Director's Corner

News from the Director's Desk

Chemeketa Prepares For A Better Future In McMinnville

The current economy has everybody’s attention. Developing the workforce skills needed to meet the demands of living wage jobs is challenging existing and prospective employees and employers throughout the nation. Chemeketa Community College’s bond-funded new campus in McMinnville will significantly improve the levels of service and support available here within the next two years. We also have a special opportunity to address current and future workforce training needs in Yamhill County by adding a career-technical building - if we can mobilize state legislative support for it.

So the McMinnville Campus is at a crossroads.  Will we seize this opportunity to become a full-service community college campus, or be content with a more limited role? Community colleges are general education institutions with a comprehensive mission to provide a community-appropriate mix of developmental coursework (to prepare students for college-level work), college transfer courses, personal enrichment courses, and career-technical training. Being under local control allows us to be responsive and accountable to the particular communities we serve.

As open-access institutions, community colleges are critical entry points to higher education and economic opportunity for all, including many who have been traditionally underrepresented in postsecondary education. With growing enrollment and increasingly diverse student bodies, community colleges are challenged to meet the tri-fold challenge of ensuring affordability, accessibility, and accountability for results. The McMinnville Campus has been doing excellent things since opening in 1974. We moved to our current campus on Hill Road in 1981, and our enrollment has grown by nearly 300% since then. Fully three quarters of the Yamhill County students taking Chemeketa classes are doing so through the McMinnville Campus. Activity in the past two years has been particularly lively, with our student population increasing by another 20%. During the fall term just completed we served the needs of 1600 students.

 Appropriate academic courses are currently available in McMinnville. Our scheduling of preparation and testing for the General Education Development (GED) certificate and classes for English Language Learning can be important aids to employability for some, and McMinnville Campus partnerships with local schools, public and private agencies, and employers were building significant growth in demand for these services even before the current economic challenges emerged

Current McMinnville program offerings emphasize transfer education. Students can take day or evening courses without having to leave McMinnville to earn an Associate of Arts Oregon Transfer degree. Campus statistics reveal that over half of our students want to earn a degree or certificate from Chemeketa, and over a third want to transfer to a four year college after starting with us. Within the next couple of years our new campus will be built and operating across town on Three Mile Lane. All programs, services and support currently available on Hill Road will be significantly enhanced at the new campus, and others will be added.

But we may have a chicken and egg situation here. It may be that the majority of the McMinnville Campus students are transfer-minded because the majority of our scheduled offerings are transfer courses. Generally, community colleges are leading providers of career and technical education and make important contributions to state and local economies by filling the need for highly skilled workers in today’s high-demand jobs. Career and technical programs of study have academic, career, and technical content components that, together, prepare students to make successful transitions to the workplace. Salem Campus data readily illustrates the positive impact that vocational programs can have on employment and wages: 64% of our students were employed within nine months of graduation, and 83% of our students earned higher wages after graduating. But McMinnville’s vocational preparation offerings are severely limited by the lack of appropriate facilities for technical applications courses, which represent about 10% of the credit course enrollment at our Salem Campus.

At the end of Oregon’s last legislative session, representatives of the legislature and the Oregon Community College Association agreed to make the industrial technology building on the McMinnville Campus one of the top priorities for state-funded community college capital improvement. The Chemeketa bond measure approved last May has provided the matching funds needed for an additional six million dollars in building funds. This would be enough to add another building to our new campus – preferably a career-technical building designed with the program flexibility needed to meet current and future vocational training needs in Yamhill County. A group of county leaders is being invited to a “community conversation” in mid-February to discuss the design of programs, services, and support at our new campus; vocational training and career pathways are certain to be major items of interest.

Data from the Mid-Willamette Workforce Summit hosted last October by the Enterprise Board for Employment and Education suggested that a number of Chemeketa’s certificate and degree programs in industrial and engineering technology would be a good fit in Yamhill County. In recent News Register articles, Jody Christensen (Director of the McMinnville Economic Development Partnership) and Ron Pittman (Yamhill County’s Chemeketa’s Board of Education representative) have each voiced their concern for the lack of local opportunities for technical training, and emphasized its importance in creating a skilled workforce for high-performing companies trying to compete globally. But, for now, when it comes to the hands-on experiential learning that takes place in laboratories and shops, Yamhill County residents will have to go to Salem to find it. For a significant portion of our citizens, the additional time and expense that would be required to commute are simply too much.

So, what do you think? These are difficult times requiring hard decisions. If you think providing local opportunities for learning technical skills that will enhance individual employability and area marketability is an important and worthwhile investment in Yamhill County, please tell your legislators. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions regarding programs and services at the McMinnville Campus, I would be glad to hear from you.

Updated February 17, 2009 by the McMinnville Center Staff.