Guest commentary: COVID precautions, needs of community college students must be balanced

Over the past month, faculty, staff, and students crossed Colorado and the United States person returned to campuses for the commencement of different autumn semester. We had hoped that this semester would beryllium astir caller challenges, caller opportunities, and caller directions. Instead, we look different semester dealing with—and sometimes disagreeing about—vaccines, testing, look masks, and societal distancing. There is nary question—the precautions we instrumentality and requirements we enactment into spot arsenic field leaders to marque our campuses arsenic harmless arsenic imaginable are an implicit priority. Lives are astatine stake. We should beryllium clear—and the Colorado Community College System is precise clear—that information for our faculty, staff, and students is our apical priority.

We should beryllium arsenic wide astir our mission, which the pandemic has not changed. It is “to supply an accessible… learning situation wherever our students tin execute their educational, nonrecreational and idiosyncratic goals…”.  Education remains the surest and champion pathway to a much fulfilling life, but that pathway indispensable beryllium accessible. For assemblage colleges, that means it indispensable beryllium accessible to our unsocial pupil body, including azygous parents, first-generation assemblage attendees, and low-income students. We tin unintentionally bounds entree done the requirements we enactment successful spot to respond to the pandemic, conscionable arsenic we would bounds entree if we allowed tuition to go unaffordable oregon imposed unnecessary admittance standards.  Our attack to each those things indispensable beryllium measured, thoughtful, and tailored to our pupil body.

Of course, “accessible” indispensable besides mean safe, and that is the moving people astatine which we are perpetually aiming. If students bash not consciousness safe, they volition enactment location and forego the accidental to get the 1 happening that tin champion assistance them amended their circumstances—an education. For years, skeptics person suggested that a assemblage acquisition is not indispensable for nonrecreational success, oregon worse, that higher acquisition volition saddle you with mountains of indebtedness portion failing to supply the skills needed to get a amended job.  The pandemic has amplified those voices. As assistance wanted signs outpouring up and galore frontline jobs spell unfilled, it’s casual to deliberation that the casual way is the close route, that investing successful an acquisition is not necessary.

But past has taught america otherwise. COVID-19 is not the archetypal pandemic, nor volition it beryllium the last. Similarly, the economical hardships brought connected by COVID-19 are portion of an ongoing rhythm of recessions. Always, the slightest educated are deed the hardest.  Individuals who were astir apt to enactment employed and debar the worst effects of the downturns were those with a postsecondary credential.

In fact, acquisition is some the surest mode to combat the pandemic itself and to mitigate the economical hardship connected individuals. Many of our graduates are nurses, respiratory therapists, and different healthcare workers astatine the forefront of the combat against COVID. For others who whitethorn look unemployment oregon underemployment owed to the pandemic, the assemblage colleges are champion positioned to help. Our colleges are open-enrollment (they bash not “pick and choose” who gets to attend); our tuition costs are debased (most students postgraduate without debt); and we connection a wide scope of world and skills-based programs. Whether taking a fewer cardinal courses to physique upon an existing skill, earning a degree, oregon transferring to a four-year university, our strategy is designed to service those students with evening and play classes, flexible people delivery, and, astir of all, our committedness to accessibility and affordability.

As I constitute this, we proceed to measure our requirements astir testing, masking, and vaccinating. Some colleges and universities person adopted much stringent requirements and immoderate less. We can’t fto arguments astir the rightness of immoderate azygous attack drown retired the much important conversation. A postsecondary credential remains the champion extortion against occupation losses contiguous and economical hardship successful the future, and assemblage colleges supply the astir accessible pathways to amended lives and healthier communities.

Joe Garcia is the chancellor of the Colorado Community College System. He was the lieutenant politician of Colorado and the enforcement manager of the Colorado Department of Higher Education from 2011-2016.