LCCC president highlights college successes
Feb. 4—CHEYENNE — Members of the Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce packed Little America Hotel and Resort's ballroom on Friday afternoon to hear an update on the successes of the relatively new Laramie County Community College Pathways Program.
With plenty of community leaders in attendance, LCCC President Joe Schaffer took the stage to recap the improvements that the college continues to make in regard to its targeted course offerings and, as a result, its increase in graduation rates. According to statistics spanning from the fall of 2010 to the fall of 2018, the school's graduation rate has improved from 14% to 38%.
The college expects to see a dip in the rate due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as of 2018, LCCC surpassed both the state and national average graduation rates for two-year colleges.
"I will have a parent or a family member come up to me from Central Nebraska, South Dakota and lots of times from Colorado, and they'll say, 'LCCC is the best-kept secret,'" Schaffer said in his speech. "If I ever hear that again, I'm going to throw a fit.
"We should not be the best-kept secret. We should be the best for what we offer. In fact, we need to leverage higher education to bring people here, educate them, train them and keep them here as one of our solutions for workforce development issues."
The majority of his presentation focused on the future of the school, listing certain goals that LCCC pathways coordinators and other administrators seek to accomplish in the near future.
Guided Pathways, introduced in 2010 in part due to poor academic performance and graduation rates at the college, is a curriculum structured around preparing LCCC students for specific careers in the workforce. The structure of the program is streamlined, with the hope that subjects will be both easier to teach and easier to learn.
Right now, the eight LCCC pathways are: Agriculture & Equine; Communication & Creative Arts; Human & Public Resources; Business & Accounting; Health Sciences & Wellness; Science, Technology, Engineering & Math; Information Technology; and Trades & Technical Studies.
The reality is that the Wyoming workforce is getting older while younger generations are generally working less. One statistic that cannot be ignored is the fact that Wyoming has the fourth-highest outmigration rate in the country — roughly 60% of 18-year-olds leave Wyoming within 10 years.
Schaffer emphasized in his presentation that LCCC is in a position to begin attracting students, but to do so, they'll have to make the college more appealing. Aesthetic changes to old buildings, as well as the addition of next year's Blue Recreation & Athletics Complex, and proposed locations like a new Crossroads Building and automotive tech building would hopefully attract more students from throughout the region.
The school is also expanding health care studies with an echocardiography program planned to start this year and a respiratory therapy program beginning in 2024. It is also currently considering an expansion of the nursing program.
The loftiest goal proposed by Schaffer during the event is for LCCC to become "the best-known higher education opportunity within 350 miles."
"350 miles is a big radius. It includes all of Wyoming, all of Colorado into Salt Lake City, into Montana, into Nebraska and into the Black Hills — growth areas for us," Schaffer said. "We sort of tacked that up and said, 'Now we're going to start to actually engage those individuals. We're going to get them here. And we're going to do it through different means.'"
LCCC is attempting to reach those demographics through regional awareness campaigns.
If things work out as they're expected to, the school will accomplish its ultimate goal of driving workforce opportunity, as defined near the conclusion of the presentation: "Transform the college's academic offerings into innovative programming with paths to viable opportunities for social mobility."
The first step is to encourage students to find work after high school. Hopefully, those graduates will remain in Cheyenne and contribute to the growth of not only the Capital City, but of Wyoming as a whole.
"What's empowering for us is knowing that that what we do at this little college in Cheyenne, Wyoming, can have an impact not only on our community, but our state, and certainly our region," Schaffer said. "We fundamentally believe that."
Will Carpenter is the Wyoming Tribune Eagle's Arts and Entertainment/Features Reporter. He can be reached by email at wcarpenter@wyomingnews.com or by phone at 307-633-3135. Follow him on Twitter @will_carp_.
