Nevada State College president: ‘We’re not just changing lives, we’re changing family trees’
Fifteen years ago this spring, Nevada State College consisted of three classrooms, a library and 177-member student body in a converted vitamin plant.
Today, the school’s footprint has grown to four buildings, and space is being prepared on campus for a $38 million education building. Enrollment is at 4,200, and the school is one of the fastest-growing of its type in the nation.
This week, as the campus prepared to celebrate its 15th academic year with a special event today, the college’s president, Bart Patterson, sat down with the Sun to look back at the institution’s history and discuss what’s to come.
Patterson is in his sixth year as the college’s leader but has been involved with it since its inception, as the first general counsel for the school in 2003 and before that as an assistant counsel for the Nevada System of Higher Education.
Edited excerpts of the interview follow:
What are the most significant changes you’ve seen at the college?
Nevada State College will celebrate its 15th anniversary with an open house scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. today.
The family-oriented event will feature appearances by Clark County’s poet laureate, Vogue Robinson, a drum group and a magician for children. Food will be provided, and college staff will be on hand to provide campus tours.
The college requests that visitors RSVP by visiting nsc.edu/ 15yearsrsvp.
We started out really built around nursing and education — the idea that we needed to provide a middle tier of education in Nevada. It’s similar in concept to the California system, which has the universities of California — the research institutions — and then has the California states as the middle tier between the community colleges and those research institutions.
So the whole concept is to have lower cost to the student and to the state to provide professional degrees of value. Hence, the core start of nursing and education.
And we’ve stayed true to those roots, but a lot of people don’t understand that the college is intended to be a comprehensive regional institution like the Califor-