McConnell’s priorities: enrollment, research

FORT COLLINS — Joyce McConnell moved just more than 1,500 miles a few weeks ago, but she says she’s ready to take on her new job at the helm of Colorado State University.

McConnell, who was hired in March, is Colorado State’s 15th president, and the first woman to hold the office. She replaces Tony Frank, who announced his resignation from the CSU presidency last September to be the CSU System’s full-time chancellor. Frank had served as both president and chancellor.

A lawyer, McConnell spent 32 years as a law professor at the City University of New York, University of Maryland and the University of West Virginia. She was WVU’s provost and chief academic officer since 2014.

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McConnell’s major goal is continuing CSU’s enrollment growth. Enrollment on campus stood at 34,015 in the spring 2019 semester, up from 30,060 in spring 2010. CSU broke the 35,000 student marker in the fall of 2017 and 2018, fulfilling the university’s 2014 capital improvement plan that expected to accommodate that many students by 2020.

She’s specifically targeting in-state students as a source for that growth.

“We have a lot of programs throughout the state where we’re trying to increase access for students who might not otherwise think of themselves as college bound,” she said. “And that’s part of what I mean about increasing enrollment; it is really increasing access to higher education.”

McConnell also hopes to keep tuition costs down for students, partially by trying to keep university operations lean, but also by trying to convince lawmakers to continue supporting higher education in the state.

Colorado lawmakers have steadily increased appropriations to state colleges over the past several years, from $667 million in fiscal year 2014 to $993 million in fiscal year 2019.

A 2013 study from Georgetown University predicted 71 percent of all jobs in Colorado in 2020 will require some type of post-secondary degree. Only Washington, D.C., and Minnesota are expected to require more degree holders.

McConnell believes Colorado State’s mission as a land-grant university means it emphasizes teaching students how to apply theory to real-life situations, and that puts it at the forefront of supplying the market with qualified labor.

“When you talk to hiring managers, CEOs of major corporations, what they’re telling us is they want students who can communicate, who have expertise, who can solve problems, who can communicate the solutions to those problems well, and then they can go on to the next problem,” she said.

She also said CSU’s research programs, which hit a record-high of $374.9 million in fiscal year 2018, can become a greater resource for the state’s business community, similar to how CSU Extension already serves farmers with research and best practices advice.

“The more you can translate the research being done on campus to what it might be able to do to support businesses and startups within the state, we can be part of that economic development engine,” she said.

McConnell lights up when she speaks about what she hopes to accomplish over the next five years before her contract comes up for renewal. But it would take a serious balancing act to grow the student body, keep tuition down, complete capital projects and provide the raises that non-tenure faculty members are demanding, all while staying within the budget.

She admits hitting those goals with the uncertainty of how much CSU will have in its budget over the next several years will be difficult, but she emphasized “strategic transformation”, her term for constantly reevaluating how the university uses its resources and shifting them around to meet needs.

“I’ve only been here two weeks [as of the time of her interview with BizWest], but what I can tell you is that a university budget in some ways is like our home budgets. We can never have everything,” she said. “ So we have to be strategic, we have to know what our goals are, we have to collectively own those goals, and be able to say what our priorities are.”