By A.J. Kaufman, Managing Editor
Dr. Brian Noland became the ninth president of ETSU in early 2012. Under his leadership, the university has achieved its highest graduation and retention rates in history, while securing record-breaking levels of research funding, including within the recent Volunteer State budget.
On the business and development side, Noland is a board member for important regional organizations and has obtained resources for some of the institution’s largest and most transformative capital projects.
With our June theme of higher education — and ETSU’s Spring commencement celebrating over 2,000 new graduates behind him — the Business Journal believed few people would be better interview subjects this round than Noland.
Business Journal: Tell us about your background and why you decided to come to Johnson City in 2012.
Brian Noland: I had the opportunity to attend University of Tennessee, Knoxville for graduate school, which is where I met my wife. We moved to Nashville, and I worked for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. From there, we moved to West Virginia and served as chancellor of that state’s higher education system. I always had the desire to get back to Tennessee. This is a region that means a great deal to us. It’s been a real honor for the past 13 years to serve an institution and a region that is home in more ways than one.
BJ: While four-year college enrollment has declined gradually over the last decade, ETSU’s enrollment continues to increase. Why has that occurred, and how do you plan to ensure it continues, especially among young men?
BN: When I speak to students, one of the points that I emphasize repeatedly is the importance of students to go to college. It doesn’t matter where — two year, four year, public, private…it doesn’t matter where you go to school; it’s the fact that you go. In an economy that is increasingly driven on human capital and ability and skill, it does not matter if that skill is a welder or a physician; it’s certifiable skills. Where we’ve been fortunate at our university is that we have degree programs that directly align with a lot of skills that people are looking for in this economy. All of these degree programs are direct in terms of the certifications and skills that our graduates will receive to go right into the workforce. That makes us a point of attraction.
Plus, we’ve worked significantly to make investments in our people and our infrastructure. When you survey students about why they’ve made the choice that they made to attend college and where they went, it’s major, it’s location, but the beauty of the campus is in the top five determining variables that students look to when they’re making that college choice decision. And we completely transformed the physical infrastructure of the university over the past decade.
All of that has allowed us to buck the trend nationally of declining enrollments. We’ve been north of 2,100 freshmen for the past three years, our residence halls are at full capacity, and we anticipate they’ll be at full capacity again this fall. We feel good about where we are in the higher education ecosystem.
BJ: There’s constant talk across the business community about retaining college graduates in our region. What kind of workforce opportunities can enable that?
BN: From a healthcare perspective, we work hand and glove with Ballad and the VA to ensure that our students who are moving through our programs are learning the skills and have the requisite background they need to transition immediately to a Ballad hospital across their system or the VA.
We’re starting new programs in the technology space, in conjunction with business and industry, to fill employment gaps across the region. Our mechatronics program, which is very similar to Engineering, we built in conjunction with business and industry to meet industry needs for large employers in the region, such as Eastman and others. In our computer science space, we built programs in conjunction with major employers like BlueCross and BlueShield that guarantee that the moment students graduate, they’ve got guaranteed jobs at that corporation.
The best way to keep more of our graduates here is to ensure that this is a dynamic and vibrant region with the things that 24 to 32-year-olds are looking for: a rich, safe, dynamic vibrant downtown, affordable housing, places for people to enjoy the community and the outdoors. A lot of these things we have and a lot of them we are working on; it’s one of the reasons why we’ve been such strong partners with Johnson City, Washington County and Kingsport.
So, all of this is interconnected. There’s not a short answer to what was a short question. There’s a lot of layers to the way in which we are trying to work with business leaders, elected officials and others to ensure that as ETSU grows, we grow together with the community. It’s hand and glove.
BJ: You’re on several boards across the Tri-Cities. Why did you specifically choose those entities?
