College on fast track: Henderson school is facing hurdles on way to funding

Jennifer Knight

Friday, April 6, 2001 | 5:04 a.m.

On a Sunday afternoon over cold lemonade and warm hospitality, a small gathering of Henderson's movers and shakers sat inside Selma Bartlett's home and served up the idea of starting a state college.

Two years later the seeds of that idea are planted on a blanched parcel of land off Lake Mead Drive in a shoe-box trailer. The name emblazoned on the front of the little outpost reads, "Nevada State College at Henderson."

Following a glowing study justifying its need and powered by the endorsement of key state politicos, the idea has moved like a speeding train from Bartlett's living room through the hands of state educators and into the halls of the Nevada Legislature, where lawmakers seem poised to provide $29 million in startup funds.

Although the project seems on a fast track powered by an abundance of political clout, it still faces questions about its viability and the soundness of its leadership.

As the proposal moves through the legislative funding process, flaws are beginning to show.

For instance, the first site for the college had to be abandoned because of environmental concerns. The proposed campus was moved to an industrial park in a rural area.

On Friday the Sun disclosed that Henderson officials foresee construction costs will soar to more than $1.3 billion in the next 16 years.

In addition, revenue shortfalls are putting its budget under tighter scrutiny.

And a recently released attorney general's report alleges that a vice president engaged in unfair business practices while he was working at the Community College of Southern Nevada under President Richard Moore, who has been named the Henderson college's founding president.

Aside from the questions about its leadership and direction, the dust kicked up from recent events has clouded the real issue of whether a state college is needed and whether there may be a cheaper, better way to fulfill Nevada's higher education needs without sacrificing quality.

Creating an institution from the ground up is costly and not the direction that higher education is headed, experts say.

"The trend is not to convert community colleges into four-year mediocre institutions, but to partner those two years with universities to complete a bachelor's degree in a two-step format," said Dr. James Samels, a consultant on higher education who worked to convert Great Basin College in Elko into a four-year program.

The "two-plus-two" system is used in Bothell, Wash., about 20 miles northeast of Seattle. The University of Washington built a satellite campus in Bothell, then had Cascadia Community College locate its campus on the same land.

Now students can enter the community college with only a high school diploma as a prerequisite. If their grades are high enough after completing two years, they can apply to the university.

"It's been working out beautifully," Warren W. Buck, chancellor of the Bothell campus, said. "It's been much smoother than we thought it would be."

The two-college campus has saved considerable costs by sharing a library, bookstore, parking, food services, security services and facilities maintenance. It also boasts the highest graduation rate in the state and ranks in the nation's top 10 in percentage of graduates, Buck said.

In many ways Bothell mirrors Henderson. It's a bedroom community that is experiencing fast growth. The surrounding area, about the same size as metropolitan Las Vegas, also has a significant teaching and nursing shortage.

The Bothell model was built after state legislators approved the dual campus to prevent the university and community college from building separate campuses 5 miles apart.

That model is one of many that could work for Nevada, Samels said.

Another option Samels suggests is to expand the state's distance learning programs.

The format would include a building where students could converge, but the main emphasis would be interactive Web-based classes.

"The current trend is bricks and clicks," Samels said. "What people really want is the direct head-to-head of other students with the convenience of interactive computers."

Samels also suggests that the Community College of Southern Nevada could expand a campus to a baccalaureate-granting school, an idea that has been successful in Northern Nevada.

Great Basin College in Elko began as a community college and grew. Its first four-year degree was a bachelor's in elementary education. The college has been so successful that two other bachelor's programs have been added -- one in liberal arts and the other in applied science.

"What we found was that there was such a need for bachelor's degrees up here that some people were enrolling in the education program just to get a degree. Some of them didn't even want to teach," Great Basin President Ronald Remington said.

But that was an option quickly dismissed in a study published in January by Nevada higher education officials and commissioned by Henderson politicians.

Out of six options for higher education, the state college was seen as the most viable.

The study found without explanation that expanding CCSN's Henderson campus into a four-year institution would increase "coordination problems."

Another option -- co-locating satellite campuses of UNLV on community college campuses such as the Bothell model -- also was rejected. The study said it would "result in limited student choices, because it would not be a distinctly new institution."

That wasn't the first time the expansion of Southern Nevada's higher education institutions had been shot down.

In 1996 Moore, then CCSN's president, tried to gain support for bachelor's programs at its campuses, but the effort failed.

UNLV President Carol Harter floated the satellite-campus option, but got little interest, she said. "We felt there was no point in pursuing that any further."

One reason university system Chancellor Jane Nichols gave for not being able to expand the community college system to include bachelor's programs was that accreditation standards would require more faculty members with doctorate degrees, which costs more money.

Expanded community colleges pay less for faculty, and their funding from the state reflects that.

Although the two-plus-two model would not require additional accreditation, it would put the state right back into the same choice of having only two options for education: a junior college or university, Nichols said.

