Image provided by: Clackamas Community College; Oregon City, OR
About The Clackamas print. (Oregon City, Oregon) 1989-2019 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 13, 2013)
PRINT: News 3 Wednesday, November 13,2013 Come in, be welcome, leave informed Donny Beach Associate Copy Editor Imagine a tourist arriving in Paris on her first visit to France. The language is unfamiliar, the road signs a complete mystery, and she has an itinerary of places to go and things to do, but no idea of where those places are or -how to get there. Now imagine that it’s not Paris, but a prospective recruit’s first time visiting the Clackamas Community College campus. A lost student with places she needs to be and nowhere to get started. Enter the CCC Admissions Welcome Center, where prospec tive and new students can go to get help with their admission counseling needs, sign up for a new student .advising session or campus tour and ensure that their first experience at CCC goes smoothly. The Admissions Welcome Center opened in Roger Rook Hall this January when the Admissions and Recruitment team (formerly Student Outreach) moved out of the Community Center building during the sum mer. The college’s goal was to con solidate many of the admissions and “getting started steps” into a central location, to answer ques tions and connect people with services. Tracy Huddleston, part-time enrollment services special ist, loves helping people in the Welcome Center who come in wanting to go to school, but who don’t quite understand the admis sion process. “It’s the light bulb effect — you see the light turn on in their eyes — they get it! It is so excit ing!” Huddleston said. The Welcome Center assists with a variety of newcomer ques tions. From help completing the online application for admis sions, to understanding how to apply for financial aid and filing FASFA to admissions counsel ing. Student Ambassador Taylor Miller knows what being a new student feels like. “I think it makes people feel less intimidated to talk to some one peer to peer?” said Miller. In addition, the admissions and recruitment team is responsi ble for off-campus recruitment at high schools, college and career fairs, coordinating campus tours and hosting on-campus recruit ment events. Ariane Rakich, lead admis- sionsand recruitment specialist is honored to have the opportunity to talk with people about their goals and challenges, and to help them see how CCC can play a part in helping them achieve their dreams. “I really enjoy the admis sions counseling part of my job,” Rakich said. Many students can navigate the getting started steps with- ] o o 3 * 3 < CD œ ) Q o 3" Student Ambassador Taylor Miller covers the front desk and processes paperwork in the Welcome Center ’s new double-door foyer office. ; out needing help and Dustin Bare, admissionsand recruitment specialist, encourages anyone who’d like help getting started or would like to talk with someone about whether CCC is the right place for them, to contact the The Clackamas Print Seen something at CCC that defies reason? Let us know — new scd(a clackamas.edu Paying it forward, one student at a time Associate Copy Editor Today’s job market is highly competitive, and while business es are placing a huge priority on having a college degree, it is the students who bear the brunt of most of that weight. Because of the rising demand for college degrees and certificates in order to earn a living wage, not going to college isn’t feasible anymore. Earlier this year, the amount of student debt in this country passed the one trillion mark. This insanity has to stop, some advocates for students say. Portland State University students made waves in the Legislature earlier this year with a pay-it-forward approach to funding college tuition, one that would give Oregon students easier access to higher education. With the help of the Oregon Center for Public Policy and a group of PSU students and the Oregon Working Families Party, the students created a proposal suggesting participants in a pay- it-forward program pay about 0.75 percent of their income per year they were in the program for 24 years instead of borrowing against their futures to pay tuition costs up front. That translates to a 1.5 percent per year payback for a two-year program or about 3 percent for a four-year degree. Barbara Dudley, an adjunct professor at PSU and co-founder of the Working Families Party, says the House Bill 3472 — the pay-it-forward program — is a home-grown Oregon solution to take wealthy banks out of the education equation. Pay it for ward isn’t a debt, it’s a contract between student and state, she said. “And it makes it easier for a student when they graduate, they don’t have this terrible debt-to- income ratio that makes it impos sible for students these days to even buy a car, much less a house, because they have this ter rible debt on their credit record,” Dudley said. Even though the student is making a commitment to pay a percentage of his or her income when done with school, it’s not a debt, so when they aren’t work ing they are not accumulating debt — the student doesn’t owe anything if they are not working, they are just paying a percentage when they are working. Dudley said it will allow stu dents to make decisions about what kind of work they want to do once they are done with school without having to worry about how the heck they are going to pay back their student debt. “To me it is much more fair and amicable,” she said. “It’s not Drop-in to see the Admissions Welcome Center team from Monday through Thursday between 10 a.m. - 3 p.m., or contact them to make an appoint ment, or simply email or call them for help with questions. W hat’s up with that... Check us out online www. thecl ackamasprint. net Donny Beach Admissions Welcome Center. “Helping students feel com fortable with getting started in college and providing them with the tools to success is one of my favorite aspects o f my job,” said Bare. really making it free, it’s just making the student’s contribution to higher education more man ageable.” John Burbank from Economic Opportunity Institute in Seattle has done a lot of research on the pay-it-forward model, but only Oregon has taken steps to advance his ideas. There was a lot of media hype initially when the Oregon Legislature unanimously passed HB-3472, which directs the Higher Education Coordinating Commission to study and create a pilot program based on the pay- it-forward idea before the session in 2015. The commission will meet on Monday, and state Rep. Michael Dembrow will present the pay- it forward concept. There also will be a working group whose job will be to design the pilot program. Sami Alloy of the Working Families Party says that taking the time to properly design the program to make sure it is going to be user friendly, accessible for students and affordable is the right thing to do. “I think it’s a really great way to do it, in steps like this, because it is something so new and so outside of the box, we wanted to make sure it is sustainable and that the public will be educated and excited about it,” Alloy said. BOOKSTORE D EALS AND SA LES! BOOM 'SW IM M ER ’ BLUETOOTH SPEA K ER $59-99 . GET A FREE PAIR OF BOOM EAR BUDS WITH ‘SWIMMER’ PURCHASE! ALL VIDEO GAMES 50% OFF SIRAS-8 SUPER MINI BLUETOOTH HEADSET WAS $49.95, NOW $32.47 2XL HEADPHONES WAS $21.95, NOW $14.27 ALL SALES ARE FINAL
