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CSN deserves more

Guest Contributor
Guest Contributor
Opinion
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By Steve Soltz

Once again, the Legislature will be deciding funding and support for Nevada's learning institutions. This affects not only K-12, but higher education as well. The institutions of higher learning in Nevada are grouped within a system known as NSHE.

I like to think of this group as eight children within a family. We all understand the concept. The children, who share interests and bonds, are also unique unto themselves, while the parents, who want to be fair, sometimes also unwittingly play favorites to the detriment of others.

Likewise, Nevada’s legislators have long tried to come up with a higher-ed funding formula that is fair to all NSHE institutions. However, for too many decades, funding decisions have been unfair to the College of Southern Nevada (CSN), which is the largest school based on student headcount — and which has needs the others do not.

This is important. Sometimes it is necessary to give one child in a family more support and attention, because that child legitimately needs extra help to reach its full potential. CSN is that child. It is the special needs child that is struggling to succeed despite all the roadblocks in the way. It has special needs because the student population it serves has (a wide variety of) special needs.

How so? It is well understood by those living in Southern Nevada that the K-12 education system here is one of the poorest performing in the country. We can argue ad infinitum about the causes but the result is that when students leave the Clark County school system, most aren’t university ready. Not even close.

But like many young people, they decide they want to go to college anyhow. Perhaps because they know a formal education is needed to allow them to achieve their goals. Perhaps they want to learn a trade that will support them and their future family. Or perhaps they want to take some different classes and try to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives. By spending a couple of semesters (or more) at a community college, they can achieve any of these things.

Unlike UNLV, UNR and the other four-year institutions in NSHE, CSN has always welcomed these individuals who aren’t ready, willing, or able to go to a university — but still want to attend college. Some are students who may not have even gotten a high school diploma, or who are still struggling to master the English language.

While CSN has graduated record numbers of students each year over the last decade, current thinking within state government is that if these students can’t get a degree or transfer within two years, CSN is a failure. That thinking is so unfair, it is bordering on criminal. Such judgment takes no account of the thousands of students who have come to CSN, taken classes for a semester or two (or three, or four, or five…) and found their way into a meaningful career, or moved on to other institutions of higher learning. The current funding formula is set to punish institutions that don’t have “completers.” But who’s to say these thousands didn’t complete their own aims and purposes for coming to CSN?  

Unfortunately, when large numbers of your students are ill-prepared for college, have no support system, and probably need to work long hours to live and pay for college, you have many more roadblocks to clear before their chances of success (speedy or otherwise) can be improved. I am not making excuses for them, here. I am making the point that just like a special-needs child who needs a bit more support than the average child to succeed, CSN should be given more funding and more support than the other institutions in NSHE.

I would also like to make a plea for the faculty of CSN, who through all the changes rained down upon them by various administrations and legislative actions have showed up every day to give their students the best education possible. This, despite the fact that their wages have actually decreased when compared to the ever-increasing cost of living over the last 11 years.

The Legislature needs to correct the long-standing imbalance in higher-ed funding where CSN is concerned. It may not seem the fairest to all in NSHE, but it is certainly the most just.

Steve Soltz is a professor at the College of Southern Nevada.

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