Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” If there’s one thing we’ve learned from recent history it is that the health of our Republic is linked to the education of our citizenry. Yes, education does, indeed, matter.

Last fall semester, College of the Redwoods initiated a process of creating a new aspirational Education Master Plan (EMP) that will serve as a guide for the important resources, curriculum development, technology deployment and use, and student success initiatives choices we will have to make in the future. 

A generous thank you to the CR faculty and staff who have devoted their time, energy, and intellectual expertise to guide the EMP process. Thank you to Chris Gaines, Gary Sokolow, Erin Wall, Sean Thomas, Kerry Mayer, Jon Pedicino, John Johnston, Derek Glavich, Wendy Riggs, Philip Mancus, Levi Gill, Peter Blakemore, Reno Giovannetti, Shannon Walkley, Natalia Margulis, and Angelina Hill for serving on the EMP Guiding Coalition. These colleagues have developed a planning process that recognizes and reaffirms the value of faculty guidance and input in decision-making and focuses on developing strategies and goals that maintain CR’s relevance, specifically relative to emerging competition from public and private educational entities, and in the service of student, local workforce, and community needs.

It is important to the Guiding Coalition that our EMP reflects the value of interdisciplinary collaboration and creates learning opportunities that cross boundaries between traditional academic pathways and trades-based programs. Furthermore, the EMP should include strategies that fosters hands-on and experiential learning that is deeply rooted in our region’s unique natural, cultural, and economic ecosystem. It should also challenge faculty and staff to adapt to the needs of our students, workforce, and community and reaffirm the college’s devotion to teaching excellence and academic student support. We must also underscore the value of a Liberal Arts education beyond just a transfer pathway.

Under the facilitation of CR Professor Chris Gaines, we have been able to make tremendous progress over the past several months to identify factors that will guide our future discussions. We have considered the following:

• The COVID crisis accelerated technological trends that existed prior to the crisis and the business community believes that it won't go back to the pre-COVID "way of doing things." The move to remote work, reliance on new technologies (such as automation and AI), and the digital transformation of marketing, selling and delivering goods and services will likely continue across industry sectors.
• Retraining our current workforce to reflect this “new normal” will be essential if we are to better serve the changing needs of our business community and provide work opportunities for students.
• Leaders across the community encouraged CR to focus on the opportunities that are tied to our region's natural, cultural, and economic uniqueness. Emerging industries such as aquaculture, clean energy, sustainable agriculture, rural health care, cybersecurity, and the remote service sector were a few of the areas emphasized by our community partners. Traditional areas such as forestry and natural resources, construction, and entrepreneurship were also seen as critical.
• Training will be needed to prepare our workforce for these or other new or emerging sectors that will drive Humboldt's future economy.
• Traditional liberal arts skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, effective communication, and the ability to embrace viewpoint diversity were seen as critically important across all organizations and leaders emphasized the need to train a workforce that is adaptable, resilient, and able to add value in times of change and uncertainty.
• It is our job to communicate the workforce value of a traditional liberal arts education to our students.

I am extremely confident that we will create an EMP that will serve as a core component of our integrated institutional planning process and link vision, priorities, people, services, resources, and the facility needs in a flexible process of decision-making and action. Underpinning our EMP is the belief that, “It is not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education” (Nelson Mandela).

We are planning to hold a CR Workforce Summit in March to continue to learn about the specific needs of our industry partners and to develop plans to address those needs.