Rose B. Bellanca is running a $100-million community college in Ann Arbor with a staff of more than 1,500 people, more than 20,000 students, and an open pipeline for transfers to the prestigious University of Michigan.
And she says she remembers clearly what inspired her to get into the education business in the first place: her kindergarten teacher’s bling.
“She had a diamond ring and high heels, and I was mesmerized by her,” recalls Bellanca, president and CEO of Washtenaw Community College for 13 years and a senior educational administrator for nearly 40 years. “I started playing ‘school,’ and before you know it, it was a career.”
These days, Bellanca’s career puts her in the front lines of the increasingly important arena of community-college education in Michigan. She reports that more businesses than ever are turning to community colleges for qualified employees as tightness in the labor market continues, and as four-year universities are increasingly challenged by high attendance costs and other factors.
Although it’s not the largest vocational-technical school in the state, Washtenaw Community College was ranked No. 1 in Michigan in two recent independent rankings — by niche.com and intelligent.com — and it was tabbed by BestColleges as offering the state’s best accelerated online program.
To oversee that kind of performance, Bellanca makes sure she puts two important constituencies first: employers and students. “We’re very aligned with the community; we’re very responsive to workforce training and development needs,” she says. “Everything we do takes an outside-in approach. We listen to CEOs of companies as well as advisory committees (and ask), ‘What do you need?’”
Referring to students, Bellanca says, “Our focus on them has never changed. They’re important to me.” To be clear, she notes, “Students have changed. They come from all walks of life. Their average age nowadays is 26 to 27 years old.”
Include the school’s faculty, system administrators, education regulators, and the politicians who hold the purse strings as other important stakeholders in Bellanca’s world.
“A community college is the economic engine of the community,” she says. “My passion and goals and what drives me are seeing everything improve — not because of me, but I need to be an integral part of that.”
Bellanca’s post-kindergarten trek up the ladder in education began after the East Detroit native graduated from nearby Regina High School, and it involved another influential figure from her own education. Based on her disappointing score on the SAT test, a Regina administrator told Bellanca’s parents that their daughter wasn’t college material. “Her advice was that I should go to business school and get married,” Bellanca remembers.
After enrolling in a business-skills school, however, Bellanca heard Macomb Community College would “take anyone.” That was her launching point: Bellanca finished a nine-month executive secretarial program while starting to attend Macomb Community College, then transferred to Wayne State University and went on to teach family life, culinary arts, and industrial arts at three different high schools.
From there, she was named the first female vocational director of Macomb Community College. “People at that time didn’t correlate that job with being a female,” Bellanca says, but “being in that arena as a woman was interesting. I’d get people who would imply that I could ‘understand this,’ and some men had a problem including me in meetings.”
In 1985, one of Macomb County’s premier school systems, Chippewa Valley in Clinton Township, brought Bellanca on as executive director of personnel and labor relations, as well as head of vocational and technical education. The experience deepened her expertise in the kind of career instruction that helps make metro Detroit an economic powerhouse.
Bellanca’s acumen earned her positions over the next 13 years as provost and chief academic officer at Macomb Community College, president and CEO of St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, and finally as provost and president of Northwood College’s campus in West Palm Beach, Fla.
As at other times in her past, hinge points came back into play for Bellanca when she accepted her post at Washtenaw Community College in 2011. Way back at Chippewa Valley, Bellanca had taken a deeper dive into a new kind of leadership exercise.
“Something new came across education then: strategic planning,” she says. “I fell in love with it. The (Chippewa Valley) superintendent asked me to create a strategic plan for the entire district, and I had to work with teams of people. We did a good job, so then I went around the country demonstrating how to do that.”
Expanding on that approach, Bellanca has continued to align the school with how education, technology, business, and people have changed. For example, Washtenaw Community College now focuses on online education, offering both virtual and “mixed-mode” instruction.
“You’d be surprised how many classes actually can be taught virtually,” she says. “Science — I never thought that was going to happen. Even art and dance.”
Washtenaw has become the No. 1 transfer institution to the University of Michigan, and nursing is the leading specialty in that pipeline, as WCC actually shares classes with U-M.
“We need to make sure the quality of our curriculum aligns with the quality of that institution,” Bellanca says. “That’s what our faculty strives to do, and they’re always working to answer, ‘What does this student need to do to be successful? How does the curriculum and teaching need to change?’”
Her school also is offering more transportation, engineering, and cybersecurity courses. “We (tend to) think you have to have a white coat to be brilliant, but blue-coated people are darn smart, too.”
