Photos provided by ANC
In the grand scheme of things, 50 years is not a long time in college years, especially of the four-year variety. All but one of the state’s institutions of higher learning are considerably older than five decades, some tracing their roots back to the Civil War era.
Among two-year schools, however, 50 years — or thereabouts — is more the norm than the exception. Of the 23 Arkansas colleges in the category, only six were established outside of a window from 1963 to 1975. The boom was not an anomaly, coming during an era when government and pro-business and industry groups actively leveraged state and federal funds to provide training in skilled careers through a robust network of what were then known as trade schools and community colleges.
While all of the state’s two-year schools look and think differently than they did when they were founded, a handful have led the category when it comes to size and sophistication of programs. One such school, Arkansas Northeastern College in Blytheville, founded in 1975, has grown into an unqualified success story thanks to steady and consistent leadership, proactive investment, and vision. Those elements combined to help ANC prepare itself to serve one of the state’s largest emerging industries, the steel mills of northeastern Arkansas, via 2018’s Arkansas Steelmaking Academy, 2022’s Steel Tech Academy, and Arkansas Steelmaking Bootcamp, launched in 2023.
Also in 2023, the college welcomed its fifth president, Christopher Heigle. The Heber Springs native earned his undergraduate degree at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro before pursuing a masters and Ph.D. at the University of Memphis. Prior to entering higher education professionally, he also spent time on the staff of the late U.S. Rep. Marion Berry, which helped shape his view of the state and its people, especially those in the job-strapped Arkansas Delta. Today, he rides herd over programs designed to improve those lives through education and job skills.
Christopher Heigle
“I’m a big economic development proponent,” said Heigle, 42. “I’m kind of like what Bill Clinton always used to say: ‘There’s no problem the Delta has or that Arkansas has that economic development, can’t fix.’ I think dignity and self-respect is earned through a job with a living wage. I feel like the community college model is the workforce model for achieving that, obviously.”
Heigle shared with Arkansas Money & Politics the latest in the college’s successful run of programs and looked ahead to the future of skilled careers training in Arkansas.
Arkansas Money & Politics: Two-year schools, as a species, have undergone something of a transformation over the past 10 years or so in which they are increasingly becoming an institution of first choice, not last resort. What has been leading that?
Christopher Heigle: Students that are graduating today from high school are generally apathetic toward the systems that were sold in my generation. They’re not looking to go to a four-year school and get a marketing degree and then hopefully work for a good company and make $45,000 and hopefully move into management. That was the plan I had out of high school, and I thought that was a good plan.
Well, they’re not interested in that today. I go to a high school, and I look around, and I say, “How many of you are ready to go to college?’ Five out of 40 are raising their hands. I say, “Well, how many of you all want to go immediately to work?” The rest of them are raising their hands. We don’t disrupt that pathway. We try to do everything we can to get them there.
AMP: We hear a lot about the economics of some technical careers these days, but that can be difficult for a typical 18-year-old to grasp. How do you sell that value proposition?
Heigle: There’s an exercise I use for kids who just do not have any understanding of what it actually takes to provide income for yourself, for your family, for the type of life you want. I tell them: Let’s imagine your life at 40. What kind of house are you in? What kind of car do you have? Do you have a spouse? What do they drive? Do you have a child? What do they drive? Are you saving for their college? Etc., etc. Very quickly, young people will describe an $80,000- or $90,000-a-year lifestyle, and I’m talking liability of $80,000 or $90,000 a year. Well, OK, that’s great. You have a goal. How can you get there?
Our short-term certificate of proficiency is earning, on average, $67,000. That’s a six-month degree, so I can take you, and in six months, I can get you a job like that. In two years, you can earn an associate’s degree, and we can get you out making $80,000 a year where, within two years, you’re making $150,000 with production bonuses. People don’t understand that, but it’s real. It happens all the time.
What else I would say is we’re not just locking you in to be a mill worker for the rest of your life. We currently have two-plus-two agreements, and we’re actively working to create more with other universities where, if you’ve graduated with that Associate of Applied Science in steel technology, you can move directly into a program where all 60 credit hours will transfer into [a partner] program, no questions asked. That gives individuals who started working at the mills at 20, 22 years old, maybe, who work for 10 years and who are now ready to be off the production line, but they know the industry and they want to stay in the industry, we can help prepare them to move into metallurgy or management or something else. We’ve given them that pathway.
AMP: What is the sticker price for that two-year degree these days?
Heigle: We’re roughly $1,400 a semester, and so I’d say less than $10,000, all in.
AMP: So that translates to virtually no student debt compared to other institutions, particularly if they’re pulling down that kind of money right out of school.
