Article by Ed Quillen
Education – November 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
IN THE HOPE of finding cheap student labor to exploit, I talk to college journalism and writing classes as often as possible. After those visits, it’s impossible to avoid generalizing about the students, and that led to a surprising observation.
The two student bodies in Colorado which seem the most similar are those at Western State College in Gunnison and Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Both campuses seem dominated by bright, energetic, and outdoor-minded students who don’t seem especially scholarly. Also, they’re both relatively small institutions — WSC’s enrollment is 2,302 and CC’s is 1,952 — so they have the “everybody knows everybody else” feel of small towns, even if Colorado College is in a big city.
But in another respect, the similarity seems odd because WSC is a state college, and the cheapest four-year school in Colorado (in-state tuition and fees were $2,403 at last report). Colorado College is a private school and the most expensive four-year college in Colorado (its annual tuition is $24,893, or 10 times as much as Western’s). So why would their students seem so much alike?
Last summer I had a chance to talk to Jay Helman, WSC’s president, and I mentioned this: that Colorado’s cheapest and costliest schools seemed more akin to each other than they were to anything in between.
He complimented me for a perceptive observation, and said that Western was evolving into the public version of a small private liberal-arts college, especially now that it has gained its independence.
Independence? That takes some explaining. Back when I was in college in Greeley (off and on from 1968 to 1974), college governance in Colorado was divided. The University of Colorado (Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs) had its own elected Board of Regents. The State Board of Agriculture governed Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Colorado School of Mines in Golden had its own board of trustees.
The others, including Colorado State College in Greeley, which I more or less attended, were governed by the Trustees of the State Colleges in Colorado. Among them were Western State in Gunnison, Adams State in Alamosa, Southern Colorado in Pueblo, and Metro State in Denver.
Over time, there were some changes. CSC in Greeley became the University of Northern Colorado and got its own governing board in 1970. Two-year Mesa Junior College in Grand Junction became a four-year school and fell under the Trustees of the State Colleges. Southern Colorado State College in Pueblo became the University of Southern Colorado and moved under the State Board of Agriculture with CSU — now it’s changed its name to CSU Pueblo.
But the smaller state colleges remained under a joint board of trustees, which meant they were financially linked. This irked Metro, the largest of the schools. Metro felt as though it were a “cash cow,” generating a lot of revenue that got put into a common pot with Mesa, Adams, and Western.
So Metro wanted to get out of the state college system and have its own board. But if Metro got that, did it make any sense to keep the remaining three colleges under joint management? Or should they become independent, too, with their own finances and their own boards?
During its last session, the legislature granted independence, and on July 1, Western — like Adams State and Mesa — became independent, with its own board of trustees.
What’s that mean for Western, which was founded in 1901 as a two-year “normal school” to train teachers for the one-room eight-grade schoolhouses on the Western Slope?
It means that the college will be going in two directions, Helman said. WSC will focus on serving its immediate region (Gunnison, Lake, Chaffee, Hinsdale and Saguache counties), and it will also become more of a “destination school,” attracting more out-of-state students than it does now.
It will try to avoid being a “starter school” for other state colleges — it’s not going to recruit students who figure “I’ll start at Gunnison and then transfer to CU after a couple of years.” And as it tries to become more of a regional and national school, it will be less of a generic state college.
WESTERN REMAINS a state institution, though, and so it gets some direction from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, which assigned service regions to the smaller colleges; WSC got Central Colorado.
“What that means,” Helman said, “is that we look at the higher education needs in the region, and try to find a way to meet them. Continuing education for teachers is the obvious example, but there are others. For instance, you might need more nurses in Salida and Leadville. That doesn’t mean we’d open a school of nursing, but it does mean that we could work with institutions that have them, so that the education was available locally.”
In September, Western and the two-year Colorado Mountain College formed a joint advisory board; the plan is to find ways for rural residents to get bachelor’s degrees without having to leave town.
As for the other direction, Helman points out that Western, for an isolated little school, has a geographically diverse student body, with students from all 50 states, as well as several foreign countries. Small public colleges typically get most of their students from the immediate area, but “94% of our students come from more than 100 miles away.”
Some of that is geography — a 100-mile circle drawn around Gunnison is not going to encompass a large population — but much of it is because WSC is quite attractive to out-of-state students.
Financially, that’s a good deal for the school — it makes money on the out-of-state students, who pay much higher tuition, while losing money on in-state students. But under the State College system, WSC couldn’t keep those profits; they went into a common pool.
NOW IT WILL GET to keep that money for its own budget, and that should put the school on a better financial footing, less dependent on appropriations from the state legislature, which have declined in recent years because state tax revenues have fallen during this recession.
“I understand why higher education gets cut,” Helman said. “The legislature also has to fund prisons and primary and secondary education, and we just don’t seem as important. We’re on the second year of no raises for the faculty. We aren’t losing good people yet, but it’s certainly a concern. The important thing to keep in mind, though, is that even when the state’s finances improve, the dollars aren’t going to come back to higher education. We’ve got to look elsewhere.”
Helman said that attracting more out-of-state students won’t prevent any qualified Colorado students from attending. “Our enrollment is up, but we still have some room.”
He’s also encouraged by the loyalty that alumni feel to Western. “They’re very generous, and that makes me optimistic about Western’s future. It’s another way that we resemble a small private liberal-arts school.”
One recent demonstration was a $1 million gift to the college’s art department. The money will also fund two scholarships. It came from Ethel Rice, a WSC graduate who worked for 36 years at the college’s Savage Library. She lived frugally and invested her savings carefully. Her donation inspired two other $1 million gifts to the school.
So with devoted alumni and an ability to attract out-of-state students, along with a mission to serve Central Colorado, Western is starting its second century. And if it ends up resembling Colorado College even more, while remaining public and affordable, it’s fine with Helman, “I like the public-private model,” he said. “It can give us the best of both worlds if we go about it properly.”
Long ago, in the dark ages before most of today’s students were even conceived, Ed Quillen covered meetings of the Trustees of the State Colleges in Colorado as editor of the Mirror, the student newspaper at the University of Northern Colorado.