BN: One of the wonderful opportunities to serve in a capacity such as this is to connect our university and our faculty with voices across the community as a whole. I serve on the board for BRIDGE (the privately funded economic development organization dedicated to growing the regional economy). One of the reasons why I elected to serve in that role is the ability of the university to also serve as a bridge across Southwest Virginia, Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky and all of Northeast Tennessee. You know, this isn’t just an institution located in Johnson City; It’s an institution located in Johnson City, Kingsport, Allandale, Sevierville, Mountain City, Rogersville. We’ve got a presence all across the region, and as the region grows, so does the university, and as the university grows, so does the region. If we’re going to attract business and industry here, that’s good for the university and the region as a whole. I was honored by the opportunity to serve on that board, because that board holds so much potential to help tell the story of our region and grow our region as a whole.
I was on the TVA board and that has cycled off. TVA is one of the great drivers of prosperity for the valley. Tennessee is what it is in many respects, because of the investments that have been made by TVA from the 1930s forward — to power the region, to provide safe waterways, to provide economic development…If I’m on a board, I’m on a board because it directly links to the mission of our university, which is unchanged since we opened our doors in 1911, and that’s to improve the quality of life for the people of the region.
BJ: ETSU holds articulation agreements with more than 30 community colleges across five states. What has been the most surprising positive of these partnerships and why are they important? Also, dual enrollments with high school students seem to be growing, as do non-traditional students attending ETSU. Tell us more.
BN: We are all part of an ecosystem of institutions that serve the needs of our region. We live in a state where Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect have made it possible for students to take advantage of those programs and have the first couple of years of college covered at no cost. So how do we align programs to ensure that institutional barriers don’t become barriers to student aspiration?
When I go to high schools and speak…I tell more stories about success for students who started with a degree in welding and then moved into engineering or started with a degree in auto diesel repair and moved into small business and now own their own dealership. Most students take credits from multiple places, so articulation agreements are important to ensure that, as those students move along their life and educational journey, institutional boundaries don’t create impediments to the realization of their dreams.
Dual enrollment numbers across the state are increasing because the state, from a policy perspective, wants students to have a rigorous high school experience. So, if a student can take advantage of a dual enrollment opportunity while they are in high school, the dual enrollment grant helps to pay for that, and that expedites their time to degree. There are multiple students who enroll at ETSU with the first semester already under their belt because they did it in high school. There are students who enroll at ETSU with a full year of college under their belt because they did it in high school, and that’s getting them into the workforce faster.
So, we’re seeing a real growth in that space. We’ve got work to do in the non-traditional space. To date, our region’s economy has been growing, and you’ve got a lot of what are non-traditional students who are in the workforce, so we’d like to see growth in our non-traditional enrollments, and we have some thoughts on elements we’ll push in the year or so to come. We’ve not seen a significant expansion of non-traditional students, at least not year over year, because our economy is doing so well. But we will begin to target some specific initiatives aimed at wanting to bring students back into the university with some college but no degree to help them finish their degree to skill that up from a certification perspective and help them with workplace advancement.
BJ: Anything else new on the horizon for the fall or coming years to share with our readers?
BN: As you look at the university, it’s an institution on the move. We’re moving in the right direction as it relates to program growth aligned to economic needs. We are an institution that’s growing, back-to-back-to-back freshman classes north of 2,100 students and we’ll be there again this year. Our residence halls are at full capacity. This is an institution and it’s a region that’s competing from a position of strength, and in Appalachia, that’s not something you find across a lot of Appalachia. We are an institution focused on the needs of our region…From healthcare to education on down the line, we are here to serve this region. And I think we serve Appalachia better than almost any other institution in the mountains — from New York, all the way down to the tail end of the Appalachians in Mississippi. This is an institution that’s got growth on the horizon…including physical growth.
But one of the things that I’m really proud of, and it goes back to an Appalachian story…It’s a region where people get up, they put their heads down, they go to work, they come home, they care for their families. It’s a very prideful region, but it’s a region that’s very quiet in the things that it does, but it’s a region that can compete with any region in the world. I’ve long believed that this is an institution that can compete with any institution in the world, and our students are just as talented as students at Harvard, and we’ve seen that come to the spotlight in the past couple years…Our students are competing on a national and international stage. And it’s wonderful to see the spotlight being placed on kids from Appalachia, many of whom are the first in their family to go to college and are going to blaze a trail that has the chance to continue to change the arc of history for this region.
