WASHINGTON — This past Friday, national leaders, including Dr. Walter Bumphus of the American Association of Community Colleges, joined officials with the Aspen Institute and the Achieving the Dream organization to urge major improvements in how two-year college presidents are recruited, prepared, hired and evaluated.
Bumphus and others participated in “The Community College Presidency” forum event and release of Crisis and Opportunity: Aligning the Community College Presidency with Student Success, a report by the Aspen College Excellence Program and Achieving the Dream, Inc. The report “addresses how the next generation of community college leaders can improve success for nearly half of America’s college students in an era of rapid change,” according to officials.
“[AACC has] found that 43 percent of the current presidents are slated to retire in the next five years. We couple that with another 32 percent that are scheduled to retire in 10 years,” Bumphus, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) president and CEO, told forum participants in an effort to describe the enormity of the community college leadership challenges.
“That’s 75 percent of our nation’s [community college] leaders expected to turn over,” he said.
Relating his own experiences as a former community college president, Bumphus emphasized the ongoing need for leadership training for up-and-coming leaders at two-year institutions. “As I stated during the AACC conference [in April] … we had 146 new presidents named between April 2012 and April 2013. That’s significant because that’s [more than] 10 percent of the community college presidents in the country,” Bumphus said.
“We’ve had 31 new presidents named since AACC. … That really points out the need to have leadership development” beyond the existing programs, he noted.
