Rural campuses at risk

By Charlotte Hsu

Thursday, Dec. 13, 2007 | 7:23 a.m.

Two hours from Reno. Six hours from Las Vegas. A town with about 3,500 people.

Hawthorne has one stoplight, one high school and one major employer (the ammunition plant that old-timers call "the depot").

Now the state's financial problems are threatening to close something else Hawthorne has just one of: a college.

A budget cut to higher education of the size Gov. Jim Gibbons has proposed could deal a hard blow to rural higher education.

To slash 8 percent, Western Nevada College would shutter five rural learning sites, including the one in Hawthorne. Together they served one in six of the students WNC enrolled this fall. Those closures and staffing reductions would jeopardize a rural nursing program that graduates a dozen students each year.

The school, with campuses in and around Carson City, would eliminate money for professional development in the next fiscal year.

"What shocked me was how few options we really have," spokeswoman Anne Hansen said.

Elko-based Great Basin College, which serves 3,000 students across six counties, has already begun making changes in preparation for cuts.

"A lot of what we do is delivered using interactive video. And our faculty generally travel from time to time throughout the semester - so they're not just a talking head on the television screen - to students in the outlying areas," said John Rice, director of institutional advancement.

"That's very beneficial to the students, and we've put a stop to that for the time being."

The college has asked the faculty to hold off on purchasing supplies such as chemicals for science classes that begin in January, Faculty Senate Chairman Ed Nickel said.

Closer to home, the College of Southern Nevada has about half a dozen rural learning centers in locations including Mesquite and Caliente. Although "it's not our desire," CSN could eliminate or reduce services to some outlying communities, said Patty Charlton Dayar, vice president of finance and budget.

"We can't hold anything off of the table," she said.

"We're very mindful that that's part of our service area and we are the only opportunity that people have for education."

Small schools, which often have only one person in a department, struggle to absorb cuts, said Western Nevada President Carol Lucey. Preliminary figures show her college enrolled 5,354 students this fall, one-fifth the number at UNLV.

"When we eliminate a professional position, we're generally eliminating the ability of a department to serve, so we don't have the same kind of flexibility in our budget that a larger institution has," Lucey said.

The roughly $300,000 WNC would save by closing rural centers would be small change to relative behemoths such as UNLV and UNR, each of which receives about $200 million in annual operating money from the state.

But the universities, too, have long struggled financially and are facing daunting cuts of their own. Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Jim Rogers said leaders have not discussed what proportion of a cut each institution would absorb - whether, for example, one school would cut 12 percent while another cut 4.

Hammering out such details is impossible until system officials hear from the governor what will be cut and when, he said.

"You're talking about particulars," Rogers said, "and nobody's talked about the particulars."

Lucey of Western Nevada College and Great Basin College President Paul Killpatrick said all state schools are in it together when it comes to cuts.

That mentality is likely to please Michael Wixom, chairman of the Board of Regents, which governs higher education.

"I don't want to get into a situation where we have fighting (among) the institutions over money," he said.

"One of the dangers in these budget crises is that you tend to fall back to a turf war mentality ... When you get into turf wars, people tend to focus on their own issue to the exclusion of all other issues."

For most Clark County residents, places such as Fernley, Hawthorne, Lovelock, Minden and Yerington are little more than names on maps. But city dwellers have a reason to be concerned about preserving higher education in the hinterlands.

About one in 10 Nevadans lives in rural parts of the state, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Rural areas with productive economies require less support from other regions of the state, said LeRoy Goodman, a Lyon County commissioner. Institutions such as Western Nevada help locals develop skills and knowledge that lead to higher-paying jobs.

To Las Vegans living in a valley with 2 million people, Western Nevada's Hawthorne learning center might not seem like much.

Each semester, the site offers about two dozen courses in fields such as art, business and English. Many are broadcast to Hawthorne from classrooms in Carson City via interactive video technology. Twenty-four students enrolled in fall.

But this is all Hawthorne has in the way of higher education.

Even via interactive video, the face-to-face contact students get from instructors and other students at rural learning centers is invaluable, said Bus Scharmann, who oversees rural development for Western Nevada. High schoolers and other first-time college-goers struggle in online-only classes, he said.

For teens, the local college often presents the only opportunity to do college-level work. Advanced Placement courses, abundant in metropolitan areas, are hard to come by in the hinterlands.

"If we're deprived of those higher education opportunities, what it ends up doing is, in communities that are already struggling, those folks that have the aptitude and desire" will leave, said Kathy Trujillo, an administrative assistant for a state health clinic in Hawthorne.

She was the first in her family to earn a degree, an associate of arts through Western Nevada's Hawthorne center.

With three kids and a full-time job, she probably would not have completed her degree had she needed to drive to Carson City or elsewhere to take classes.

"The travel's one thing, and then you add weather," she said by phone. "If you're going in the spring semester, you're hitting winter. If you go in the fall you're hitting winter. The commute is not just long, it can be dangerous."

In tiny Hawthorne, attending classes via interactive video helped Trujillo broaden her world view.

"There were campuses all over the state that would chime in," she said. "The professor would be in Douglas, there'd be kids in Lovelock or maybe in Fernley, there would be people throughout the state coming in.

"When you're taking community college courses, you're exposed to a (range) of people who have different ideas, different experiences, different values. It's not just really about learning. It's about experiencing and sharing."