Erie County Community College sees growth and challenges

When Erie County Community College first launched three years ago, the upstart Pennsylvania institution had two offices for its six employees and rented out classrooms on the third floor of an old Catholic high school. Pandemic-driven supply chain delays meant desks and chairs might not arrive in time for the start of classes, so the president sent an employee to a nearby Sam’s Club to buy folding tables.

It was a rocky start.

Now campus leaders say the new community college, nicknamed EC3, is thriving. Student head count reached 715 students this fall—up from 456 last year and 231 when it first opened in fall 2021. The graduation rate for its first full-time cohort was modest, 33 percent. But its course success rate—the share of students who pass—rose from 64 percent its first semester to 81 percent in fall 2023. EC3 also now has about three dozen staff members.

To go from “pure chaos” to that much growth is “pretty stinking cool,” said Christopher Gray, president of EC3. He described enrollment as “through the roof.”

That’s partly because tuition has been free through $1.75 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds, allocated by the county government, he said. But the college is in a strong enough financial position to continue that tuition largess, thanks to a gift of more than $3 million from a local philanthropy, the Susan B. Hagen Fund. Gray’s hope is that that will cover tuition at least until the college is accredited and students can receive federal financial aid; EC3 is currently seeking accreditation through the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and expects to become an official candidate next month.

The birth and continued growth of EC3 is a rarity. Nationally, new community colleges aren’t especially common; most are decades old. The first community college in the U.S. was established in the early 20th century, and the institutions expanded during the Great Depression and proliferated during the 1960s and ’70s.

John Fink, senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said he’s only heard of a couple of new institutions in recent years, including Madera Community College in California, founded in 2020.

He believes that’s partly because community colleges are already prolific. When state lawmakers initially invested in them, they sought to put the institutions in “every community,” so “you’d be hard-pressed to find a community, especially a sizable population like Erie, without one,” he said. “Just by design, they’re everywhere.”

But for Erie, a former manufacturing hub with at least 270,000 residents on the shores of the Great Lake that bears its name, that wasn’t the case.

A Bumpy Road

Gray described the college as a “pipe dream for a bunch of higher ed disrupters” finally coming to fruition.

Erie County suffers no lack of higher ed institutions; it has at least seven of them, including nonprofit and for-profit colleges. But it had no public, two-year college focused on locals. Residents of the high-poverty, rust belt county pushed for a community college for over a decade, ultimately founding an advocacy group called Empower Erie.

Plans for the college were initially mired in political turmoil. The group got pushback from leaders and supporters of Northern Pennsylvania Regional College, headquartered in Warren County, which the state founded in 2017 to offer two-year degrees and workforce development programs throughout its northern region. Proponents of a new institution argued that the existing college served too many counties—now 10, including Erie—and operated on a different model, in which it leased out different spaces for students to either attend classes in person or sit in a room together and watch instructors virtually.

Opponents, however, believed that a new college would duplicate offerings that already existed. In 2019, Joseph Scarnati, then president pro tempore of the state Senate and a cofounder of the regional college, sent a letter calling on the state board to reject the would-be college’s application; faith leaders in the county then issued a response defending the institution.

Now that the college has existed for a few years, those tensions have dissipated and some of the college’s initial critics have become its partners, Gray said. For example, he regularly communicates with the current leaders of Northern Pennsylvania Regional College and aims to offer programs in niches they’re not already filling. County executive Brenton Davis, once a fierce opponent of EC3, has since become one of its “biggest supporters,” Gray said, and helped it secure funding.

It took time for community members, especially in the county’s more rural areas, to realize “we’re not just a small version of the private liberal arts colleges,” Gray said. “Now that they see we’re teaching welding … we’re teaching health care … they see the value of it.”

The college faced other obstacles getting off the ground, including staff turnover in its early years. Start-ups involve “a lot of uncertainty,” Gray said, and that can be hard on employees. Policies and procedures other colleges have fine-tuned for decades were being created on the fly; EC3’s first comprehensive employee handbook is scheduled to come out this week.

At a newly made college, “you have to find comfort in the discomfort,” and that’s a big ask, he said. “If you can’t deal with that, you’re going to hate it here.”

Right now, EC3 is also in the midst of a legal battle with a former employee who alleges she was fired in March 2023 in retaliation for reporting sexual harassment and racial discrimination by administrators while working at the college, The Erie Times-News reported. The plaintiff, Marieka Jones, previously employed in the finance department, filed a lawsuit in August claiming Gray would “repeatedly and intentionally touch his genital area over his pants” while they were alone in her office, but he ceased meeting with her privately when she reported the behavior to her supervisor and the head of human resources. Jones, who is Black, also alleges a dean said she was being “aggressive” when she asked why the college wasn’t celebrating Black History Month. She is seeking monetary damages and her job reinstated.

Gray said he couldn’t comment on the lawsuit and referred Inside Higher Ed to a statement from the college, which called the claims “baseless.”

“Since our inception and opening, EC3 has worked incredibly hard to create a welcoming workplace for all,” the statement read. “EC3 strongly refutes these baseless allegations and believes this suit is without merit. Due to the litigation, we cannot comment further at this time.”

A ‘Clean Slate’

Despite of the lawsuit and other challenges, EC3 now boasts full classrooms and financial health. To get there, it has adopted some unusual practices, including a lean financial model.

The college rents space in five locations and has no interest in owning property, Gray said.

“As we grow, we will probably never build a Taj Mahal. I think we need to be where students are,” he said. And “the reality is, there isn’t a funding stream for it.”

The college is also built on partnerships. It provides student services—such as mental health care, food and housing support, and career services—by partnering with local organizations, rather than foot the bill itself. For example, the college provides an office to a local nonprofit that works with displaced workers, which in turn helps students connect with jobs.

“I’m not wasting my time doing all that crap,” Gray said. “We’re not mental health counselors. We’re not food pantries. When I find a student has a need, I can partner.” He said the college’s “key core deliverable” is education and the wraparound services that go with it, including a student success coach for every course and a hypervigilant early alert system to intervene when students show signs of struggling. Unless funding for higher ed significantly ramps up, he added, other institutions may also find themselves looking to outsource non-educational services.

Some EC3 programs are also being created through partnerships. The college offers a surgical technician program by partnering with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center School of Surgical Technology to fill local shortages.

“I don’t believe the model of old colleges is ever going to work again,” Gray said.

Fink, of the Community College Research Center, said he imagines that creating a new community college is no easy feat and can come with high start-up costs for space, equipment and staffing. But he also acknowledges that institutions like Erie and Madera have a “cool opportunity” to implement evidence-based practices that were less known when many of their peer institutions were founded. If he were starting a community college from scratch, he’d focus on “backwards designing” programs to align with well-paying jobs in the region or facilitate smooth transfer, he said. He’d also create “on-ramps” to the institution early on: strong partnerships with high schools and employers to connect with both traditional-age students and adult workers who might want to learn new skills to advance in their careers.

“I’m sure many community college leaders out there would love to—even as a thought exercise—just think about if we could totally start with a clean slate … based on everything that we’ve learned to date, if we could just totally reinvent ourselves, what would that look like?”