The Global Experience Festival included many unique costumes and charecters, on March 27. (Photo Courtesy of GRCC Communications Department)

Administration talking expansion
By Kyle A. Kiekintveld
Collegiate Staff Writer

With the purchase of the Davenport campus still uncertain, the plans for the future expansion of GRCC are unknown.

As of right now, there are tentative plans to renovate the main campus, but eyes are also on the regional centers of Byron Center and Rockford.

While the prospective purchase of the Davenport campus might change a number of things for the college administration, they still have a number of plans if the additional space is not purchased.

“On the one to ten year plan the idea is we have certain spaces on campus that are available for us to build upon,” said Bob Partridge Executive Vice President of Business and Financial Services at GRCC.

Partridge points out current structures like the service parking ramp off of Lyon St. which could be the home of a new building focusing on health education courses.

Plans also exist to expand the ATC building. The football field and track could also become locations for future GRCC buildings.

“We have some ideas to expand the Ford Fieldhouse on both the east and West sides,” Partridge said. “New health fitness areas, expanded classrooms, expanded labs and maybe additional practice facilities.”

Plans also exist to expand the Student Center into the current parking ramp. Several areas would also be renovated to add more green space in attempt to make the campus much more appealing.

Currently GRCC is experimenting with regional centers like the one in Byron Center as a means to alleviate some of the burden on the GRCC main campus.

“Our hope is to strategically locate geographically regional centers or outreach centers that will serve our county, closer to them,” Partridge said. “We won’t have to have students come down here, they won’t have to park, and they will avoid some of the congestion.”

The regional center programs fall under the wing of Arturo Armijo, the Executive Director of Regional Learning Centers.

“The whole concept of regional learning centers was bringing accessible education to the community and individuals, at locations where they wanted it.” Armijo said. “We found out through the last couple surveys that students like this facility here (the Byron Center regional center).

It is located in their own backyard, they can get classes a lot easier, theres free parking, they don’t have to drive all the way downtown.”

This is only the second semester the Byron Center regional center has been open. This past Fall the regional center only offered 19 courses but in Fall of 2009 it is offering 26 courses.

“Their is a definite need for it (regional centers), a definite interest for it.” Armijo said.

Their are three regional centers right now, in Rockford, Grandville and Byron Center. The Byron Center regional center is unique in the fact that it is the only one that offers day and evening classes as well.

As of now, the regional centers do not offer full degrees but they offer courses that will allow students to easily transfer to the main campus to acquire their Associates.

“One of the things Dr. Steven Ender, the new President of GRCC, that he has a successful history on developing and growth of these regional centers.” Armijo said. “He said what he has done before, is about a fifty mile radius (around the main campus) and brought services to those areas.”

Armijo points out that GRCC is landlocked with very few opportunities to grow the main campus. He feels that over the next 10 and 20 years that the regional centers are the future for GRCC.

“I like the main campus but I live right down the road,” said Amanda Melville, an education major taking classes at the Byron Center regional center said. “I like the accessibility of it, Parking is a lot easier, I don’t have to pay for it. There are smaller classes here, so you get more attention from teachers.”

“I just wish there were more classes offered here. That would make it much more convenient,” said Shontae Payne another student at the Byron Center regional center. “Just because I am here every other day but I have to go downtown (to the main campus) for my other classes.”

Regional centers are options for GRCC to grow the campus.

(Top/Index)

Moving day for police
By Ryan Lenau
Collegiate Staff Writer

After years of having an office on the fourth floor of the Main Building, campus police are relocating across Lyon Street to the West Michigan Credit Union Building.

The police admit that the current space is not adequate to work out of. “We have outgrown our space,” said GRCC Chief of police Cindy Kennel. “We have talked repeatedly about how hard it is to work in a small place.”

There are many advantages to moving into the building across Lyon Street. “We will be more visible with our own street office,” Kennel said. “The credit union will be putting employees and people over here.”

Kennel was constanly saying that she needed more room.

“The decision was done by the space planning team.” Kennel said. “We were asked for our input.”

(Top/Index)

Collegiate places first
Collegeiate News Wire

GRCC’s Collegiate won first place for General Excellence for print and website among 11 Michigan community college newspapers, on April 4, at the MSU campus during the Michigan Community College Press Association (MCCPA) conference.

Lansing Community College followed in second place and Washtenaw Community College took third place, with Schoolcraft taking honorable mention in the category.

Editor of the Traverse City Record-Eagle and one of the three category judges wrote in his comments, “This is a very good student newspaper. It focuses on students and campus news, both on the news side and on the editorial pages. I got a good feel for what life is like for the student body in Grand Rapids.”

The Collegiate editors recently returned from the College Media Advisors (CMA) spring convention in New York with the best in show David L. Adams Apple Award. This is the second year running that the Collegiate has won in that category.

