A Community College, Deeply Rooted, Evolves to Survive

There’s been a college overlooking the west end of Broad Street here in downtown Statesville since 1856, when “about 70 young ladies” began attending classes in a handsome new building with fluted Doric columns. But in the years since, what was originally called the Concord Presbyterian Female College has repeatedly found itself on the verge of closing.

Presidents came and went, sometimes abruptly. The name changed several times. The Great Depression put the college in such dire straits that in 1932 it began admitting men. The Presbyterian Church withdrew its support in the 1950s, citing “the very slender need” for such an institution, and it became a private community college. Financial worries in the early 1970s forced it to join the state community-college system. As recently as the late 1980s, its accreditation was threatened.

Yet the tidy campus at the end of Broad Street is still here, and the chairman of its Board of Trustees, Ralph L. Bentley, a retired local physician, says “the state of the college is probably the best it’s ever been.” That’s largely because it keeps evolving to meet the changing needs of the county it serves.

Mitchell Community College, as it is now known, has a diverse enrollment of about 3,100 full- and part-time students in academic programs — including more than 800 high-school students on two popular dual-enrollment tracks — plus a variety of continuing-education programs serving local businesses and individuals, enrolling about 6,000 a year.

Keeping up with local needs is the job of James T. Brewer, Mitchell’s president, who is known to almost everyone here as Tim. Administrators rely on a mix of institutional research — “We can get a 40,000-foot view of the industries,” he says — and conversations with friends, neighbors, and folks they meet at farmers’ markets, in restaurants and the bike store downtown, and at various civic-organization meetings.

Statesville is the seat of Iredell County, which has some 167,000 residents and stretches northward nearly 50 miles from the outskirts of Charlotte. While the southern end of the county is increasingly suburban, with ties to the auto-racing industry, the northern end remains among the state’s most productive agricultural regions. Scattered throughout are manufacturing enterprises and hospitals hungry for well-trained employees.

It’s an ever-changing balancing act to satisfy employers’ demands while providing more-traditional courses for students planning to transfer to four-year institutions — students who have been the college’s “bread and butter” for decades, says Mr. Brewer. Articulation agreements with the state’s senior institutions define the core academic programs, and Mitchell, like many community colleges, advertises that students can “save at least $20,000" by completing their first two years of coursework here, where in-state tuition maxes out at $1,216 for a full semester’s load.

Meanwhile, the college faces competition for students to the south, where Central Piedmont Community College is one of the largest in the state, and to the east, where Rowan-Cabarrus Community College pools the resources of two counties.

Mitchell’s $17-million endowment — unusually large for a community college — allows it to retain some liberal-arts traditions that it prides itself on, such as studio-art courses and a music program. Along with creaking wood staircases and brick walkways, they give the compact main campus the feel of a private college, albeit one with a small library and an even smaller campus center.

Meanwhile, Mitchell also offers advanced-manufacturing instruction, nursing degrees, and welding classes, plus a cosmetology program and noncredit community favorites like aerobics and line dancing. “Aligning the college to be relevant to things that are needed in the community” is what keeps enrollment healthy, Mr. Brewer says.

Interest in nursing, for instance, is running high, but current capacity is limited to 120 students. “We get twice as many applications as we can take,” says Linda Wiersch, the nursing dean. So now the college has a deal in the works with the City of Statesville and Iredell County to build a $12-million health-science building on the site of a former hospital near the campus.

‘Hurting for Workers’

Enrollment is often the main concern of any small college, whether private or public. In Mitchell’s case, students bring not only tuition but also state money: The size of its appropriation each year is based on how many students enrolled the year before. That amount, about $13 million for 2014-15, provides just under half of the college’s revenue (the rest comes from federal and state student aid, a county appropriation, tuition, and other sources).

As at many community colleges, economic conditions play a big role in determining Mitchell’s enrollment. “When the economy does well, our numbers are flat,” says Carol Johnson, vice president for work-force development and continuing education. “When the economy is tanking, our numbers are through the roof.” At the height of the recent recession, enrollment ballooned to 4,100, as people out of work signed up for courses.

