Confessions of a Retiring “Eagle”

This past semester, I did something I have never done before in my 20 years of full-time teaching at Wake Tech Community College: I applied to retire.

Like many who retire early, I have personal reasons for my decision, including my need to assist my elderly father. In the coming years, I will need a level of flexibility that being a professor does not afford me. It is time.

Now that I have made the decision, I have been reflecting on my journey as a professor at the community college. Several times during my career, I have been asked whether I would like to teach at a four-year university. “Don’t you want something more?,” I’m questioned. My response has always been the same: “I am right where I should be.” Teaching at the community college has been a fulfilling career choice.

There are many more opportunities to make a difference here than there are at an elite university. My goal as a professor has always been and will always be to make a positive difference in the lives of my students. Making a difference is a key component of happiness. And here, there are many more opportunities to make a meaningful, positive difference in the life of a person than there are at an elite university.

Think about it. A Duke University student enters college with many advantages and will leave with many advantages. A typical community-college student faces many more challenges. Some struggled in high school. Some struggle with learning disabilities. Others already failed out of a four-year university and are here to press the reset button. About 35-40 percent of our students cannot afford the $3,600/year tuition.

My journey has led me to the community college. And I have no regrets. But these challenges present themselves as opportunities for me to make a difference. This is not to say that a professor at Duke can’t do as much. Of course he can! But my journey has led me to the community college. And I have no regrets. Imagine the thrill a teacher experiences when witnessing the lightbulb moment in the classroom. That is, the moment the lesson challenges students’ preconceived notions about how the world works. And they get it.

Here is one small (but impactful) example. An early lesson in the Principles of Economics curriculum is opportunity cost: what you give up in order to get something. One of my approaches to this lesson is to have the students consider the opportunity cost of spending two or three dollars per day between the ages of 22 and 30. I see the desks of these students, several with store-bought coffee or vending-machine items. It turns out that if students wait until age 30 to start saving three dollars a day for retirement, they give up $128,000 relative to their peers who started saving three dollars a day at age 22. That gets their attention.

And, if they can grit it out and save $2,000 a year between ages 19 and 26 (or $5.48/day, about the cost of a Starbucks coffee), then they not only can become a multi-millionaire, but they will save over $750,000 more than their peers who put aside $2,000 a year from age 27 through retirement.

Here is a screenshot of the video I show (emphasis mine).

I am not trying to pick on Duke, but I am confident that more Duke students enter college with the confidence that they can become multi-millionaires if they are not one already. On the second day of class, my students learn that becoming a multi-millionaire is in the realm of possibility for them, as well.

Now imagine the thrill of teaching a student who comes up to you and says that, based on what he learned in your class, he has opened a Roth IRA. At that point, the lesson has made a real difference in a student’s life (not just a theoretical one). That gives me joy.

I have enormous respect for our students. Nearly all come to the community college to make a better life for themselves. They are optimistic about their own futures. They believe in the American dream. And they understand that achieving it requires hard work.

Not all students work hard, but the bad grades that follow are nearly always accepted as a consequence of their lack of effort. Not all students work hard, but the bad grades that follow are nearly always accepted as a consequence of their lack of effort, not because of their identity in any racial group.

It is not unusual for a student at the community college to work full time, take a full load of classes, and pay for his or her own tuition. The average age of a community-college student is 24. Time spent trying to work and take other classes means less time for my class. To quote one of my favorite economists, Thomas Sowell, “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”

It is not unusual for a student at the community college to work full time, take a full load of classes, and pay for his or her own tuition. I try not to get insulted. It used to really upset me if a student fell asleep in my class. What was I doing wrong? But then I started questioning the sleepers. I learned that, often, these students worked the night shift before coming to class. They had too many demands on their time. Then there are others who fess up to playing video games all night. These students have weak time-management skills and learn through natural consequences.

