Surf’s Up — Learning to Ride the Waves While Weathering the Storm

Mindfulness leader Jon Kabat-Zinn is quoted as saying, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” I believe this captures our reality at MVCC — we are learning to surf, and surf well.

As I enter my 17th year as President of MVCC, I am continually inspired by the resilience, hard work, and caring manner of MVCC faculty and staff, and our collective ability to adapt. I feel like I’m just starting my third presidency — they all just happen to have been at MVCC.

The first period, from 2007 to 2014, was dominated by enrollment growth fueled by the Great Recession, strengthening systems, and building capacity. The second period, from 2015 to 2022, centered around increasing student success with our Guided Pathways reforms and, of course, navigating challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it feels as though we are transitioning to a new era at the College — one likely filled with programs and services delivered at a speed and scale through partnerships we can hardly imagine today.

I find insight in Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s quote, “When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That is what this storm is all about.” Similarly, as an organization, we have undergone significant changes through numerous Guided Pathways initiatives to transform the student experience — all while enduring the COVID-19 pandemic, processing millions of dollars in stimulus funds to make up for lost revenue, and redesigning workflows and job responsibilities across departments to absorb a 9% reduction in our full-time staffing pattern by eliminating 35 full-time positions and laying off three existing staff members.

We’ve had to surf the waves as they came.

It’s not easy navigating our environment when the economy of Upstate New York has a 3.3% unemployment rate and a shrinking number of high school graduates. This is compounded with public and private four-year colleges lowering their admissions standards and accepting students they wouldn’t have considered five years ago — students who otherwise would have attended a community college. And the State of New York, which is supposed to provide roughly one-third of our operational revenue, gave us only $350,000 more this year than they did in 2008. Despite being part of a “historic” $163M investment for public higher education in the recent state budget, community colleges received the same level of funding as last year and were told to be grateful. Read more in my May 2 blog post, “Against the Odds.”

How do I know we’re learning to surf at MVCC? Well, at a time when the Gallup organization publishes research on employee engagement and says that workers are “burned out” and “disengaged,” last spring’s employee survey showed that 89% of full-time employees feel proud to be a part of MVCC, and 80% look forward to coming to work each day. This pride and enthusiasm show up in our collaborative efforts with school district partners to reimagine the high school-to-college transition, as well as our ongoing efforts to redesign core programs and services to meet individualized needs and restore the promise of education with our FastTrack Career Programs, specifically designed to serve adults who have fallen through the cracks of our educational system. I will share a more detailed white paper on this “reimagine, redesign, and restore” framework in a future blog post.

As we pursue the “re-work” strategies mentioned above, we know artificial intelligence (AI) is a game changer — much like the internet was 30 years ago. We recognize this moment and stand ready to meet it at MVCC. AI will be the primary focus of our organizational learning in the coming year with webinars, workshops, and crowdsourcing opportunities for faculty and staff to learn together and do what MVCC does best — scan our environment, analyze best and emerging practices, and adapt what works into our culture in ways that make us better and stronger.

As punctuated as the change of the last several years has been, I believe the coming year may be one of relative equilibrium — the calm before another storm if you will. It will be a time for us to navigate the intensity of the daily crunch, but also a time to take a collective breath to take stock of how far we’ve come and consider the next strategic arc for the College. It will also be a time for us to ask ourselves important questions that need to be asked in ways that will better position us with a sense of readiness for whatever comes next.

With all this in mind, as I think about MVCC and the future, I’m reminded of this quote of unknown source: “Fate whispered to the warrior, you cannot withstand the storm. The warrior whispers back, I am the storm.”

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Against the Odds

There are times when an organization needs to grieve. As we face unprecedented uncertainty in our budget, and in the Higher Education space in general, this is one of those times for MVCC. When any organization is forced to endure layoffs, everyone is left with a sense of loss, a fear for the future, and a very natural questioning of the decisions that have been made and why it is that we had to make them. This is true for all of us — including me. So, as we take a moment to pause, to grieve, and to reflect as an organization, I wanted to give some context for the situation. Of course, context will not alleviate the feelings of loss that we, as a community, must work through, but I hope to situate that grief in the larger context. 

Thinking about this post, I asked ChatGPT “What does against the odds mean?” The AI model responded, “The phrase "against the odds" means to accomplish something or succeed despite facing difficult or unfavorable circumstances. It suggests that the chances of success were low or that the situation was challenging, but despite those odds, the person or thing was able to succeed. It is often used to describe a situation where someone overcomes significant obstacles or achieves something that others thought was unlikely or impossible.” I find it fascinating how I could not have chosen a collection of words to better describe MVCC’s financial circumstances.

Roughly 95% of annual revenue for community colleges comes from a combination of student tuition, county sponsorship, and state aid. The ideal is that the proportionate distribution would be one-third, one-third, one-third from these three funding streams — we are nowhere close to that ideal. What made me think about the notion of “against the odds” is the fact that MVCC continues to thrive and serve Oneida County despite the disinvestment from the State of New York.

Until recently, state aid for community colleges was allocated on an enrollment-based funding formula. When enrollment went up, state aid was supposed to increase and consequently, when enrollment decreased, so did state aid. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. When the Great Recession hit, enrollment increased, but the state cut our per student allocation with the rationale that we would make it up with the increase in student tuition and the promise that they’d restore the funding when the economy recovered. MVCC watched its state aid per student decline 12% from 2009-2011 and waited until 2016 to see the per student rate restored to 2008 levels. The Great Recession was an anomaly with historic increases in enrollment, so it was easily anticipated that community college enrollment would drop as people returned to work. Rather than stemming the tide, the state funding formula put community colleges in free fall despite our efforts to establish a “funding floor” otherwise phrased as, “Please don’t cut us.” As a result, the state reduced community college funding by 14% from 2015 to 2020.

The outcomes have been devastating. It wasn’t until 2021 that the state established a funding floor for community colleges — a funding structure that K-12 and SUNY state-operated four-year campuses have always enjoyed, and which both the counties and state are legislated to comply with. However, the state has not adhered to its legislated commitment, which means that MVCC currently receives roughly $353,000 more from the state than it did in 2008. Yet, we serve nearly as many individuals when considering the increase in part-time students and non-credit workforce training programs. In contrast, Oneida County has made good on its commitment and has increased its annual base support of MVCC by 18% during the same period. If the state would have simply matched the County’s commitment, MVCC would be receiving roughly $1.8 million more in our base budget, which is roughly close to the structural budgetary deficit we rally to resolve on an annual basis. Let me situate those numbers. We serve, if you take into account credit and non-credit programming, more than 15,000 students with a $50 million budget. When compared to the budgets of K-12 and public four-year colleges in New York, community college budgets are a fraction in total. It shouldn’t be this hard to serve the educational needs of our community.

The reality of the situation is that the odds are stacked against us, but as an organization we are more efficient, more resilient, and more creative than many of our counterparts. If anyone is positioned to triumph against the odds, it is MVCC. So, today we will grieve our loss and wrestle with the realities of the difficulties that we face. However, we also must look to the future, to know that as an organization we will heal, and as we always do at MVCC, in the long run, we will not only survive, but more importantly, we will thrive. 

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.