"This is simply a recognition that in Nevada, it is time that we expand our higher education options," Nichols said.

Las Vegas style

The way the Henderson college supporters have gone about expanding options has raised eyebrows.

Nevada doesn't do things like most states, especially in Las Vegas, where bigger is better and huge developments seem to spring up overnight on yesterday's empty lot.

The fast-paced efforts to build the college may not be out of place, but "instant" campuses are looked down upon by the normally slow, measured academic world.

"Recognize it for what it is, an economic motivation rather than an academic one," said state Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, a UNLV professor. "These are political and economic concerns rather than academic concerns."

Most state colleges take years of planning before they develop, said Stanley Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities across the nation.

"Starting a state college is a very major commitment. You need to think carefully about where it will be located, the staff and the budgetary factors," Ikenberry said. "It's typically not something that's done in the short term. It's not surprising at all that it takes five to 10 years to get a state college up and running."

By contrast, the original goal was to open the Henderson college this fall, two years after the idea was publicly proposed.

"The sense that we got on Henderson is to shoot first and count the bodies later," Samels said. "I never saw the documented need and demand."

California State University, Channel Island, took the traditional route. The startup college has been working for five years to expand its off-site campus, which has been operating in Ventura County for 30 years.

The new campus was needed, CSU officials say, because the nearest state-run bachelor-granting institution is 40 miles away, and the area is expected to grow 23 percent in the next five years.

But the Nevada college idea, like many opportunities in Las Vegas, presented itself at the right place and the right time, Nichols said.

"I don't think you'll see new state institutions in Nevada unless there is a partnership and resources coming from other places," she said. "Those things happened and gave us the opportunity to move more quickly than we would have."

When the proposal was brought to university officials by Henderson boosters, city officials said they would provide a site if the state would build a college. That got the ball rolling.

Even if the Legislature provides the money to build the college, there will be hurdles to clear to get accreditation, a needed process if students want to go to graduate school.

Accreditation standards require Nevada higher education officials to prove the need for the college and justify the method used to arrive at that conclusion.

"One of the concerns the commission has is, are they going to bleed the lower program institutions of their resources?" said Larry Stevens, deputy executive director for Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges, the institution that will be reviewing Nevada State College's accreditation. "You can't start new programs if you have existing programs that will suffer and cause the quality of the program to go south."

Teachers needed

The main argument to justify the college is that it is needed to plug the leak of teachers leaving the state and to fill the teacher shortage in Clark County's burgeoning school system.

Critics point out that argument has flaws.

Five years ago, as the Clark County School District was facing a critical teacher shortage, UNLV's teacher's program was full.

Harter says UNLV is now better equipped to meet the need. It produced 779 teachers in 1999, compared with 567 in 1996, and there are no waiting lists for would-be educators, she said.

Also, the idea that increasing the production of teaching degrees will solve the crisis is naive, said John Jasonek, executive director of the Clark County Education Association, the local teachers' union.

According to exit interviews, he said, the No. 1 reason why teachers leave the state is a lack of pay.

"No matter how many teachers you train, it will not matter if you can't pay a decent teacher's salary. We've just made more than $30 million worth of cuts that affect kids, and now we're talking about building colleges?"

The drive for a college is more than just the purist notion of creating an academically excellent institution or filling a need for teachers. The city of Henderson has a stake as well.

"I think it would be important to Henderson's image, but I don't think that's the primary focus," said Bob Campbell, a resident since 1977 and a key player in getting a college going.

A state college would feed the city's economic development, be a notch in the belt of politicians and help change Henderson's blue-collar image.

"We were a dirty little factory town. No one wanted us," said Bartlett, a banker and 47-year resident of Henderson, whose house was the site of the idea's birth. "No one would loan us money. We were Hoot-erville."

Since then Henderson has become the fastest-growing city in the nation.

Growth is a key factor in college supporters' case for another institution. Demographers project that Southern Nevada's population will increase by 62 percent during the next 10 years.

Based on those projections, Nevada expects 24,300 high school seniors to graduate statewide by 2010. Some will gravitate to schools such as UNLV, University of Nevada, Reno, and Great Basin, academics say.

With a community college campus already within the city limits and UNLV less than 10 miles away, Henderson, a city of 175,000, may not yet have matured enough to support another institution, Stevens said.

"To support a community college and a four-year institution with that many people is a very iffy proposition," he said.

Critics argued that interest generated by Henderson officials was all about houses. The original site that Landwell Inc. donated to the college was based on an annexation deal.

If the city agreed to annex 300 contaminated acres along with the adjacent college land, the donation would be made. The deal ended up falling through because the necessary land-use issues could not be hammered out in time, and another site was offered.

Still, progress is the battle cry for college backers. Nevada is one of six states without a state college, and proponents look at it as a once in a lifetime chance to do something great in education.

"It's building a community, like you do a young child," Bartlett said. "If you don't plant the seed, the tree will never grow, and that's what we've been doing with the state college."

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