By Ed Carmien
Welcome to the higher education page here in your NJEA Review! This space is for all things higher ed. Our state’s 18 community colleges currently host over 108,000 students who come to us from New Jersey high schools, as well as other states and even from around the world! They seek a degree, a certification, a leg up for transfer or just a chance to widen their horizons. As open-enrollment institutions we take everyone, in credit and noncredit courses, with thousands of options waiting to be tapped.
While most NJEA members work in our state’s elementary, middle and high schools—making the state’s schools some of the highest rated in the nation—many higher education faculty and staff are also represented by NJEA. This page will host monthly news and opinion, and information of particular note for higher ed folks, but also of interest to those who stock the pipeline with students who end up in the classrooms of our state’s community colleges.
To help cast a wide net for material, NJEA has created a webpage just for higher ed content. At njea.org/highered, you’ll find a link there where you can drop your comments, ideas, thoughts, speculations about what you wish to see in this column. We can’t promise to turn every tip, concept or creative impulse into material for the Review, but we do promise to give everything a look.
While I volunteered to coordinate this column, I didn’t volunteer to write something every month. My role is to act as a sort of acquisitions editor, to cultivate voices from around the state, to help bring the expertise of others to light here on this monthly page. Encouraging others to pass on their thoughts to you, our readers, represents my main job.
For example, our 18 New Jersey community colleges include nationally recognized sports teams, journalism programs and other standout elements. We might not be able to highlight every remarkable community college program in the state, but we can try!
I think it is important to reach outside of our union as well, to experts and thinkers in areas relevant to us in higher education. For example, I plan to invite words from our advocates and from the New Jersey Council of Community Colleges. I hope to hear from admissions people at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey about transferring to their doors from our houses of learning. Maybe the folks at Rowan University have a different take on transfers. I know Princeton University accepts transfer students from MCCC, my institution—maybe the Ivy League has yet another view.
We might have room to recognize truly amazing individual accomplishments, as the Review did several years ago by profiling a 52-year long career teaching math carried out by strong unionist Art Schwartz. Careers that long, lived by individuals committed to the union way, don’t come along every day, every month or every year, but it can’t hurt to pass along news of outstanding individuals you’re aware of. We can’t promise to find room to honor every remarkable higher ed member, but we’d still like to hear about everyone who stands out, for whatever accomplishment.
We hope you carry on reading and start to contribute things for us to read about. Find the link to share your ideas at njea.org/highered or send an email to HigherEd@njea.org with your ideas and possibilities. Because that’s our main business, over here on the higher ed side of the union—possibilities.
Ed Carmien is a professor of English at Mercer County Community College (MCCC), and an NJEA consultant the Region 29 UniServ office, which serves the association’s higher education members.