Tri-C Joins ‘#EndCCStigma’ Social Media Campaign

Hashtag aims to challenge negative perception of community colleges

A new social media campaign is seeking to debunk some long-held beliefs about community colleges, and Cuyahoga Community College is among the institutions joining in.

Tri-C has joined the #EndCCStigma campaign. Participants are encouraged to use the hashtag with social media posts that illustrate the ways in which two-year schools offer an academic and student-life experience on par with four-year schools.

Steve Robinson, president of Owens Community College in Northwest Ohio, started the campaign.

“Back when there was still smoking in public buildings, they called community colleges ‘high schools with ashtrays,’” Robinson said in a recent segment on News 5 Cleveland. “There's always some sort of snobby, pejorative name that a local community college has.”

Robinson noted that community colleges have faculty that match — or in some case surpass — faculty found at four-year institutions, in addition to more individualized attention in class.

“I came from a big tier-one research university. I love those places, but if you take your freshman and sophomore classes at a place like that, you're going to have classrooms filled with hundreds of people. At your local community college, you have smaller class sizes,” Robinson told News 5 Cleveland.

“You're also probably going to study with a grad student. There's nothing wrong with grad students — I was one for many years, and I taught them for many years — but at your local community college you're going to have an instructor with a master's degree, maybe even a doctorate, and a lot more wraparound services than you'd see at a big school.”

Jenny Febbo, Tri-C’s vice president of integrated communications, relayed some of the ways in which Tri-C offers an affordable education that is on par with a four-year college or university.

“Right now we have the lowest college tuition in the state of Ohio, and our estimates are that you can save approximately $13,000 off the cost of a college degree,” she said.

“We have more than 1,000 credit courses and almost 200 career and technical programs, and we work very closely with our students to make sure that the classes they are taking are on a career pathway that will transfer to another university.”

March 08, 2019

Erik Cassano, 216-987-3577 or erik.cassano@tri-c.edu