Learning to live with NMC

The Issue: Student survey of the Northern Marianas College as an institution of higher learning in the Northern Mariana Islands.

Our View: With a significant reduction in annual revenues, all must learn to live in both good and bad times, including students.

High school students recently surveyed by an advertising class at the Northern Marianas College gave their forthright expressions about attending NMC after graduation from the various schools here.

Some 67 percent of 261 students polled aren’t interested, while 60 percent of 353 students said they want to pursue further studies at NMC. The latter is the larger group and it goes without saying that many of our graduating students would matriculate at NMC in their quest to acquire lifetime skills.

There is the view that NMC doesn’t offer courses normally available in colleges across the country. What needs to be understood, however, is that NMC is a two-year community college and has taken the extra mile to offer four-year degree and masters programs in cooperation with colleges and universities on Guam and the West Coast.

But this view should be a matter that the board of regents and the next president of NMC should list down as the next goal of the college in the first quarter of the next millennium. While we maintain that it is a realistic goal, we equally are cognizant that such goal would require a long process often determined by our financial resources to support a four-year institution. We’ll leave this issue for subsequent deliberative discussion by the board of regents.

NMC is the only institution of higher learning in these isles with satellite campuses on both Rota and Tinian. It has diligently worked with both sectors here to provide workers at all levels the opportunity to acquire lifetime skills. Like building a house, the family (each of us in this community) must be proactive in the collective effort to eventually complete the not so distant goal of turning it into a four-year institution.

Indeed, the challenge amidst the continuing drop in revenue generation is to rally behind the goal of wealth creation so that we could eventually support the establishment of a four-year Northern Marianas College. For now, we must all learn to live with what we have with even greater determination to strengthen the role of NMC in the first quarter of the 21st Century. Such a goal isn’t insurmountable and all we need to do is get our acts together. With local resolve and journalistic mind set, we can conquer it. Si Yuus Maase`!