Heigle: Well, actually, we don’t do loans. We offer Pell grants, and we do a tremendous job getting those out. We’re also unique in that we own about 1,500 acres of farmland, and every year, we get about $350,000 in revenue that goes immediately and directly into student tuition, so we subsidize an incredible amount for our postsecondary students.
Beyond that, we try our best to keep a good cadre of active workforce grants where, as of right now and if things go well for the next few years, our students are really not paying anything, so the value proposition is honestly through the roof.
AMP: Some two-year schools around the state have engaged in something of an arms race to attract students — sports teams, dorms and so on. It appears ANC has avoided that to a large extent. Are those things that will eventually be required to stay competitive?
Heigle: We don’t have to pretend to be a university because we’re too busy being a community college. I hate to say it like that, but the truth is we could start sports, and we could have dorms, and we could do all that, but it would incredibly impede our ability to provide a workforce. We spend quite a bit of money on professional trainers, and we keep them. If we don’t — well, let’s say an industry comes in, and they need us to teach a new procedure in extrusion. We don’t have an extrusion person, so we have to fly them in from Sweden. When I say we are a workforce college, that’s what we’re doing with our money.
I’m not saying what [other colleges] are doing is bad because you have to have an industrial need in order to spend the money that we’re spending. If we didn’t have steel, yeah, we’d be doing basketball. We’d be doing anything we could to enhance the quality of life for our people. Right now, however, the biggest priority we’ve got is to keep the industries moving so that we’ve got an active economy.
I think we’ll see the same out of El Dorado soon. I think South Arkansas College is just going to do incredible work down there. They already have a pretty good leg up as a workforce college, and I’m very excited to see what they’re going to do with it. They’re probably going to behave very similarly to us.
AMP: So if they’re not lured in by a basketball team or a climbing wall, what are student expectations or demands, if you want to use that word? How have they changed over the years?
Heigle: Well, at the risk of undermining myself, they do want climbing walls, and they want lazy rivers and all that. The truth is we have a student grill. We have a game room. We do everything we can within our budget that’s reasonable for us to give them the experience and make sure they’re happy and healthy here.
AMP: Keeping with the recruitment theme, what steps have you taken to help increase ANC’s reach into underserved communities, women and students of color?
Heigle: We have made progress in that area. To be honest, we’ve had trouble with that in the past. It’s no secret that we’ve struggled, at least industrially, to make sure representation is what it should be. All we know to do is to continue to get into the high schools and be among the people we want to impact the most. I want to say that it’s working. We have a growing population of African American students. We’ve got, probably, more first-gen [college students] than we’ve ever had.
With us, everything we do is based on poverty metrics. We don’t typically means test for our services; we reach out to the populations that we know we have to work with in order to make an impact. Poverty is endemic within the area, and we’re trying to address that regionally, and we feel like we’re doing a pretty good job of it. I always say that the purpose of publicly funded economic development is to change the outcome of poverty.
AMP: You are only the fifth president in ANC history, and you follow the very successful tenure of James Shemwell. How has that continuity of mission in general and Shemwell’s contributions in particular set you and the college up for success?
Heigle: We could write a book on Dr. Shemwell. Obviously, he’s incredible, a strict capitalist. He would always say, “We move at the speed of business. We listen to the industries.” We have to listen to the industries, and if they’ve got a problem, we have to solve it, or else they will figure out how to solve it themselves, and we become superfluous.
AMP: Given that mantra, what do you see as the biggest opportunities for the future, and how will that shape the catalog and programming at ANC?
Heigle: The future looks like automation and electricity. Electrical engineering is going to happen one way or the other, and that’s going to happen in all industries, in all sectors. Automation, obviously, is manufacturing specific, and we’ve got a new computer science instructor who’s very excited about tying in some machine learning, which is what the market is asking for right now.
We have recently reengaged our industries and had a large countywide meeting just to say, “We know what we’re doing now, but what’s the next step?” We believe it’s time for the college to grow again, and so we’ve got a task force of industry representatives that are helping us define that. We do not have the facilities we need, and so we’re looking at an expansion, probably another 100,000 square feet in our allied tech center.
AMP: Obviously, you have a proximity advantage of having the steel industry in your backyard, but what other industries are commanding your attention as you look to the future? Are there new industries that are emerging?
Heigle: Right now, everything is still being driven by the steel industry, but the truth is there are other ancillary industries that work alongside them, and that affects our programs. Industrial maintenance as an example: You could transfer into any industry in Arkansas with an industrial maintenance degree.
Another thing I want to mention is Mississippi County is going through an explosion of aeronautics growth. Our former air base has shut down, but we’ve had two companies announce recently they’re expanding. As a result, our associate of aviation maintenance degree, where we’ve been carrying around four students, all of a sudden it looks like we’re going to have about 25 students, and we may have to hire another instructor. I am all for sector diversification, you know? This is good for us.
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