The college tailors its continuing-education instruction to companies’ need for skilled machinists, mechanical engineers, and others. Because demand for new employees is so high, it recently helped organize a program to offer manufacturers “a pipeline of screened, trained, certified production technicians.” Companies pay $1,000 up front to participate, as well as $1,000 per person they hire through the program. Businesses also arrange specialized training through Mitchell for current employees who need to learn how to improve manufacturing processes or hone their management skills.

Sharon Rouse, Mitchell’s director of engineering programs, says many more jobs are available in the region than she has students to fill them. Hedy Ryerson, the occupational-extension coordinator, sees that, too. “Companies will reach out to us because so many businesses — especially in the trades — are hurting for workers.”

A few blocks from the main campus, students train in new technology and manufacturing classrooms and labs. Welding and HVAC programs share a low building beside a studio-art outpost and a small farm plot. A busy, crowded campus in Mooresville, 16 miles south of here, meets demand for courses in the southern end of the county with offerings like a fast-track, partly-online business program that students can take at night, finishing in just two years.

‘Dang, We Ought to Do That’

Recently Mitchell added an agriculture program to serve farm families in the county’s northern end. “We’re No. 1 in the state in dairy, and there’s also a lot of poultry and beef,” says Camille Reese, vice president for instruction. An agribusiness program, “for people who wanted to stay on the family farm but needed business knowledge,” she says, started in 2014 with seven students. Now it has 35.

Ms. Reese expects the program to continue to grow. “There’s a huge shortage of ag-ed people and extension agents. I thought, Well, dang, we ought to do that — there’s a market. When we start, in 2017 or ’18, we’ll have the first ag-ed program in a state community college.” This semester the college also added a culinary-arts degree. And Ms. Reese is eyeing a program in hospitality.

The college has occasionally shut down programs that haven’t attracted enough students to justify their costs, including some in the automotive field. In other disciplines with plenty of students, like studio art, it limits how often it offers some particularly costly courses. But faculty members recently persuaded the president and trustees that the music program, with about 30 majors at a time, was strong enough to become the only community-college music department in North Carolina accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music (it’s in the final stages of approval).

Expansion notwithstanding, Mitchell’s comparatively small size counts as a plus, says Porter Brannon, vice president for student services. “You take care of each other in ways a larger community does not,” she says. “The board and the community are invested in maintaining a certain look and feel. Students who want that traditional-college feel come here.” Where else, she wonders, does a student get called in to see her for leaving cookie wrappers in a classroom?

Personal attention is also part of the college’s new retention strategy. Of the students who started in the fall of 2015, about 30 percent didn’t return. So Ms. Brannon is setting up a program to train faculty members to intervene at the first sign of difficulty. “Students disengage for a number of reasons. Almost all of them have jobs, except the high-school students, and they may have kids. When we reach out to them, many students are so happy we did.”

Douglas O. Eason, who served for 22 years as Mitchell’s president before turning the job over to Mr. Brewer in 2012, says the college has been a survivor because it’s made changes when it’s had to. He and others argue, though, that keeping Mitchell’s liberal-arts tradition intact remains important. “A welder,” he says, “needs to be able to read and write.”

Stephen G. Herman, who retired in 2015 after teaching history for 50 years, is nevertheless back in the classroom this semester. What’s kept the college alive for 160 years, he says, is the dedication of the city and county around it: Whenever a crisis loomed, the community stepped in to make sure it didn’t lose its college. “It’s been a community college from the beginning,” he says, “whether it was called that or not.”

Indeed, it seems that almost everyone in Statesville has either taken or taught at least one course at the college. The owner of the wine store took computer courses; her son is now in a dual-enrollment program. A nurse at the local hospital has signed up for aerobics, her husband took continuing-ed courses in plumbing and real estate. Statesville’s mayor, Constantine H. Kutteh, a lawyer who lives across the street from the campus, has taught there, as has his father.

And when his mother died, Mr. Kutteh acknowledged the college’s role in the community in a poignant way — by asking people who knew her to contribute to a nursing scholarship named for her. “I wrote thank-you notes,” he says, “saying, ‘You will help educate the people who will take care of us when we’re old.’ "

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.