Campus scene at Columbus State Community College (John Tierney)

When David Harrison became president of Columbus State Community College (CSCC) in 2010, the central-Ohio region, though economically healthier than the rest of the state, was still reeling from the effects of the Great Recession. Leveraging the capacities of the large institution he heads, Harrison began assembling a New-Deal-like potage of programs aimed at preparing people for the workforce, closing the skills gap, providing pathways to a debt-free education, and increasing the number of students earning a postsecondary degree or credential.

The recession is over now, even if its effects linger. And the economy in the Columbus region is growing faster now than any other part of Ohio. But the needs CSCC is addressing persist. “We’re trying to make sure there’s a collective impact that is greater and more long-lasting than any particular time period or any individual project,” Harrison told me. “What we’ve been able to do the last couple of years is connect the college to the community—and vice versa—in really deep ways, so that while we’re trying to advance the college, we’re also trying to address the most pressing needs of the region.”

Those two sentences from my hour-long interview with Harrison in September nicely capture a sense of how this education leader sees what he is trying to do in Ohio’s capital city and its surrounding region: addressing the needs of the community and aiming to have a lasting impact. I was in Columbus with Deb and James Fallows to report for the American Futures project, and I kept hearing people mention Columbus State and its president in admiring ways. I wanted to find out more.

You might think that in a city that is host to a true educational colossus—The Ohio State University, the third-largest public university in the country with over 57,000 students—the president of the local community college would have a hard time having much impact. Not so.

For one thing, CSCC is no ordinary community college. It’s a goliath in its own right—a 25,000-student institution that can't help but make waves in this city when it does things. And David Harrison, dynamic and skillful though he may be, has had a lot of help. He has a hard-charging staff of very capable people. And in a city where “collaboration” isn’t just a buzzword but seems to be a principle that people live by, Harrison has received a helping hand from many others, including business leaders and the Mayor. The results add up to a story about how this community college and its allies are giving Columbus and the central-Ohio region a vital boost.

Before speaking with Harrison, I met first with five of his top staff and was quickly overwhelmed by the flurry of programs and initiatives they were describing to me. The names and descriptions were coming too fast for me to digest immediately: the Central Ohio Compact, FastPath, New Skills at Work, Preferred Pathways, Credits Count, and so on. Fortunately, I’ve since then had time to make sense of all these programs; unfortunately, the landscape of initiatives is too rich and complex for me to describe in detail here. But I’ll try to give you the flavor of it.

Harrison assumed the presidency of CSCC having most recently served as Vice Provost at the University of Central Florida, where he had successfully established a program that guarantees the opportunity for a bachelor's degree for graduates of partner community colleges. Within a year of arriving at CSCC, Harrison had put together a similar program, called Preferred Pathways, that guarantees admission for CSCC graduates to The Ohio State University. Students do their first two years of college work at CSCC and then move on to OSU for the last two years.

The program got a lot of positive attention, and that enabled Harrison and CSCC to work out similar arrangements with six other colleges and universities in the region. All this is making a real difference in helping to provide an affordable education for many, as well as keeping those people and their talents in the region. Harrison said, with clear delight, “We now have a few cycles under our belt, and we’re finding that our students are doing really well—performing at a high level, graduating on time or even early. So we’re building a track record that is a real win for each institution, but also a win for students and families.”

That success set the stage for what is arguably Harrison’s premier achievement, something called the Central Ohio Compact, which is worth describing in some detail, starting with its genesis.

As he was getting the Preferred Pathways program put together, Harrison said, he used his “new-guy excuse” to go around and interview a lot of area school superintendents. He found a common refrain in those conversations had to do with “the high—and growing—levels of remediation required with students who were graduating from high school and coming to college but weren’t really ready to do college-level work.” Another recurring issue involved the misalignment of curricula with business needs.

Finding over time that he was having much the same conversation both with school superintendents and with other college presidents, Harrison finally said to a number of them, “Look, we all seem to be interested in the same problems. It seems worth it for all of us to get together and figure out what we can do about this together.” So, in 2011, CSCC hosted 150 people—college presidents, school  superintendents, and various of their staff members—for the first regional summit on college completion and career success.