Candidates for Atlantic Cape President Participate in Forums

MAYS LANDING – Atlantic Cape Community College held a series of forums Nov. 8-10 to introduce the three finalists in its search for a new college president.  The current President Dr. Peter Mora announced his intent to retire at the end of December. The search, which started at the beginning of the summer, attracted 37 applicants and has resulted in three final candidates who responded to questions at forums held at each of the college’s three campuses. 
Atlantic Cape is one of 19 community colleges in the state, one of only two such institutions that span more than one county. The president will oversee an institution with a $40 million annual budget and campuses in Mays Landing, Atlantic City, and Court House. The Cape May County campus, open since 2005, has witnessed a significant decline in enrollment over the last six years from a high point reached in 2010.
Earlier in the year, the Herald published a series of articles looking at the history of the Cape May County campus. The recent forums offered an opportunity to hear what plans might be offered by the three final candidates for president that address the issues raised in the Herald series and the Cape Issue commentary.
Atlantic Cape has faced serious difficulties that negatively impacted its enrollments at a time when enrollments constitute about 60 percent of college revenues. Decline in the gaming industry in Atlantic City, a demographic trend leading to a smaller pool of traditional age students, a decline over the last decade in the percentage share of revenue from state and county sources, and a need to raise tuition and fees annually in an economic environment in which individuals are hard pressed to absorb increases; these all represented challenges for college leadership.
A look at the history of the 11 years that Atlantic Cape has had a campus in Cape May County shows difficulty adapting to the county’s unique needs. The result is a campus in Court House with continuously diminishing activity, declining enrollments, a greater dependency on technology-formatted courses, few, if any, campus venues that encourage student involvement on campus, and no real strategy to make the only higher education campus in the county a focal point for community intellectual and cultural life.
The Forums
The three forums held at the Court House facility were each one hour long. The audience for each ranged from about 25 to 35 individuals. Dr. Mitchell Levy, vice president for Student Affairs for Atlantic Cape, hosted the forums. The candidates were given a few minutes for opening remarks, were asked three questions by Levy that would be uniform for all three forums, and then were asked to respond to questions from the audience submitted on index cards provided as people arrived for the event. The forum closed with a few minutes for the candidate to make a summary statement.
The questions showed some common themes over the three separate forums. Candidates were asked about strategies to counter continuing enrollment losses, about how they would deal with the extremely high percentage of students who find their initial college experience dominated by remedial course work, about the role and treatment of adjunct faculty, and about “restoring” the Cape May County campus to “full-service” courses in the face of increasing dependence on technology-enabled virtual classes.
Questions also were asked that focused on the Court House facility including making it a center for cultural life, increasing its services to senior citizens, restoring funds for student clubs and activities, and reopening the cafeteria or similar spot for students to mingle and spend time outside of classes.
Dr. Barbara Gaba
Dr. Barbara Gaba is currently the provost and associate vice president for Academic Affairs at Union County College. She also served as an administrator at Camden County College. She earned her terminal degree, a Doctorate in Philosophy from Bayero University, Nigeria.
Gaba described herself as a first-generation college student whose success through a series of career roles has given her a broad appreciation for many of the issues facing typical community college students. She spoke of her work in curriculum development, accreditation and assessment activities, student services, and grants management. Since her current role places her atop a branch campus, the Elizabeth City campus of Union College, she stressed her experience with the special needs of a branch campus.
In addressing the problems posed in audience questions, Gaba noted that many of the issues confronting Atlantic Cape are “problems everywhere.” Speaking to declining enrollments and the poor three-year graduation rate, Gaba stressed making greater efforts at retention, improving the attractiveness of facilities, ensuring that classes stress student involvement rather than lecture formats and having places for students to go outside of classes. She did not offer suggestions on how she would approach these issues differently than Atlantic Cape does now.
Asked about making the Court House campus a focal point for community life, Gaba talked of “opening the college up” by letting civic organizations know the facility is available for cultural and educational activities. Increasing publicity for events was another stress point in her presentation. Gaba cautioned that declining enrollment brought with it the financial realities of fewer resources for things like student clubs.
