Q&A with SJR State President Joe Pickens

Joe Pickens, a native of Crescent City and former state legislator, is entering his seventh year as president of St. Johns River State College.

With campuses in Orange Park, Palatka and St. Augustine, the college hosts a diverse population of students ranging in age from 16 to over 60.

SJR State recently expanded its offerings to include two baccalaureate degrees, moving it from a Level I to a Level II accredited institution.

It has also joined a higher education initiative in Northeast Florida called Earn Up. The goal is to increase college completion and training certificate attainment rates to 60 percent by 2025.

Why is Earn Up necessary?

This is a movement that I think will be more state college-centric, but the fact that our university and college partners are willing to be part of the coalition is hugely important. We operate in isolation all too often. We have our students, and they have their students.

I have preached this sermon ever since my days in the legislature that, all too often, that's the way it has been with respect to K-12 and beyond. We really should be thinking about the global perspective and the community-wide perspective. They're our students.

If we can communicate that and if we can believe and act in that way from the K-12 level to the state college level and through our college and university partners, then we will have come a long way. It's about improving the ease and efficiency of the matriculation from high school to college to the workforce.

A lot of this has to do with creating awareness. Creating awareness allows people to make much better and informed decisions.

What do you think about education's role in attracting companies to an area?

Florida is a very business-friendly state because of our tax structure, a lot of things the governor and legislature has done, regulation, or the lack of it, and weather. We have a lot to offer, but a more educated and more skilled workforce would certainly add to that.

When companies are thinking about moving here, they ask about the public school system first and then they ask about the workforce. Trained and "trainability" options. Most of those "trainability" options fall on us as well.

We need to be proactive rather than reactive. In the old days we were complemented for being nimble and being able to respond to needs. That's getting to be a year late, now. Now, we need to be talking to partners and anticipating needs that are coming a year or five years out.

What are some of the challenges or opportunities unique to this region?

Florida has one of the largest middle-skill job projections for the future in the nation. That middle-skill means a high school diploma, so just having on-the-job training doesn't meet that. It's going to require an industry certification or it's going to need an associate's degree, at least.

If you're going to raise the completion level from where it is now to over 60 percent, you're going to have to attract a lot of people who traditionally don't think about college or post-secondary education. By and large, those people come to us because we're their entry point.

A large part of this initiative is that we're going to be ground zero for the majority of those folks who weren't thinking about college or who have taken a little bit of college and dropped out.

We can also create more seamless opportunities for our 2-year degree graduates to matriculate to Jacksonville University, Flagler College or University of North Florida to pursue a bachelor's degree in an area where we don't offer it.

We really do have all the components one would want, just in this region. This is an initiative that brings us together.

What do you think of some of the stigmas regarding community college?

When I came to SJR State, we started a campaign that was about rebranding the college from head to toe. It really would be wise for students to think about us more as a first-choice college.

I respect and understand the perception that, for many, a community college was the college of last resort. I think that's changing, and I think it's because we're doing things about it but also because of the realities of cost and accessibility.

More students are working students or they're students with families. The community and state college system has done a lot in the past decade to make post-secondary education genuinely accessible. That means not just available to them, but available affordably and conveniently, to work around their schedule and their family's schedule.

Accessibility means more these days than a campus nearby. It means online instruction as well. The average age of our students is between the upper 20s and early 30s. These are certainly students with young families, and they're juggling a lot of balls in the air at once.

The model of what post-secondary education looks like for the baby boomer, like me, looked a whole lot different in terms of what my needs are from my children's needs will be. Online instruction has made degree completion opportunities grow by multiples, and pretty soon, exponentially.

What is the biggest change you've seen at your school since taking over?

The bachelor's degrees, by and large, are getting all the attention. But our bachelor's degree program makes up slightly less than five percent of our student population. But that's a big change from zero and the core of what we do, still, to be the community's college.

The other things we've done, in terms of reaching out to first generation and non-traditional students, impacts a potentially much larger population. In Putnam County, for instance, we have taken on the adult education program from the school system. Our numbers there have improved significantly.

What do you say to people who think college is too expensive?

One of the most powerful misconceptions, especially for students who would be first in their family to go to college, is that they can't afford it.

Most people have an idea about Bright Futures or other scholarships that are available locally. But the Pell Grant program absolutely guarantees that in America, the students with the most need have the most resources available to them.

We need to be communicating to eighth- or ninth-graders, while their future is still wide open in front of them, that college should not be just a hope but an expectation. Finances should never be a barrier. But the perception that college is expensive is now getting to be a false barrier. That may have been the case 30 years ago, but with the open access institutions open and available to students now and the availability of grants for the most needy students.

I think the number is 60 percent of the student body at SJR State is receiving some form of Pell Grant.

College is not only affordable, it is necessary if you want a career rather than a job, certainly today and absolutely going forward.