Office of the Chancellor

July 2010

Participating in new student orientation never gets old for me. Orientation sessions for new students, and students transferring from other colleges, happen weekly throughout the summer at UCCS. The campus is filled with people looking for meeting places, where to park, where to buy a book, where to get advice on financing their education, or where to find a cold drink.

Through the seeming chaos, I revel in the changes that have taken place on this campus as I recount long lines of students waiting to register for classes or assuring a student as he or she faced a 300-page University Catalog.

Now, I see students sitting at individual computer terminals and literally – thanks to a new computer system – shopping for classes, just as they might on an on-line retail site. Even a mainstay of college, the catalog is now online, making it easy to see an official course description or requirements for a degree.
The chaos is seemingly in order.

But while the campus and its processes have changed dramatically, I find students have not. The hopes and dreams remain much the same since my arrival on campus thirty-plus years ago. UCCS continues to attract people who want to reach higher in their lives, the lives of their families, and to support their communities.

While those may sound like dissimilar goals, they are not. Someone who enters college with the goal of improving his or her ability to secure employment clearly has a personal goal, one that benefits the individual. Some estimates place the earnings of a college graduate at $1 million more than a high school graduate.

But the benefits are collective as well.

In the 23 counties that make up southeastern Colorado, 19 percent of adults have earned college degrees. In contrast, 16 percent of adults live in poverty.
Those numbers reflect the challenge facing our region now and in the future. A single percentage point increase in the number of adults with a college degree – another 7,000 people – means an additional $3.6 million in income to our region.

By improving education, we boost income and decrease the number of adults – as well as children – living in poverty. By improving education, we increase the amount of taxes generated and reduce the demand for social services.

Individual footsteps cross multiple paths, ranging from the first generation student who shows siblings, cousins and neighbors that college is possible to the graduate who teaches or opens a business in his hometown.

The faces of the people I see at orientation sessions are real. In between the temporary anxiety of a new experience, they are full of hope. They aim to reach higher. I aim to help them by keeping the cost of attending UCCS within reach (tuition increases are consistently among the lowest in the state) and by working individually with students to combine grants, scholarships, and an on-campus job to make the dream of a college education possible.

Pam Shockley-Zalabak