Phil Sisson, President, Middlesex Community College
Phil Sisson, president of Middlesex Community College, caught up with Invest: to discuss the exciting opportunities being made available to students, including new facilities at the college as well as increasing access for students of diverse backgrounds looking to upgrade or complete their education.
What new and ongoing initiatives are driving Middlesex Community College forward?
The work that we’ve been doing here is so important to the college. We’ve just completed a facilities master plan to make sure our two campuses — in Bedford and Lowell — are serving the needs of all of our students. This ensures that we are able to accommodate all of the academic programs that we need that are part of our blueprint in the area so that we can meet workforce demands in the region. That was an 18-month process with an outside company where we have identified, both in Lowell and in Bedford, ways that we are going to expand our technical programs and create new venues for a number of programs, including a brand new simulation lab for our nursing department. This will open in January, but that simulation lab will be completed this fall. So, we will have everything from phone health aides to certified aesthetic nurse specialists (CANs) to licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and then registered nurses (RNs), along with all the transfer opportunities for our students. We’re very excited about expanding in the healthcare region.
We’re also bringing robotics, engineering, and biotech together in one building on our Bedford campus. This will help us to address the training needs of companies for synergy in the ever-growing biomechanics and robotics fields and manufacturing field here in Massachusetts. We want to make sure that we are on the cutting edge of what we are able to do to meet the local workforce needs and provide academic programs and facilities for our students that are going to be attractive, exciting hands-on opportunities for them to get the education that they want.
We were also recognized by the American Association of Community Colleges as an award winner this year for institutional advancements around equity and belonging. We’ve been on a trail of creating, at our entire institution, a culture of open-mindedness and expansive excellence. It’s built into our strategic plan, so that we can close any opportunity gaps for all the students that we serve at the institution. We’re very proud of that award and of all the efforts on the part of the faculty to make this a place where students feel that not only can they be admitted but also accepted and find a sense of belonging. We know how important it is for students to feel they are connected to the institution.
Thirdly, we’re an Asian-American/Native American/Pacific Islander-serving institution that’s been funded by the federal government over the last nine years. The city of Lowell has the second largest Cambodian community in the United States after Long Beach, California. We have an Asian connection center, a program just to serve our Asian-American students to make sure that they and their families can access higher education and know all the possibilities that are available to them. We do incredible programming to make sure that their culture is uplifted at the institution. Our most recent grant is really about mental health for our students in the Asian community along with how we use the art and culture to make sure that students have an opportunity to expand their own horizons about what they know about their culture but also to take time away from the stress of academic programs all the time. This has been a wonderful opportunity. We have an incredible Cambodian ceramicist on our art faculty, we are the host for the Angkor Dance Troupe — which is an internationally recognized Cambodian dance troupe — we are very embedded in the community and committed with our connections to serve those students.
The last thing that I would say is our signature program — one that has existed at the college for the last 34 years — is the biotechnology program. It was one of the first biotechnology programs in the state, and it’s still a signature program as recognized by MassBioEd and Mass Life Sciences. We have beautiful facilities for our students to be prepared both with a certificate and with an associates degree, helping them to work in the biotech industry, not only as entrants but also to be able to expand their careers beyond. They are able to transfer to many four-year institutions, including Northeastern University. We have a special associate’s and master’s degree program that supports students of color to both increase their journey and to move forward to get their baccalaureate and their master’s degree from Northeastern after they complete their associate’s here at Middlesex.
How do you anticipate the recently signed MassEducate program will help Middlesex Community College in terms of involvement and demographics?
It’s very exciting. Starting with a program that was introduced a year ago called MassReconnect, where students over the age of 25 could access higher education through a community college, we know there are a significant number of students out there walking around with credits and credentials. Through MassReconnect, the 15 community colleges were able to prove that we could open our doors and help facilitate their completion. In fact, we had almost a hundred of those students who completed their degrees just this May because they came back through MassReconnect.
One of the biggest obstacles, of course, for higher education is just how much it costs. That opportunity to not pay tuition fees and also have support with books and supplies has made a huge difference for our over-25 population.
But MassEducate is a whole new opportunity for us to serve as many of our citizens as we possibly can here in the state of Massachusetts. So, if someone has completed a high school diploma or GED and they have an opportunity to come back and access an associate’s degree or certificate if they’re interested in scaling up or changing their careers early on in terms of what they’re prepared for. MassEducate is going to have a huge impact. We’ve already seen, since the governor’s signing, a 20% increase in our headcount and in our credits for this fall, and we know this is only the beginning because we haven’t even done any marketing around that. But we’re excited about the marketing campaign we have coming through. We have hired new staff in admissions, in financial aid, in our student information center, to be able to accommodate what we’ve been seeing over the last few weeks. But most importantly, this is, as we’ve talked about, our strategic belief that we believe this is an equity based operation at this point: we want to make sure that anyone who wants to get an education can get started at community college without having the burden of debt and to have a real opportunity to be supported. It’s not just about access for us, but figuring out how to bring together all the support systems to make sure that once a student has entered the door and has connected with us, ensuring that they can have a path to an appropriate career.
