Coffee Talk – Dr. Lane Glenn, President of Northern Essex Community College

( Editors Note: Coffee Talk is a regular feature in each issue of Merimack Valley Magazine, where a local person of interest is interviewed over coffee. In the September/October 2011 issue Chris Markuns sat down with Dr. Lane Glenn, the new president of Northern Essex Community College. If you’d like to subscribe, please use the ‘SUBSCRIBE’ tab above or just click here. >> )

The Ellis Island of Highter Education:

Photos by Adrien Bisson.

If you’re a college student, you can count on eventually facing that paralyzing moment when you wonder if all the work, money and time will really take you to a better place. If you’re a student at Northern Essex Community College, the school’s new president should be the only inspiration you’ll need to keep moving forward.

In 1985, Lane Glenn was a smart but financially challenged high school graduate. The son of a career Marine, he wanted more schooling but found himself following dad’s footsteps. He was practically on the bus to basic training — paperwork done, physical passed — when a local bank offered him a full-tuition scholarship to a community college in Midwest City, Okla.

A quarter century later, Glenn is sitting in Andover’s Boston King Cafe looking as polished as a showroom concept car, a bright-eyed, 43-year-old personification of NECC’s self-proclaimed sparkling future. Just the fourth president in the school’s 50 years, he steps into the job — after five years as vice president of academic affairs — during an incredibly auspicious time for community colleges. Enrollment is about 14,000, up 17 percent over five years.

Glenn sat down with MVM in his inaugural month of July and was clearly still in honeymoon-love with the idea of running a place that lets a person change their life for short money.

MVM: We have to start here: Your Ph.D. is in theater?
LG: (Laughs) That’s usually the first question. Theater is a creative art. Theater is a form of expression. Theater requires that you understand human nature, human dynamics, interpersonal relations, how people communicate with one another. As a leader, I found that to be some of the best background training I could’ve had. So for my career, from the arts to this, to me it feels like a natural evolution.

Sitting with Dr. Glenn, one can tell he has a Ph.D. in theater from the dynamic way he expresses himself.

MVM: What’s the draw of community colleges for you?
LG: We are a teaching college. Lots of colleges and universities provide teaching, but they also do research, they have a lot of other interests. Community colleges are there to teach students who are there to learn, and I love that mission. The other thing I deeply appreciate about what we do, is we serve absolutely everyone. We serve a higher proportion of minority students, of first generation college students, students with learning disabilities, low income students, people who are sometimes disadvantaged or might have otherwise thought college was not within their reach. They’re not the only people we serve, but we serve more of them. We are, as I’ve heard it said — and I love this phrase — the Ellis Island of higher education.

MVM: Times are changing, though, aren’t they?
LG: This country had its biggest graduating high school class ever in 2008. So we’ve had more students coming out of high school into college, which has put more pressure on selective universities, which can turn away more students — we’ve all heard that story — and they’re expensive. And in this economy, a lot more people are out of work, underemployed people are going back to school, so all these pressures are driving more students to the community colleges. We’re seeing a boom of honor students coming directly from high school to community college. So we’re seeing the full range.

MVM: And you’re ready for that?
LG: Think about the jobs being created right now. A report about a year ago called “Massachusetts’ Forgotten Middle Skill-Jobs” looked at jobs being created in the state the next 10 years, and 600,000 of those jobs are going to require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree. That’s what we do!

Dr. Glenn speaking with MVM's Chris Markuns outside Andover's Boston King Cafe.

MVM: What are your biggest challenges?
LG: One of the biggest challenges our students have is they’re not ready for college when they come to us. Most of them require some kind of remedial course work, usually it’s math. Seventy-five percent are not doing math at a college level. So something I’ve been pushing for, and we’re going to increase attention to, is our work with area high schools and families to help students be ready for college when they get to us or wherever they go. I’m in communication with superintendents all the time. I’m saying to them, “Whatever you want from us, we want to be there for you.” We have an early college program at Amesbury High School right now, we’re about to replicate it in Haverhill this fall, and we’re talking to folks in Lawrence. If we can get to hundreds of those students — right now it’s 90, in the fall we’ll double that — over the next few years, we’re going to help improve that issue.

MVM: And once they get to you?
LG: I don’t perceive it, and people at the college are careful not to perceive it as, “Well, it’s the high schools.” It’s not. It’s all of us. From our end, however they come to us, we need to be prepared to work with them. Most of our students work, most attend college part time, many have families, many are learning English as a second language, many are low income. All these personal characteristics make them different from what we used to think of as the traditional college student — attending full time, staying in a dorm, joining a fraternity. For our students, what that means is we have to be as flexible as we can possibly be with the classes, the programs and support services that we offer. Everything that we do in order to help our students across that finish line needs to be done as flexibly as it possibly can be. We need to be everywhere our students need us to be, the Amazon.com of higher education.

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