She spoke of the use of peer mentor programs, matching college students with high school students to help pave the way for initial college success. She added support for “brush up” courses that help prepare high school students for the PARCC exams. A program for senior citizens to take courses strictly for intellectual development was part of her discussion. Through it all, however, she frequently returned to a need for recruitment and marketing if the college was to achieve the base enrollments needed to generate funds for such new initiatives. She did not identify a potential target market for added recruitment. Atlantic Cape’s past recruitment decisions have led to a heavy dependence on traditional age students which has made the recent demographic trends harder to absorb in terms of the college’s enrollment.
Her stress was on style. She felt more conversation was needed. “Talking to people” is to Gaba an essential means of “building bridges.” Gaba did not indicate how she would organize for decisions on using increasingly scarce resources. She left little doubt that her decision style would be collaborative, but she offered few insights into how she would change the college’s current responses to its many challenges in ways more conducive to success.
With tuition and fees accounting for almost six out of every 10 budget dollars and enrollments continuing to drop, a vision that either shows a pathway to reverse those trends or a new way to adapt to them appears to be needed.
Dr. Paula Pitcher
The second forum presented Dr. Paula Pitcher, currently the senior advisor to the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. She previously headed enrollment management, research, and planning for Middlesex Community College. Pitcher earned her Doctorate in Management from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC). At an earlier point in her career, Pitcher was an administrator at Atlantic Cape.
Pitcher noted that she too was the first in her family to attend college. “Education transforms life,” Pitcher said as she recounted her experience attending college while dealing with the demands of being a single mother. As a non-traditional student herself, Pitcher said she understood well the challenges facing many non-traditional students at community colleges. The institution where she obtained her doctoral degree, UMUC, is well known for its creative approaches to supporting non-traditional students.
Pitcher, like the other candidates, stressed the multifaceted nature of her career experience. She spoke of a collaborative management style which welcomed the opinions of a variety of stakeholders and experts.
In addressing questions of faculty, Pitcher said, “Faculty are the core of an institution.” She said she favored ensuring that faculty, and especially the “often overlooked” adjunct faculty, get the resources they need to succeed.
Pitcher often spoke in general terms, not proposing specific approaches to problems she did not yet fully understand or had not yet delved into. She spoke of being data driven yet cautioned about any overuse of certain data. For example, Pitcher somewhat dismissed the statistics on the low three-year graduate rate as a construct of a federal formula rather than a clear picture of “who we are and what we do.”
Her response to questions on the high percentage of students in remedial work was to look at improving the pre-college experience of students so “they don’t need remedial work.” She did not elaborate on a strategy to do so. She did say that partnerships with high schools would be critical.
She spoke of being committed to transparency and keeping the public informed about problems and initiatives. Working with the greater community was a stress point in her response to questions about older students. These students are focused on getting jobs, she said. We need to work with the community “to ensure they hire our graduates after graduation,” she noted. It was not clear if Pitcher knows that Atlantic Cape does not have a placement function. The career center just opened at the Cape May County campus places an emphasis on career goal identification but it has not incorporated any post-graduation placement function. She did mention support for a “learn and earn” program which she did not detail but which presumably involves some sort of paid relationship that marries work and credit.
When asked about the Cape May County campus being a center of cultural activity for the community, Pitcher said “I am all for it,” and argued for “getting the word out” that the facility was available. This was a similar response to Gaba’s, both of which placed an emphasis on events staged and run by others with the campus facility playing a support role. It is a role often adopted in higher education, but it usually complements a series of educational or cultural programs organized and run by the institution using the intellectual resources of the college.
Pitcher closed with an emphasis on her professional portfolio which she says has given her experience in all aspects of higher education. She said she would bring a “fresh perspective” to address the issues confronting Atlantic Cape. 
Given the fact that Atlantic Cape has long depended on traditional age students whose demographic decline in our area has posed a hardship for the college recruitment strategies, it was surprising that Pitcher, herself admittedly once a non-traditional student and the holder of a degree from one of the country’s most well-known institutions for dealing with non-traditional students, did not offer new insights into working with that population as a part of an enrollment turnaround strategy.
