Metro State president sees college primed for growth.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: COTE'S colorado

Stephen Jordan has much to celebrate as he marks five years as president of Metropolitan State College of Denver:

* The hiring of 180 new tenure-tracked faculty, bringing the total to more than 430.

* The opening of the Center for Visual Art in the Santa Fe Arts District.

* The upcoming debut this fall of graduate degree programs.

* The $52 million Student Success Building set to break ground by year's end that will mark the school's first self-owned building on campus.

* More than 65,000 alumni--with nearly 80 percent of them remaining in Colorado after graduation.

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Yet you sense he's most excited about Metro's potential for the future as the nation's baby boomers retire and employers struggle to secure talent from a smaller generation of workers.

Metro, which serves nearly 23,000 students and educates more undergraduate Coloradans than any college or university in the state, will be best positioned to help fill the gap, he says.

Colorado ranks among the nation's best in college-educated residents per capita, but it has a poor track record of graduating its own natives, relying instead on those 300-plus days of sunshine along the Front Range to attract a steady stream of career driven professionals and entrepreneurs.

"For Colorado, this question about educating our own students is going to be a much more important issue for us because we're not going to be able to rely on that net importation any longer," Jordan said during an interview at his Auraria campus office.

Jordan cites demographic studies that project the white population declining from the birth-to-age-44 bracket over the next 15 years. Meanwhile, the minority populations, especially Latino, are expected to grow.

That means the college expends considerable effort working to improve the success rate of its minority students, which it has considerable experience serving.

"We set out a conscious strategy as we were hiring new faculty to begin to address our retention and graduation issue given the nature of the students that we have," Jordan said. "As we've been hiring new faculty, we've been pushing down into lower division courses, particularly those critical courses around English composition and math."

And the college is already beginning to record improvements from those changes.

"In the five years I've been here, we've seen our first-time freshman retention rate go from 58 percent to 62 percent to 64...