Organizer Bill O’Connell said that 70 colleges entered the different categories in the Apple Award.

The Collegiate is also winner of the 2008 Michigan Press Association (MPA) General Excellence for two-year college. Awarded to them in Feb. 2009 at the Amway Grand Plaza hotel. This year is the Collegiate’s first year being a finalist in the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP) Online Pacemaker, which yielded 233 entries this year from across the country.

The Collegiate is one of the 42 finalists. Winners will be announced Oct. 31, 2009 in Austin Texas at the ACP/CMA National College Media Convention.

The Collegiate staff has taken home many individual awards the past two years. Those can be viewed outside the Collegiate office room 339 in GRCC’s Main Building.

(Top/Index)

U.S. lags in clean energy graduates
By Jim Tankersley
Tribune Washington Bureau
MCT Wire

In what could be an encouraging sign of change in America’s long-standing shortage of graduates prepared for high-tech careers, the hottest subject on college campuses across the nation right now seems to be renewable energy, a surge of interest driven largely by the specter of global warming.

Concern about climate change is apparently galvanizing more students to turn toward a subject involving science and engineering, educators suggest, in much the way that Moscow’s launching of the Sputnik space satellite jolted baby boomers to turn their eyes to the stars.

Over the past year, college and university leaders say they have seen a surge of enthusiasm among undergraduates for studying energy sources that don’t contribute to global pollution.

What remains uncertain is whether enthusiasm for the science and technology of renewable energy sources will carry over into graduate school, swelling the ranks of Americans with advanced degrees in such subjects.

“We have a shortfall of people to do cutting-edge research and do the innovations we need,” said Vijay Dhir, dean of the engineering school at UCLA. But, he added, “the potential is there.”

The rising interest in renewable energy is so new that it’s not clearly reflected in the latest enrollment figures, educators say. But leaders from a range of schools across the country including Arizona State University, Indiana University, the University of Colorado and UCLA all say energy and sustainability are the hottest topic for their students.

President Barack Obama is mounting a multibillion-dollar push to boost so-called “clean energy,” in hopes of creating millions of U.S. jobs.

The effort includes stepped-up support for graduate research in the area.

At the White House last week, Obama told a group of academics and energy entrepreneurs “innovators like you are creating the jobs that will foster our recovery and creating the technologies that will power our long-term prosperity.”

The United States has struggled in the past two decades, however, to produce enough home-grown scientists and engineers to meet the booming demand. And the foreign students who flock to American science and engineering schools by the thousands are increasingly going back to their homelands instead of pursuing careers in this country.

Enrollment in U.S. graduate engineering programs dropped more than 5 percent from 2003 to 2005, the last year for which statistics are available.

At the same time, rapidly developing countries such as China and South Korea have ramped up the scale and quality of their graduate engineering programs.

Graduate science enrollment overall in the United States nearly doubled in the past two decades.

But the programs are now more than half-filled with foreign students, who increasingly leave the country upon graduation.

America’s retention rate for international students the portion who remained in the country two years after earning doctoral degrees fell between 2003 and 2005, according to an analysis of federal data by Michael Finn of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.

Aggravating the dearth of newly minted engineers, the rate at which American workers with science and engineering skills retire from the work force is expected to triple over the next decade.

If that trend continues, the National Science Board warned in a 2008 report, “the rapid growth in R&D employment and spending that the United States has experienced since World War II may not be sustainable.”

Business leaders are equally blunt. “The most critical challenge over the long term is people and brainpower,” said Karen Harbert, who runs the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy. Without a solution, she added, “We’ll be less concerned about importing oil than talent.”

Obama hopes massive spending will help. His signature stimulus package includes $20 billion to support the basic and applied science research much by graduate students that could yield cheaper solar cells, more efficient wind turbines and longer-lasting batteries.

His budget would eventually triple the number of federally supported graduate student fellowships.

The increased interest among students may also reflect developments over the past few years that have raised the profile of global warming as an issue. Former Vice President Al Gore has been a tireless advocate for facing up to the problem, winning the Nobel Prize for his efforts.

As presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain emphasized the issue.

Even the Bush administration, which had downplayed climate change, eventually acknowledged its importance.

The nation’s economic problems may also be contributing to the trend. Experts say undergraduates who once dreamed of outsized salaries in finance may now be more willing to spend five years living on modest graduate stipends, especially if they see prospects for future growth.

“In the past, very talented kids would go into business school, to Wall Street, get big bonuses,” said Yannis Yortsos, the engineering dean at University of Southern California. “That may not be the case for a while. They may go into engineering instead.”

Yortsos has seen a rapid rise in student interest in renewable energy research. It’s driven, he says, by a “social awareness” of sustainability issues and climate change.

(Top/Index)

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