*This agenda is subject to change.
Presidents Track (Invitation Only)
March 17, 2024
Sponsored by 
INNOVATION, THOUGHT LEADERSHIP, AND LONG-TERM SUCCESS
8:00 - 8:10 AM
Opening Comments
(Joint Session With Vice Presidents Track)
Rufus Glasper, President and CEO, League for Innovation in the Community College
8:10 - 9:10 AM
Reckoning With Relevance: EAB’s 2024 State of the Sector
(Joint Session With Vice Presidents Track)
Today’s community colleges face a triple threat of disruption: declining public confidence in the value of higher education, rapid advances in AI and automation poised to disrupt work and learning, and dwindling student and worker populations that strain our systems. But what if disruption felt more like opportunity than catastrophe? In this session, we will separate news from trends about the ROI of a college education and how your institution can deliver on that value when students are less academically prepared and staffing is tight. You’ll leave this session with insight about the current state of higher education and the best strategies for cross-functional collaboration designed to regain public confidence in your institution.
Tara Zirkel, Director, Strategic Research, EAB
9:10 - 9:20 AM
Community. Technology. Simulation.
(Joint Session With Vice Presidents Track)
Infectious diseases pose an ongoing threat, disrupting the education sector and society at large as they continue to emerge and evolve. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Operation Outbreak (OO) partnered with Colorado Mesa University (CMU) and CMU Tech––a mid-sized public university and its community college subsidiary––to maintain in-person education while minimizing disease transmission, drawing on the power of community, technology, and simulation. This collaboration saw CMU students, staff, faculty, and administrators uniting to outsmart the virus. The presentation will also describe the OO, a pioneering experiential education initiative in outbreak science, featuring an outbreak simulation of a fictional pathogen that spreads across participating phones via Bluetooth and a multi-disciplinary curriculum. The talk will conclude with the importance of incorporating outbreak science education––namely, these outbreak drills––into curricula to enhance STEM learning and help mitigate the impacts of future campus outbreaks of all kinds.
Kian Sani, Advisor to the Group Leader, Special Projects, Sabeti Group; Program Manager and Co-Head, Operation Outbreak, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
9:20 - 9:35 AM
Break
9:35 - 10:45 AM
Highlighting Community Partnerships
(Joint Session With Vice Presidents Track)
This session focuses on codesigning partnerships that accelerate the growth of Google's Data Center workforce. We recognize the vital role community colleges play in nurturing future generations of tech talent, and we hope to establish collaborative pathways that provide diverse students with the necessary skills and opportunities to thrive in this dynamic field. Through open dialogue and a shared commitment to inclusivity, we believe we can cultivate a data center landscape that reflects the richness and potential of our broader society. We look forward to engaging with leaders to outline the framework for the technical skills needed to participate in the data center workforce.
Stacey Hodoh, Global Director, Cloud Supply Chain Operations and Community Engagement; Nathaniel Tindall, Head, Simulation, Modeling, Automation, Robotics, and Technology; Maria Reyes, Manager, Global Workforce Innovation and Development, Google Cloud
10:45 - 11:45 AM
How Can Community Colleges Help Expand and Diversify the Advanced Technology Workforce?
Expanding private and public investment in automation, AI, and other advanced technologies is increasing demand across industries for talent to fill well-paying technician jobs in healthcare, information technology, engineering technology, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, and other fields. To meet this demand, community colleges need to dramatically increase and diversify graduates from programs in these fields. They also need to rethink how they design, teach, deliver, and recruit for these programs. The presenter will draw on ongoing CCRC research to frame a discussion of how community colleges can meet this opportunity to expand pathways to good jobs for students and talent pipelines for employers and their communities.
Davis Jenkins, Senior Research Scholar, Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University; Mordecai Brownlee, President, Community College of Aurora
11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
Lunch (Provided)
12:30 - 2:00 PM
Aligning the Future of Learning to the Future of Work
Meeting local workforce needs and providing a strong talent pipeline for economic viability is not a new endeavor for community colleges; however, rapid technology change, available federal funding, and college enrollment trends demand an innovative and nimble response that extends beyond traditional strategies. Community colleges are well positioned to catalyze their communities, and their learners, through skills-based credential programs that align with locally identified employer needs. This session will leverage an action-oriented, human-centered design process to engage presidents in exploring current trends, the cultivation of design questions pertinent to the topic and their specific context, and a design plan to address how to implement a strategy at their campuses. A collaborative hands-on approach will be utilized to guide participants to tangible deliverables that can be taken back to their respective colleges to transform current practices in ways that are impactful for all stakeholders.
Lisa Larson, Senior Vice President, College Transformation; Naomi Boyer, Senior Vice President, Digital Transformation, Education Design Lab
2:00 - 3:00 PM
Resource Development and Tapping Into Untapped/Unknown Resources
Where can a president find the resources necessary to raise the money a college needs to grow philanthropic revenue? During this session, we’ll discuss four areas for successful exploration.
Bill Crouch, Founder and CEO, BrightDot
3:00 - 3:15 PM
Closing Comments
Rufus Glasper, President and CEO, League for Innovation in the Community College
The Sunday General Session begins at 3:30 PM.
