Clarkson president to lead colleges board
POTSDAM — Clarkson University President Anthony G. Collins has been named the president of the state's Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities.
As he embarks on his two-year term on the board, he said private colleges need to start working more with state colleges, a collaboration he said would strengthen both.
"If you collectively look at the state, we are the biggest net importer of students of any state. People might think California or Massachusetts, but we are," Mr. Collins said. "We are trying, collectively, to take advantage of that. We want to retain them and put them to work in New York's economy and that's what we're trying to do at the highest level with SUNY and CUNY."
The 113 private colleges and universities in the commission enroll 470,000 students, nearly 200,000 of whom are from outside the state. There are another 465,000 students at Sate University of New York's 64 campuses and 260,000 at the 23 City University of New York campuses.
The commission was formed in 1956 and is the organization that works with the state Board of Regents, Education Commission and SUNY and CUNY chancellors.
Mr. Collins aims to get all the different types of universties working together, sharing research, equipment and faculty. He has been on the commission's board for five years, and there have been some efforts to begin collaborative efforts. Clarkson is in the midst of a research project with SUNY Fredonia and SUNY Oswego about contaminants in Great Lakes fish populations. The research began in 2006 and is funded through a $1.75 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. On a smaller level, Clarkson and SUNY Potsdam have been working together to bring a regional chemistry meeting to the state college's campus for four years. The conference was held last week.
The purpose of more cooperation, Mr. Collins said, is economic development, "so that we can compete with anyone in the world and out-compete them."
If the collaboration does take off, Mr. Collins said he hopes it will attract even more students to the state's colleges and universities, which in turn will make the institutions themselves even more of an economic force simply because of their payrolls. Cornell University, Ithaca, and the University of Rochester are two of the state's top 10 employers. In St. Lawrence County, St. Lawrence University and Clarkson account for 5 percent of the jobs and 6 percent of the payroll, he said.
"People don't understand how big higher ed is in the state. I don't think people realize they're not going anywhere," he said. "We can grow even bigger because being acknowledged as the knowledge center of the world will attract more students to the state."
