Talk about a road trip!
Throughout October, NECHE staff is holding eight regional meetings to engage our members in conversation about the revision of our Standards of Accreditation, a process that takes place every ten years. This is the most important undertaking that I will lead during my tenure as NECHE President. Our Standards are used to guide colleges and universities in their efforts to continuously improve; the challenge here is to adopt a new set of Standards that preserve all that is positive about higher education in America, but also identify and address the many challenges confronting our enterprise. The final version of these new Standards will go into effect in July 2026.
We began our meetings at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts; the next was in Manchester, New Hampshire on the campus of Southern New Hampshire University; and most recently we visited Warwick, Rhode Island, the home of the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI). Five more visits await us: one more in Massachusetts, then onto Connecticut, Vermont and Maine, and finally to New York City at the end of the month.
Interim President Dr. Rosemary Costigan, a proud graduate of CCRI who has been at the institution for almost thirty years, hosted a group of more than forty administrators from dozens of New England schools. She gave us a warm welcome and shared a bit about her distinctive institution.
Community College of Rhode Island is the largest public two-year, degree-granting college in New England and the largest public institution of higher education in the state. It provides a variety of academic, career, and technical programs on its four main campuses in Warwick, Lincoln, Providence and Newport, with courses also offered at satellite campuses in Westerly and Woonsocket. CCRI serves more than 15,000 students annually on campus or remotely and offers the most affordable tuition in the state, providing an accessible, flexible path to a college degree and other credentials.
The power of community colleges is their ability to provide social and economic mobility to 9 million students, average age of 28, 80% of whom are employed, and 45% of whom are first generation college students. While the complexity of transferring credits between community and 4-year colleges has been a lingering issue, CCRI’s Joint Admissions Agreement is a wonderful example of how institutions can work together to make these transitions seamless. Students spend the first two years at CCRI earning an associate degree, then those credits are fully accepted towards their bachelor’s degree at either Rhode Island College or the University of Rhode Island. Special benefits for transferring students include up to a 30% discounted tuition (depending on a student’s GPA); waived application fee; a personal advisor; and easy placement as a junior in one’s major. I particularly loved the tagline for the program:
Start here. Go anywhere.
Because I am a closet architecture geek, allow me to take this opportunity to rave about one very special example of modern architecture on CCRI’s campus (with gracious appreciation to architecture critic Will Morgan for his insight, from his 2020 talk on the Knight campus).
The CCRI campus in Warwick consists of just one building– a futuristic megastructure of a half million square feet that was completed in 1972 and designed to encourage social, educational and cultural exchanges among the student body. It embodies the essence of Great Society ideals of the 1960s, an era when new public colleges and universities were springing up around the country. Housing an entire campus under one roof created a strong identity for a large (but hardly elitist) segment of higher education. Compared to the slightly earlier Keeney Quadrangle built at Brown University — a cozy Colonial Revival composition of brick, lawn, and trees– CCRI is more like an ocean liner beached on one of the state’s tall hills.
Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing about CCRI is that it was built at all. Perkins & Will, a respected Chicago architectural firm with impeccable modernist credentials, designed this unapologetic tribute to the work of Le Corbusier, one of the most influential twentieth-century architects. The nautical motifs of giant funnels and skinny railings, as well as the brightly colored metal windows, recall Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” houses of the 1920s, but the main inspiration is surely his later Brutalist buildings. Le Corbusier discarded streamlined forms and smooth walls in favor of raw concrete which bore the crude marks of the wooden forms into which the concrete was poured.
This aggressive, minimalist style devoid of decorative flourishes must have come as a surprise to conservative Rhode Islanders and one wonders how such a radical building was foisted upon the state’s voters and educators. What a persuasive tale the architects must have spun! While other states were spawning mega-building campuses (think UMass Dartmouth), the intentionally heroic style of CCRI seems unusually brash. The mega-structure is not what you would call warm and fuzzy, but it has provided New England’s largest community college with a dramatic and iconic architectural landmark.
I was really pleased to see it for myself and especially to spend some time at CCRI, another one of our community colleges that make me so proud to be in higher education.
