Columbia Basin College: Taking education to the next level

Columbia Basin College’s goal is simple. We help our community members get the credentials they need to take life to the next level. About 70 percent of jobs advertised require some education beyond high school, so it is essential to ensure affordable access to post-secondary opportunities.

Our strategy is equally simple. We connect. Just as the heart sends oxygen and nutrients to the body through veins and arteries, so does CBC breathe life through evolving networks of connection to develop students, families and businesses.

We are working to deepen these connections in 2016:

▪ Argent Road’s skyline is changing to connect with the future. Our new Social Sciences and World Languages Center will contain offices and classrooms to create capacity for the next decade, when we are predicted to grow by 1,000 more full-time students.

▪ Pasco School District plans to relocate New Horizons High School to our CH2M Hill Building, staging a dramatic connection that will create a new model for alternative high school education in Eastern Washington.

▪ A second Health Sciences Center will connect through Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland to the recruitment of new doctors in our community. This four-story facility, which will house our bachelor of nursing degree and other health sciences programs, will provide clinic and office space for new doctors who are establishing residencies in specialized areas that will grow our local medical services portfolio.

▪ Our original Richland campus, which provided the incubation space for Delta High School, is being renovated to reconnect our programs to the Richland schools and community.

▪ In Kennewick, we are considering how, with the city and the port, to bring a culinary arts and events center to the Columbia Gardens Wine Village being vigorously pursued by those two entities.

▪ Destination Eastern has created the clearest possible pathways from Columbia Basin College to Eastern Washington University by developing “degree maps” that can be completed by attending CBC and EWU. These degree maps are on a single sheet of paper with the required courses at both institutions for more than 80 degrees. A full list can be found at https://access.ewu.edu/transfer-center/transfer-maps/columbiabasin. The degree maps will allow CBC students to follow a quarter-by-quarter plan from their first year to senior graduation.

▪ HU@CBC is a successful program that has allowed hundreds of students to complete baccalaureate and master’s degrees without leaving the Pasco campus. We are adding more traditional arts and sciences majors to our seamless education, social work and criminal justice programs. Chemistry and accounting are under development, and other areas, such as history, psychology and Spanish, are being discussed.

▪ Our career and technical programs are creating a tight core curriculum that focuses on the common competencies needed across a range of technical disciplines. This dynamic approach will allow us to generate new programs more easily, so look for expanded options in areas such as energy, applied agriculture, information technology and composites and fabrication.

▪ A huge innovation that will connect our students to a degree map, and the competing responsibilities of family and work, is the completion of an annual schedule of all classes at the college. We envision a time when our students will be able to register for an entire year rather than a single quarter, creating a predictable annual schedule that shoots a straight arrow from start to finish.

▪ Finally, we never cease to work on our internal connections. The more closely we connect to students, the more we can contribute to their success. After three years of redesigning our student services areas, we are poised to work on tighter and more direct pathways to baccalaureate degrees by refining how we arrange our curriculum. A recently formed faculty committee, with administrative support, is working on what, at the national level, is called “Guided Pathways.” Concisely stated, new research into the psychology of how people make choices and decisions is spurring innovations in the choice architecture of higher education in ways that will connect our students more powerfully to their intended majors both at CBC and the transfer institution they choose.

CBC is on the move to expand opportunity for success.

If I may assist you, please send me a note at rcummins@columbiabasin.edu.

This story was originally published March 22, 2016 at 10:33 PM with the headline "Columbia Basin College: Taking education to the next level."