NPC candidates share passion for community colleges
The last two candidate finalists for the open presidential position at National Park College, Kendricks Hooker and Joel Michaelis, met with students, staff, and the community on Tuesday to discuss their respective ideas and why they would like to be the college’s next leader.
Hooker, provost at Cabarrus College of Health Sciences in Concord, North Carolina, and Michaelis, vice president of instruction at Southeast Community College in Lincoln, Nebraska, followed WorWic Community College Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Services Bryan Newton and NPC Executive Vice President for Advancement and Government Relations Wade Derden, who spoke on Monday.
The NPC Board of Trustees will meet at 6:30 p.m. today in the Ray and Pat Smith Conference Room at the Gerald Fisher Campus Center to discuss the candidates in executive session. The four finalists were approved by the NPC Board of Trustees late last month.
Hooker, who has over 25 years of experience in higher education and has served in leadership roles in the health education field, talked about the challenges he has seen in education throughout his career and how he met them head-on.
“First and foremost, I’m a product of a community college,” he said. “I graduated from Coahoma Community College in Clarksdale, Mississippi, so I’ve always supported the mission of a community college.”
Noting a community college should accept 100% of the people who are interested in attending, he stressed the importance of creating a culture of kindness.
“Since we’ve accepted those students, it is our responsibility to make sure that we provide those students with the resources they need to be successful, Hooker said.
When asked why he chose to apply for the position, he said his and the college’s mission align which is very important to him.
“I wanted to connect myself to the mission,” he said. “I think oftentimes it’s important to make sure you are aligned with the mission. And the mission is simple — learning is the focus and student success is the goal. That resonated with me.”
Michaelis, who has worked in the education field for over 30 years, previously as the chief academic officer at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Middlesboro, Kentucky, before going to Southeast Community College, also talked about that mission and how community colleges positively impact economic development in the regions they serve.
He said they cannot help but to do so.
“Every once in a while you’ll probably see somebody share something on Facebook and it’ll say something like ‘Bring back trade schools.’ Which, I always find somewhat amusing.
We never left. You have them. They’re called your local community college. Your local college, your local two-year school is the one that’s providing those,” Michaelis said.
Looking at a school’s values, he noted that was what piqued his interest in NPC, too, citing the access and accepting every single student who is interested.
“Now to some degree your high schools are, but even here they’re doing it through us, through the career academy,” he said. “And so when you say what impact does the college have on the local workforce and the local economy … wow, a ton.
“We’re training the people that are the workers that are going out, that are filling the jobs that don’t require a four-year degree or higher. The jobs that require a little bit less,” he said.
They are also training those students that do require a four-year degree or higher, he said, because they come there to get their first two years.
“We’re providing them the financial ability to be able to do that that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise have. Maybe through athletics, we’re providing somebody the opportunity to come to college who hadn’t thought about college,” he said.
“What they were thinking about was, ‘Man, I don’t want to give up on playing basketball yet.’ And so they can extend those glory days a little bit more by coming here and winning a national championship. They can do that and then while they’re here, they realize something about themselves. They realize they have the capacity and the ability to do something they didn’t realize they had before.”
Besides meeting with stakeholders, Michaelis said one of the first projects he would undertake if given the job would be to analyze relevant data about the school, such as the matriculation rate among local high school students, specifically those receiving dual credit.
“Are they coming? Why aren’t they coming? Where are they going? So of the students that are choosing, where are they going? Is it a long ways out? Is it here? Is it directly to a four-year? Are they going to a different community college? What are they doing and why are doing that?” he said.
“And then start working with our folks who are working in those initiatives to ask the questions of, ‘OK, what is it that we need to do?’” he said.