12/15/2023 0 Comments Columbus community colleges![]() ![]() All this is making a real difference in helping to provide an affordable education for many, as well as keeping those people and their talents in the region. The program got a lot of positive attention, and that enabled Harrison and CSCC to work out similar arrangements with six other colleges and universities in the region. Students do their first two years of college work at CSCC and then move on to OSU for the last two years. Within a year of arriving at CSCC, Harrison had put together a similar program, called Preferred Pathways, that guarantees admission for CSCC graduates to The Ohio State University. Harrison assumed the presidency of CSCC having most recently served as Vice Provost at the University of Central Florida, where he had successfully established a program that guarantees the opportunity for a bachelor’s degree for graduates of partner community colleges. But I’ll try to give you the flavor of it. Fortunately, I’ve since then had time to make sense of all these programs unfortunately, the landscape of initiatives is too rich and complex for me to describe in detail here. The names and descriptions were coming too fast for me to digest immediately: the Central Ohio Compact, FastPath, New Skills at Work, Preferred Pathways, Credits Count, and so on. The results add up to a story about how this community college and its allies are giving Columbus and the central-Ohio region a vital boost.īefore speaking with Harrison, I met first with five of his top staff and was quickly overwhelmed by the flurry of programs and initiatives they were describing to me. And in a city where “collaboration” isn’t just a buzzword but seems to be a principle that people live by, Harrison has received a helping hand from many others, including business leaders and the Mayor. He has a hard-charging staff of very capable people. And David Harrison, dynamic and skillful though he may be, has had a lot of help. It’s a goliath in its own right-a 25,000-student institution that can’t help but make waves in this city when it does things. ![]() I wanted to find out more.įor one thing, CSCC is no ordinary community college. I was in Columbus with Deb and James Fallows to report for the American Futures project, and I kept hearing people mention Columbus State and its president in admiring ways. Those two sentences from my hour-long interview with Harrison in September nicely capture a sense of how this education leader sees what he is trying to do in Ohio’s capital city and its surrounding region: addressing the needs of the community and aiming to have a lasting impact. “What we’ve been able to do the last couple of years is connect the college to the community-and vice versa-in really deep ways, so that while we’re trying to advance the college, we’re also trying to address the most pressing needs of the region.” “We’re trying to make sure there’s a collective impact that is greater and more long-lasting than any particular time period or any individual project,” Harrison told me. But the needs CSCC is addressing persist. And the economy in the Columbus region is growing faster now than any other part of Ohio. The recession is over now, even if its effects linger. Leveraging the capacities of the large institution he heads, Harrison began assembling a New-Deal-like potage of programs aimed at preparing people for the workforce, closing the skills gap, providing pathways to a debt-free education, and increasing the number of students earning a postsecondary degree or credential. ![]() ![]() When David Harrison became president of Columbus State Community College (CSCC) in 2010, the central-Ohio region, though economically healthier than the rest of the state, was still reeling from the effects of the Great Recession. ![]()
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