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Meeting Community Needs- The rebirth of Rocky Mountain College

It may sound like myth, but some administrators here at Rocky
Mountain College insist it is true. During the 1986-87 academic
year, an interim president took a look at the sea of red ink
on the college’s books, walked into a local bank that held the
bulk of Rocky’s debt, and threw the keys to the college on the
table.

By BEN GOSE The Chronicle of Higher Education

(Many thanks to Dr. Stuard Rosenfeld of Regional Technology Strategies, Inc. (RTS) http://rtsinc.org/ for passing this along- Russ)

The gambit worked. The bankers — apparently horrified at the
prospect of owning the college’s boarded-up buildings and
pothole-strewn walkways — ultimately let it pay only 50 cents
on the dollar to retire some of its more than $5-million in
debt.

But Rocky, as it’s called here, still needed to find a path to
a brighter — and sustainable — future. The trustees found
their guide in Arthur H. DeRosier Jr., who had just spent
seven years righting the ship at the College of Idaho (now
known as Albertson College of Idaho).

During Mr. DeRosier’s first year at the college, in 1987,
Rocky’s accreditor, the Northwest Association of Schools and
Colleges, put the institution on "show cause" status. That
meant the college had to provide regular updates to
demonstrate why its accreditation should not be revoked. Mr.
DeRosier still remembers a line from the report: "There is
absolutely nothing to commend the finances of this
institution."

By the time Mr. DeRosier left 15 years later, in July 2002,
Rocky had experienced an impressive turnaround. The college
had more than doubled its enrollment, to 800 students;
increased its endowment from $700,000 to nearly $20-million;
erected a new student center and state-of-the-art library; and
renovated and brought back into service several historic
buildings. Rocky erased its structural deficit in 1994, and
Northwest removed it from show-cause status in 1997.

Rocky’s return from the brink didn’t follow the usual model.
Instead of cutting his way into the black, Mr. DeRosier went
on an expansion binge designed to better meet the needs of
people in Montana and northern Wyoming, the college’s
traditional markets. By creating a series of programs the
community wanted, the college saw its enrollment head back up.

"The new programs saved the college, there’s no question about
that," says Rocky’s current board chairman, Lawrence A.
Campodonico, a retired physician.

Mr. DeRosier began the revamping by working with the local
newspaper, the Billings Gazette, to poll citizens about what
they wanted from the college. That led to a
bachelor’s-degree-completion program that now enrolls roughly
45 students, and is especially popular among American Indians.

During Mr. DeRosier’s first month on the job, the president of
an Ohio college with an equestrian program asked him why
Rocky, surrounded by prime horse country, didn’t have a
similar offering. Bingo! Rocky’s own equestrian program was up
and running four months later, and now enrolls about 50
students.

Rocky also started an aviation program, which trains
professional pilots, and a physician’s-assistant program. Both
make sense in this state, where planes are used for
crop-dusting and monitoring ranches, and where many small
towns have no doctor. This year, 100 students are seeking
aviation degrees, and 21 students are enrolled in the
physician’s-assistant program.

The new programs angered some liberal-arts faculty members,
who thought the college was diverting scarce resources from
its core mission. But Mr. DeRosier countered that Rocky, which
was created in 1947 through the merger of Billings Polytechnic
Institute and Intermountain Union College, had never been a
pure liberal-arts college.

The grumbling about the new programs largely subsided as they
grew. In 1997, an accrediting committee said they were "good
examples of cooperation with local companies or industries
that creatively use college and company resources to the
benefit of both organizations."

And Mr. DeRosier didn’t stop there. Only four American Indian
students attended Rocky in 1987, when Mr. DeRosier became
president. He viewed Rocky, with its small classes and
nurturing faculty, as a logical second step for students who
attended the state’s seven tribal colleges, all but one of
which offer only two-year degrees. And he managed to persuade
the tribal-college presidents and federal grant makers that he
was right.

For many years, grants from the Department of Energy supported
a consortium that helped American Indians earn their
bachelor’s degrees at Rocky. More recently, Rocky and a local
hospital have received federal grants, totaling more than
$3-million, to deliver telemedicine courses at tribal
colleges.

Today, the college has more than 50 American Indian students,
and it recently hired Janine Pease, a former president of
Little Big Horn College, to become Rocky’s first vice
president for American Indian affairs. Thomas R. Oates,
Rocky’s new president, thinks the number of American Indians
on the campus can "easily double" in the next several years,
and that the increase in diversity will make the campus more
attractive to out-of-state students.

Rocky isn’t out of the woods yet. Faculty and staff members
will receive raises averaging 3 percent this year, but that
modest increase comes on the heels of four straight years of
salary freezes.

The college is now borrowing to build a $5.5-million,
200-student residence hall, in the expectation that enrollment
will grow to between 1,000 and 1,200 students. Rocky is wooing
students in growing markets, like Boise, Denver, and Seattle,
since the number of high-school graduates in Montana and
Wyoming is projected to decline over the next decade. Paying
back the debt will be challenging if the projected growth
doesn’t materialize.

"For many, many years into the future, we’re going to be
tuition dependent," says Mr. Oates.

Yet the college’s revenue sources today are certainly more
diverse than they were in 1987. In addition to bringing in the
grants and other federal funds related to educating American
Indian students, Mr. DeRosier seemed to put every prominent
person he met on the college’s board, or on the National
Advisory Council that he created in the 1990s.

Rocky now has 35 board members, and 84 people on its advisory
council, which meets once per year to help the college with
strategy. (Members are responsible for their travel expenses.)
Members of the board and advisory council collectively have
given 16 percent of the $35.5-million raised in a capital
campaign that began in 1996.

Still, reminders of hard times abound on this campus. Just
next to the exquisitely renovated Prescott Hall, which houses
the president’s office, is a women’s dormitory that has been
boarded up for more than 40 years. A commercial dental clinic
intrudes on the northwest corner of the campus — a legacy of
land sales during the lean years.

But the rest of the campus is looking better than it has in
years, with neatly cut grass, healthy crabapple, lilac, and
spruce trees, and walking paths outlined by red brick. Some
310 freshmen, the most ever, will walk those paths this fall.

Mr. DeRosier, who at 72 now works part time as head of a local
historical center, says he is often asked if he would rather
be taking control of Rocky today than in the dark days of the
late 1980s.

He says no. "There’s something nice about building a
foundation," he says, "and leaving it for the next guy to put
a house on."

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http://chronicle.com

Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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