By Bill Cirone, Santa Barbara County
Superintendent of Schools
As members of the Class of
2013 prepare for their high school graduation ceremonies across California, hundreds
of thousands of them are also preparing to enroll in one of the state’s 112
community colleges.
Local students don’t have to
look far to find two great choices — Santa Barbara City College and Allan
Hancock College. Both have long been jewels of the state system, and they
recently received overwhelming confirmation of their lofty status.
City College was named one of
two top community colleges in the country by the Aspen Institute, which cited
SBCC’s outstanding achievement in student learning outcomes, degree completion,
labor-market success (students securing good jobs after college), and
facilitating the success of minority and low-income students.
Hancock is regularly ranked
as one of the five best community colleges in California and one of the top 120
in the nation. This spring, it got a huge vote of confidence when it received
the largest gift in its history — nearly $12 million — in a bequest from the
late Patricia J. Boyd, a former faculty member.
These high-profile
affirmations are important, and well deserved. The public may be tempted to
take this excellence for granted — but it doesn’t come easily. Faculty members
and administrators work every day to serve their students and the larger
public, and students know it. Nearly 21,000 of them enrolled at Hancock last
year, and nearly 27,000 at City College. They may be planning to get an
associate’s degree in one of the many specialties the two colleges offer,
transfer later to a four-year college or university, upgrade their professional
skills, or retrain themselves in mid-life for another career. Perhaps they’re
studying purely for personal enrichment.
Students of all ages and life
experiences find a wide range of degree and certificate programs, outstanding
faculty, impressive facilities, and great support services. Both schools can
boast of their students’ career successes and excellent acceptance rates to
four-year universities, and they can point to alumni who have achieved national
and international success.
Two former Hancock students,
for example, were prominent at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony —
best-actress nominee Jessica Chastain and Oscar winner Mark Andrews. Oscar
winners Kathy Bates and Robin Williams and Tony award-winner Boyd Gaines are
also alumni.
Other examples of successful
Hancock alumni include the late Admiral Owen Siler, international business
executive Michael Henry, retired Major League pitcher Bryn Smith, the late
artist Milford Zornes, retired NBA player Mike Bratz, and NFL coach Gunther
Cunningham.
On its roster of famous
graduates, City College can list two winners of the MacArthur Foundation’s
“genius grants” — Dr. Angela Belcher, now an MIT professor and an authority in
nanotechnology, and Dr. Yoky Matsuoka, a technology executive and an authority
in neurorobotics — as well as World Series-winning pitcher Jesse Orosco and
operatic tenor Eduardo Villa.
With more than 2.4 million
students, the California Community Colleges are the largest system of higher
education in the United States. They educate 80 percent of our state’s
firefighters, law enforcement personnel, and emergency medical technicians, and
70 percent of our nurses.
Santa Barbara County’s two
community colleges haven’t achieved this excellence alone. They rely on
community partners — businesses, individuals, and nonprofit agencies — for
raising money, providing expertise, and giving advice on how to shape programs
that will make their graduates’ skills relevant in the marketplace.
This level of excellence is a
further testament to the amount and importance of community support received by
local schools. Congratulations to all the administrators, teachers, support
staff, students, and community members who make SBCC and Allan Hancock two
crown jewels in our national community college system.