Unlike those at elite universities (from what I imagine and have seen on TV this past year), community-college students possess a near universal attitude of non-entitlement. While protests were happening at colleges across the country, I did not witness tensions between Jews and Muslims at my school. I saw in-class collaboration and support. When a Koch-funded speaker comes to speak on campus, there are no protests, just interesting questions.

So, first and foremost, the students have made working at Wake Tech a fulfilling career choice for me.

Beyond the students, another area of joy has come from the faculty. For the last several years, I have been fortunate to co-chair the Wake Tech Great Teachers Seminar, an annual professional development that I have written about in a previous Martin Center article.

Through this event, I have learned that our faculty are passionate, engaged, and innovative in working to improve the learning outcomes of our students. There are too many examples to mention, but I’d like to highlight a few. My colleague Jeff Myers loves to travel, so he created a study-abroad program for our students in Salzberg, Austria. Yes, I know a lot of colleges have study-abroad programs, but they are developed and run by administrators. Jeff undertook this massive project (which expanded beyond the business department to the culinary program) on his own, beyond his already heavy teaching load of six classes per semester. Beyond this, he has taken Wake Tech students to 16 countries on 30 different trips, including Cuba (four times), Qatar, Thailand, and Egypt.

As an example of innovation, two of my colleagues, Brittany Hochstaetter and Chad McKenzie, developed a chatbot to help students write better emails. It’s called Emaily, and it is a welcome tool in a world where students think it is acceptable to begin sentences with lowercase letters and use texting jargon. Again, no relief from their teaching schedules. They just did this on their own.

There are so many more. Wake Tech has been a leader among community colleges. We were the first community college in the nation to start a data-analytics program. In online education, Wake Tech has consistently ranked among the top colleges in the country, and at one point we were ranked the number-one community college for online education.

To encourage and motivate its teachers, Wake Tech implemented faculty rank a few years after I began full-time teaching. The ranks are assistant professor, associate professor, professor, and senior professor. The review process for rank is done by a mix of faculty and administrators. Faculty apply, and, as someone who has sat on the committee to review applications, I can assure you that it is a blind and fair process. Faculty who receive rank promotions are offered a three-percent raise above the annual increase given to all state employees (as determined by the state legislature).

To bolster their faculty-rank applications, faculty members participate in various activities that benefit our students. Is faculty rank a good idea? Yes and yes. It’s good for Wake Tech, and it’s good for individual faculty members. Most importantly, it’s good for our students. It’s good for Wake Tech because faculty are incentivized to contribute to the school beyond their classes. To bolster their faculty-rank applications, faculty members participate in various activities that benefit our students, such as leading student clubs, getting grants to bring in speakers, and starting new programs.

While I look forward to the freedom that comes with retirement, I will miss Wake Tech. Every decision has a cost, and the decision to work at the community college is no exception. While being a faculty member at a community college does not require us to publish or perish, we do have a heavy teaching load. Every program is different, and the requirements for each division differ. As an example, the standard for the business-administration department is 18 credit hours. Because our pay is not high, most instructors take on additional classes. In addition to teaching, we have to advise students. My current advisee list exceeds 100. This makes it more challenging to give advisees individual attention, though we try.

Speaking of pay, throughout most of my career, North Carolina community-college faculty pay has ranked near the bottom of the 50 states. This is interesting because our state population clearly values education. When the community college is mentioned at the state legislature, both Republicans and Democrats stand up and cheer. But that cheering does not always translate into faculty-salary increases. We seem to be the forgotten stepchildren relative to our UNC System higher-education siblings.

Thankfully, my husband and I put into practice some of my own lessons and managed to save enough to retire (fingers crossed) despite my pay. While I look forward to the freedom that comes with retirement, I will miss Wake Tech. I am thankful to have learned so much, including a new lesson just learned: I should stop comparing my school to the “elite.” When you think about what is accomplished daily at Wake Tech and at community colleges across the state, the word “elite” works well to describe us. It has been an honor and privilege to teach at Wake Tech.

Kelly Markson has taught economics at Wake Technical Community College since 2005.