The time to help Californians who feel economically stranded and want jobs that pay living wages is now. And it is urgent.
That’s the message that California Community College – often referred to as CCC – Chancellor Dr. Sonya Christian and Calbright College President Ajita Talwalker Menon carried between them as they recently spoke at a virtual “Fireside Chat” with Calbright’s faculty and staff.
“This is time for us to double down on our commitment to California’s working adults, to our low-income adults, to the diversity of our populations,” Chancellor Christian said. “Because our commitment is to each and every Californian, not to some. To each and every one. So we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
That sense of urgency – “the time is now” – is the driving force behind the California Community College’s Vision 2030, a collaborative action plan for the state’s community colleges that removes barriers to higher education, guides best practices in education and workforce training, and responds to technological and environmental changes facing California while advancing the needs of all students.
“Vision 2030 revisits the concept of access and really we asked ourselves the question: Are we truly open access institutions? Are we open access if there are 6.8 million Californians who are working and they are in low-income jobs and they have not found their way to the community college?” Christian asked Calbright’s staff.
The conversation was held in late February as part of Calbright’s “Virtual Summit,” a two-day event for Calbright staff and faculty to come together, review the work they’ve done to reach Californians seeking flexible, skills-focused education programs, and plan for how education journeys can continuously be improved for adult learners.
Calbright was founded by the California State Legislature in late 2018 with the mission of increasing economic mobility and closing education equity gaps for working adults who lack easy access to traditional forms of higher education. The College offers online, flexible, affordable, skills-based programs that provide tangible economic value for both working adults and hiring managers. It also conducts research on best practices for online education and adult learners, and shares its discoveries with the rest of the CCC system so that every college can offer better support.
Chancellor Christian said that Calbright has a vital part to play in the work of Vision 2030, which emphasizes equity in access, equity in support, and equity in success, for traditional and non-traditional community college students alike.
“The establishment of Calbright was a visionary endeavor and it was a signal by the state of California saying that we’ve got to start building a structure where every Californian has an opportunity to get to higher education,” she told Calbright’s staff. “You are the only – let me repeat that – you are the only college in a system that is a statewide college taking on very difficult problems we haven’t solved before and you’re systematically solving problems with such detailed work.”
When asked by President Menon where the sense of urgency for Vision 2030 came from, Chancellor Christian cited a vital part of American history education leaders turned to for guidance and lessons learned.
“When we were working on Vision 2030, we were reading from [Martin Luther King’s] letter from Birmingham jail,” she said. “There’s so much in that piece of writing. One piece I’ll highlight, he talks about waiting. And he says waiting almost always means never. And that call of ‘don’t wait’ permeated our discussions, and our time is now. Every semester we wait, we miss a group of students who could have benefitted from those changes we should have in place to support them.”
Chancellor Christian reminded Calbright staff there is simply no time to wait, and challenging times call for the type of greater innovation in education as the College is doing.
“I believe during our most challenging times is when we collaborate more intensively and intentionally. I believe it is during more collaborative times – during these more difficult times – our innovation gets more fine tuned. ”
