Although most of our summer academic classes are online at this point, we still host a decent number of in-person summer camps for kids. Over the last few days, I’ve been bumping into kids all around campus doing all sorts of (organized) things—acting, building, blowing bubbles.
It does my heart good.
Part of that is just because it’s fun to watch kids be kids. But it’s also a great use of the campus as a place.
Over the last 10 years or so, much of the growth that has happened has been in places other than campuses. Dual enrollment has been growing in high schools, for instance, and online courses were turbocharged by the pandemic. Each has its virtues, but each comes at some cost to campus life. And my college is not unique in that.
As many campuses do, we rent out space for corporate meetings and conferences. That’s useful, both financially and in terms of networking, but it isn’t quite as much fun as the kids blowing bubbles. That’s to be expected, I suppose.
Yes, by all means, let’s keep the kids’ camps and the corporate conferences. But campuses could also be used productively to draw in alumni and local seniors, both of whom could be powerful allies.
Community colleges should have an advantage in cultivating alumni, given that most alums tend to live within an hour or so of campus. That isn’t as true in the four-year sector, and certainly not among the most exclusive institutions. Given that kind of home-field advantage, it would seem logical to expect that community colleges would have the most robust, tight-knit and supportive alumni networks of any sector of higher ed. But for the most part, they don’t.
There’s a myth in some circles that students only identify as alums of the last/highest place they attended. According to the myth, a student who starts at a local community college and then transfers to a prestigious university will only identify with, and donate to, the university as they get older. That myth becomes self-fulfilling when community colleges don’t put nearly as much effort into cultivating alumni as the four-years do.
It’s time to give the lie to the myth. I’ve met people in civilian life who, when they hear where I work, respond that the community college they attended treated them better than any place they went later. They often say it with a tone of surprise, like they hadn’t really thought about it before.
(Thinking out loud: Some “how-to” on building and cultivating alumni networks for community colleges might be a good use of time at the American Association of Community Colleges conference. Let’s get the best ideas together and share them across the sector!)
That’s a missed opportunity. Bringing those folks to campus for social events on a regular basis should be much easier here, given that the alums live so close.
Seniors are a fantastic resource, and a major growth demographic. (That’s especially true in parts of the Northeast and Midwest, where sometimes they’re the only growth demographic.) In the aggregate, seniors vote at higher rates than younger cohorts, and they are more likely to carry influence with local politicians. If cultivated, they can become powerful advocates. Here, too, relatively short driving distances should come in handy. I’ve seen regular programming for seniors go over quite well, drawing significant crowds; the key is to do it.
In decentering the physical campus for the sake of access—online and in high schools—we may have lost sight of just how valuable a campus can be. That’s even more true when the campus is aggressively local. We bring in kids in the summer, and that’s great. We should be bringing in alums and seniors, too.