Spotlight On: Mark McCormick, President, Middlesex College
August 2025 — The biggest challenge for colleges and universities is the demographic cliff, or the fact that the number of 18- to 20-year-olds is in decline. Middlesex College is responding with a strategy that includes dual enrollment, which is already showing results. “We’ve grown our dual enrollment over the past four years, triple-fold. We’ve tripled our number of students and high schools that participate with us,” said Mark McCormick, president of Middlesex College, in an interview with Invest:.
What have been some key highlights or achievements for Middlesex College?
Middlesex College has had several significant accomplishments that relate to how higher education intersects with health care over the last year. Several community colleges in New Jersey are engaged in partnerships with pharmaceutical companies in the Garden State.
Middlesex College focuses on helping biotech industry partners of all sizes – from large companies to more modest and start-up operations – to find employees who have the skills needed for entry-level positions without the employer having to train them, including in emerging high-demand fields like aseptic training. Often, such training begins with basic field-specific skills and an industry-recognized credential that can build into an associate degree over time.
I am proud that Middlesex College is a prime partner with the New Jersey Council of County Colleges, two other New Jersey community colleges, and Johnson & Johnson in the NJBioFutures initiative, which is a strategic public-private partnership that ensures that pharmaceutical and biomanufacturing companies in New Jersey have the highly-skilled workforce they need to be leaders in emerging technologies now and in the future. Johnson & Johnson also has provided funding to all three colleges to develop and deliver the curriculum and to outfit appropriate high-tech training spaces at each institution.
Middlesex College also collaborates with and supports the two major health care systems operating in Middlesex County: RWJ Barnabas Health and Hackensack Meridian Health, both of which operate multiple facilities and employ thousands of individuals in the county. We support them in many ways, mainly through our three specialized healthcare technology programs in nursing, radiography technology, and dental hygiene. Given the state of healthcare and the lack of employees available to support healthcare employers, when our Nursing, Radiography Tech, and Dental Hygiene students graduate after two years, they have multiple job offers.
Coukd you tell us a bit more about your clinical training programs?
Middlesex College has long incorporated simulation in teaching and learning in our Nursing Program, including lifelike mannequins that mimic real patients, including a mannequin that gives birth, an infant mannequin, and older mannequins so that students are able to learn and practice before entering clinical settings.
This past year, the College constructed and opened a new state-of-the-art Nursing Simulation Center with two hospital rooms with two beds each and mannequins, a nurses’ station, and a classroom. The training taking place in this Center accomplishes two learning objectives: it gives students a safe place to practice the skills before they go out in the real world, and, perhaps more importantly, it doubles our clinical capacity.
Clinical sites are harder and harder to find, so we need to have the facilities available for students to have multiple different experiences during their time as a nursing student, including in pediatrics, OB/GYN, and others.
What are you seeing as the biggest challenges in the regional educational landscape?
The challenge that every college and university is facing, particularly community colleges, is this so-called demographic cliff or enrollment cliff. In the United States, this June’s high school graduating class is projected to be the largest we are going to have for the foreseeable future. After June 2025, the number of high school students projected to graduate each year begins to decrease. Because the majority of students that nearly all community colleges serve are 18- to 20-year-olds, there will be fewer of those students to go around.
On top of that, that same impact on enrollment is happening at the four-year colleges and universities, both public and private. In many cases, four-year institutions of higher education have grown less selective in their admissions practices, so there will inevitably be increased competition for a smaller number of 18-year-olds going forward.
For the last several years, we have been preparing for this demographic shift in three ways. One way is that we have been much more intentional about our dual enrollment partnerships across the county, ensuring that as many high school students as possible have an opportunity to participate in dual enrollment by enrolling in a college course while still in high school. We have developed a more robust program where students at several high schools can now earn an associate degree before they finish high school. Last year, we had 10 of those students walk across the stage at commencement. This year, we have 55.
We are also trying to target adult students who have earned some college credit but no degree, and have seen the number of students over 45 double in the past two years.
Finally, we are also working closely with large employers in the county to promote opportunities for their employees to earn an associate degree, often with financial support from the employer.
What have been the results of the dual enrollment strategy?
Over the past four years, we have tripled the number of students participating in dual enrollment. We are happy to provide an opportunity for high school students in Middlesex County to take college courses for credit, whether they end up enrolling in Middlesex College after graduation from high school or not.
I am also proud of the outcomes data on dual enrollment, as it shows that participation in dual enrollment while in high school results in better outcomes for students. For example, let’s say two students from the same high school graduate the same year and enroll at Middlesex College, one student successfully completed six credits of dual enrollment, and the other student did not participate in dual enrollment. During their time at Middlesex, the student with dual enrollment experience will earn the associate degree faster and at a higher rate, and also finish with a higher grade point average. Our data for the past three years proves that to be the case for every high school we work with in the county.
What do you say are going to be your top goals and projects in the next two to three years?
One of my goals is to continue having robust conversations with employers about what they are looking for in entry-level employees. There are probably some smaller companies where we have yet to make those connections. Each industry or group of employers is likely to have specific needs, and being on the cutting edge of building the curriculum, we can help recruit and build that pipeline of new employees the industry needs.
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