Education is in Jeffrey Nasse’s blood. The son of two teachers, he has experienced firsthand the transformational power of education, he told a Pima Community College audience Tuesday evening.
Nasse, the second of two finalists presented for the PCC chancellorship, introduced himself to a small crowd and spent about 45 minutes answering questions.
Nasse
“For families, there’s opportunities,” he said. “That has always been the inspiration for my work at community colleges.”
Nasse is college provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Broward College in Florida. The college and its multiple campuses, he noted, serve 51,000 students.
“It’s a lot and that requires collaboration,” he said, speaking about his leadership style. “And, obviously, of course, working in the classroom as a teacher is very much a collaborative process.”
Nasse credits his leadership style to his background as a teacher. He began his career as a faculty member at Maine Community College, East Carolina University and Florida Atlantic University, after receiving an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps in 1994.
All of that experience, which included working in construction and as a bartender, brought Nasse to the PCC chancellor search.
A chancellor is the chief executive officer of a community college system, and generally sets direction for the academic, fiscal and administrative programs on campus.
The other candidate for the chancellorship, Veronica Garcia, president of Northeast Lakeview College in Texas, spoke at PCC on Monday evening.
Currently, Dolores Duran-Cerda serves as interim chancellor at PCC. The community college’s former chancellor, Lee Lambert, left last August for a post in California. His annual salary while helming PCC was $348,935.
Nasse said PCC’s commitment to “access, affordability, equity and high-quality academic programs” is what drew him to apply for the position.
“This is something that aligns with who I am,” he said. “I think there’s great opportunities at the college, (which) is well-positioned in the community.”
In his role at Broward College, Nasse works with the sixth largest school district in the United States. Partnering with the school district, Nasse was able to work with a special teacher incentive fund to provide “great pathways and opportunities” for paraprofessionals working in local schools, he said. The program provided money to pay for those workers’ tuition and “create a pathway for them to earn their degree.”
Also under Nasse’s leadership, Broward College graduated its second largest nursing cohort of 450 nurses to work in the community.
He has also worked to partner with JetBlue to provide internships and equipment.
“We require employers, nonprofits, schools and universities that we partner with to sit on our advisory boards to really help inform our curriculum,” Nasse said. “And that is to understand their needs.”
Those partnerships, he said, have helped craft “unique agreements with research partners, empowering people at multiple levels.”
Completion and retention are also important to Nasse. At Broward, his team gets a daily enrollment report on students’ progress compared to the year prior. He also instituted a faculty data dashboard, so faculty can look at their core success, completion, enrollment and retention rates.
Additionally, Nasse and his team provided 2,000 computers last year to students that needed access. Since his start in 2017, Broward has steadily increased its graduation rate.
“What barriers are our students experiencing?” he said he asks. “We want flexibility and mobility.”
Like PCC, Broward College is a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. Nasse said the college “thrives on diversity.”
“Ethnic diversity, diversity in experiences, diversity in goals, diversity in so many ways, I built a career in a lot of those areas,” he said.
Nasse noted that when he had his first Zoom interview for the PCC chancellorship, the community was described as a “family.” That, he said, appealed to him despite challenges that higher education is facing.
“I’m excited about some of the opportunities and challenges and to take those on,” he said.
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