Dr. Irene Rios
Dr. Irene Rios is the chief academic officer at the Naugatuck Valley Community College in Connecticut. Her career spans several institutions and she was the only candidate to stress experience at four-year institutions as well as community colleges. Her Doctorate in Education is from the University of Hartford.
Rios, carrying a three- to four-inch binder which she referred to as her research on Atlantic Cape, spoke of college access as a pathway for students who seek opportunity. “Student success is what we do,” she said.  From the start of her presentation, Rios talked about strengthening engagement in both counties served by the college. She, like the other candidates, spoke of a long career record of positions that provide a broad understanding of the parts that make up a higher education university.
Speaking to why she should be president, Rios spoke of that experience and her leadership and management skills. She said her management style is characterized by collaboration and transparency. Citing a project to develop seamless transfer articulation for community college courses throughout the four-year institution system in Connecticut, she placed emphasis on the management and communication skills it required.
While speaking of her strengths in communication she noted that the first order of business is to be a good listener. She approaches many issues, she said, by bringing people together to listen to what they need. It was a skill used in program development, she noted when she held industry forums to see what employers needed in the workforce and used that information to build new or combine old programs, citing a program in cyber security as an example.
Speaking on the issue of adjunct faculty, Rios cited statistics that show that two-thirds of faculty members at community colleges are adjuncts. Given their importance to the success of the institution, she wants to make the adjunct experience a good one.  She mentioned that the adjuncts bring real-life experience to the classroom. Unfortunately, the short forum did not offer an opportunity to develop that theme.
Several institutions in the country have embraced a concept of the adjunct as a practitioner, someone who uses what they teach in “real world” jobs. These institutions have promoted the value of learning from those who “do as well as teach.” It requires a somewhat different approach to identifying and hiring adjuncts, but it has worked successfully in many locations as a student recruitment tool. If Rios was hinting at that concept, the forum was not the environment to fully develop the thought.
Rios was the only candidate to place emphasis on training for adjuncts.  Arguing that “a better-trained faculty is a better faculty,” she referenced concepts like a center for teaching to improve the teaching of adjuncts that may not have a lot of experience in the classroom. She also spoke of instruction in information technology. “This is not learning what button to press or how to load something,” she said. “It means helping faculty learn how best to use technology to improve the teaching experience.”
Responding to the question on making the campus a focal point for the community, Rios spoke of engaging with the people who live in the county.  Engagement was a key phrase in many of her responses. Whether discussing economic development efforts, program development, or facility use, Rios quickly called for engagement, for listening, for reaching out to those the institution serves to determine what is needed. Only then would the college apply the constraints of what the institution is able to do to respond.
Even more than Pitcher, Rios frequently called for data-driven decisions. She stressed regular program reviews on a short cycle and informed by standardized metrics. She looks to metrics that will merge institutional outcomes with external realities; what is the job placement history over five years for a program’s graduates, for example.
In an effort to improve the experience and retention of students, Rios pointed to a need for classroom instructors to be the first line of information. Once trained to see the earmarks of potential attrition, the faculty is in position to link the student to available services.
The problem of the high percentage of students in remedial courses led Rios to describe an initiative to limit developmental courses to no more than one semester. Use of programs like supplemental instruction and summer boot camps represented some of the ways to specifically attack the problem. Statistics are clear that the longer students sit in developmental courses the more likely they are to drop out.
She talked of strengthening links to high schools at one end and four-year institutions at the other, a seamless flow through the associate degree programs of a community college. Speaking of early college opportunity programs with creative use of Pell grant funds, or of merging parts of existing, already-developed programs to form new offerings that directly meet an industry group need, or of links to the chamber of commerce for insight into how to direct the college’s economic development response, Rios’ response to questions carried a theme of engagement with the community, the feeder institutions, and the next level schools as a way of ensuring that the community college is not isolated and unaware of roles it should be playing.
In the span of a short one-hour forum, Rios was able to cover specific examples of program responses to many of the problems confronting Atlantic Cape.
Of the three candidates, Rios spoke most openly about the unique needs of the second of two counties in this joint college experience. She spoke of a desire to use what she claims are her skills as a good listener to meet, “sooner rather than later,” with Cape May County groups about their priorities and needs. This was a strong message for a forum held on an underutilized campus in Court House.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.