Sierra College Resets the Bar

Sacramento Business Journal
November 24, 2006

by Joel Davis

When I read that a man who grew up in this region had bequeathed more than $1 million to an area community college I thought that was pretty cool.

Despite having bachelor's and master's degrees from more prestigious University of California Berkeley, Les A. Miller left most of his estate to Rocklin-based Sierra College.

Community colleges are rarely remembered in this fashion, but in this case, for Sierra at least, it's Miller Time, and I couldn't be happier. I mean, how often does a community college get remembered this way? How about 'never'?

Miller's donation is reportedly the largest individual contribution ever made to Sierra College, and the largest estate donated to a community college in the Sacramento region.

Like Mr. Miller, who died this year, I too attended Sierra College.

I was a notorious underachiever in high school, a lost soul, easy to slip through the cracks in high-achieving Davis. And my two years at Sierra -- I lived in the dorms (think the bar scene in "Star Wars") and called it Second Chance U -- straightened me out to the point where I was able to grab a bachelor's from California State University Fresno and a master's with honors from an Ivy League university.

This is not unusual: I know countless people who have gone on to successful/meaningful careers after getting their acts together at junior college, often with degrees from prestigious universities that are infinitely easier to get into after two years of keeping one's nose clean at junior college rather than four years of having it pressed to the grindstone in high school.

Conversely, I also know several people who flamed out at prestigious universities after overachieving in high school, often under the auspices of well-intentioned but overbearing parents.

"I was fried by the time I got into Princeton right out of high school," a longtime friend recently told me. "My wife started out at a JC near her hometown and did fine. I kind of wish I had done the same."

It is a familiar refrain, along with the laments about impersonal four-year university freshmen classes with 400 students where the closest you get to the professor is his/her student assistant. There's also the homesickness factor that community college students, often living at or near home, usually don't have to deal with.

Despite their reputations as glorified high schools, JCs are the workhorses of our educational system, offering everything from industrial education to college prep courses. Having both taught at and attended them, I can also say that they also offer students a more diverse exposure to the University of Life.

I have been part of JC courses both as a student and teacher that included participants from parolees to octogenarians to Russian immigrants to gifted teens taking a course not offered in high school. With (usually) smaller classes and a more diverse crowd, I actually enjoyed lecturing more at the JC level than at the university level.

It's like taking a random scoop of society and trying to teach them something.

I don't have children, but I have been around enough parents to see a lot of hand-wringing over everything from getting their kids placed in the top preschool to wondering how they are going to pay for four years of college at a top university.

My advice: Take a tip from Mr. Miller. He proved that Les is, well, more.

Joel Davis is a Sacramento writer and college journalism instructor.