Saturday’s graduation ceremony for Washington State University Vancouver will serve as a testament to not only the students’ dedication and fortitude, but to the vision laid out by state leaders a quarter-century ago.
It wasn’t very long ago, after all, that would-be college students in many of the state’s population centers were distressingly underserved. What are now Eastern Washington University, Central Washington University, and Western Washington University all were established as normal schools (teachers’ colleges) between 1882 and 1893 in the relatively isolated locales of Cheney, Ellensburg, and Bellingham. Even Washington State, which began life in 1890 as Washington Agricultural College and School of Science, landed in Pullman — a fine college town, but not exactly a metropolis.
So, although the University of Washington was located in Seattle, the state’s largest population center, high school graduates in Vancouver, Tacoma, and the Tri-Cities had little access to an affordable college education close to home. As The (Tacoma) News Tribune recently wrote editorially: “Traditional college students — young, family-supported, middle-class or wealthier — could pack up and move to one of the existing state universities. But many would-be students with modest incomes, including parents and people tied to their jobs, were shut out of the system.”
Which points out the significance of legislative action that in 1989 paved the way for branch campuses of the University of Washington and Washington State University. Branches in Vancouver, Tacoma, Bothell, Spokane, and the Tri-Cities were born, and today those campuses are nearing adulthood; today, those campuses serve a combined total of more than 15,000 students. In 1990, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.8 percent of Clark County residents had a bachelor’s degree or higher; by 2010, that number was 26 percent. Not all of that can be attributed to the presence of a four-year college in the county; economic conditions play a large role, specifically the availability of jobs that attract college graduates to the area. But the presence of WSUV has had a transformative impact upon Clark County.