As an undergraduate at the University of Colorado and a member of the United Mexican-American Students group and the Chicano Business Student Association, Joe Garcia grew concerned about equity in higher education. “I saw how poorly Hispanic students were faring at the university,” he says.

After graduating with a business degree and unsure about what he’d been prepared to do, he took a job driving a truck and enrolled in law classes at a community college. With a new direction, he began applying to law schools. He was accepted by and enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he joined the Latino Law Student Organization and used that platform to pressurize  the administration to recruit Latino students and support them, and also to  hire Latino faculty.

Garcia has been fighting for equity in higher education ever since - as a lawyer, as a Lieutenant Governor, as president of a university and a community college, as president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, as Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, and today as Chancellor of the Colorado Community College System (CCCS).

Doing Good Work

Garcia made his first positive impact on low-income and first-generation college students as president of Pike’s Peak Community College. “That’s where I really had the opportunity to focus on first-generation college students and students of color, because so many community college students came from that background and too many of them were unsuccessful in completing a degree,” says Garcia.

Although he was encouraged that low-income and first-generation students viewed community college as an access point, he was disappointed that two-year schools were becoming the end point rather than a rung on the ladder of success. So, he made a commitment to focus on student support.

In a career move that’s rare in higher education, Garcia left Pike’s Peak Community College and became the president of Colorado State University, Pueblo, an HSI. “There’s not a lot of mobility for administrators to go from a two-year environment to the university,” he says.

As he did at Pike’s Peak, Garcia focused on minority student success. Impressed by Garcia’s accomplishments at Colorado State, John Hickenlooper, Colorado’s gubernatorial hopeful, asked Garcia to run on his ticket for Lieutenant Governor. “I told him no because I thought I was doing good work where I was,” says Garcia.

But Hickenlooper persisted and finally convinced Garcia to run for the Lieutenant Governor office by promising to appoint him Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, thus allowing him to serve in both roles. “It had never been done in Colorado… I could continue my focus on higher education equity,” says Garcia. Hickenlooper won and Garcia served as his Lieutenant Governor and Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education from 2012-16. Hickenlooper is currently serving as senator in Colorado.

Focusing on Two Growing Demographics

Hoping to increase equity on a broader scale,  Garcia became president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, an interstate compact of 15 states and territories, in 2016. “We work throughout the west from Colorado, north to Montana.  south to Arizona, and over to Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, even the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands,” says Garcia.

During his two years as WICHE’s president, Garcia traveled throughout the west writing policies that focused on first-generation and low-income student success, but his primary goal was to update the organization’s strategic focus. WICHE would continue to develop broad higher education policies, but focus on students of color and first-generation students, the only two growing demographics in higher education. “The number of white high school graduates nationally had been in decline since 2012. We needed to change our focus and say, ‘we need to reach those students we didn’t reach in the past,’” says Garcia.

The more liberal and progressive states, like California, were on board immediately, but conservative ones like Alaska, Arizona, and Idaho bristled at the change, viewing it as an extension of affirmative action. Eventually, they realized it was a matter of survival, both for the states’ economies and for their institutions, and chose survivability and sustainability. “We needed to focus on the changing demographics of our country,” says Garcia. He considers WICHE’s change in strategic focus, which created smoother access to higher education as well as equity, his biggest accomplishment as president.

Access to higher education without equity, Garcia says, can cause more harm than good. Most students incur some amount of debt. Those who don’t earn a degree still have debt and may be worse off financially than before they enrolled. “They’ve taken on debt but they’re not any better prepared to pay off that debt. Now they can’t get a car or an apartment or start a business,” says Garcia.   

Diverse Leadership

Now in his fifth year as Chancellor of the Colorado Community College System, Garcia prides himself on providing careers and employment to underserved communities. Twenty-four percent of the system’s roughly 100,000 students are Hispanic and 48 percent are first-generation. Of the system’s 13 colleges, about half are HSIs and two are one percentage point shy of achieving that status. It’s not only Colorado’s changing demographic that’s funneling more Hispanics into the system, it’s Garcia’s outreach. “We are doing far more outreach that is bilingual. At the Community College of Denver, we now have our first bilingual president…She can do Spanish-language broadcasts and interviews in the Spanish-language media, talk to parents, and emphasize that this is a population that we want to serve,” says Garcia. Without the support of their families, he adds, students are not going to enroll and succeed.

Half of those serving on CCCS’s governing board and more than half of the system’s presidents are people of color, and some are bilingual. Garcia is proud of this diverse gathering of leaders. “Since I started, we have been able to diversify our ranks such that we now have three Latino presidents, one Asian-American president, three African American presidents, and one president from the LGBTQ community. That is the most diverse leadership group in the history of our system,” says Garcia. “We’re really trying to reflect our students.”

Garcia intends to increase CCCS’s flexibility so it can serve more working students, adult students, and rural students through hybrid instruction, additional  programs, and support services targeted toward adult learners. “I think we’ll be able to make a greater impact on Colorado’s economy, on individual lives, and at the same time grow back the enrollment we’ve lost over the past three years (due to the pandemic),” says Garcia.