Feedback from the community will play a bigger role in shaping the future of Carroll Community College, according to the institution’s . Mince is the college’s fourth president, succeeding . Ball worked at the college for 25 years, becoming its third president on July 1, 2014, upon the retirement of Faye Pappalardo, who spent 15 years steering the school.
“My transition is an opportunity to build upon the college’s legacy while shaping its future,” Mince said. “My plan is to stay open-minded, seek input, and lead with empathy.” Mince was approved as president in a unanimous vote by the college’s Board of Trustees on July 6.
Her salary was not disclosed. Mince began working at Carroll Community College in 2017 and has , including associate president, provost, vice president of academic and student affairs, and dean of the faculty. Mince oversaw the college’s academic and student support areas, strategic planning, institutional research, and online learning.
She was approved in a unanimous vote by the college’s Board of Trustees on July 6. Mince earned a Ph.D.
at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a major in Human Development and a concentration in Learning Theory; a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a major in Physical Education and concentration in Teaching Behavior; and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, with a major in Physical Education and a concentration in Teacher Certification K-12. Carroll Community College, located in Westminster, had a $36.7 million operating budget in fiscal 2023.
It offers more than 70 associate degree and certificate programs, as well as 38 workforce training certificate programs, and also provides personal enrichment classes. About 9,391 credit and noncredit students attended the college in fiscal 2023. This fall, 3,164 students took courses for credit, about 90% of whom are Carroll County residents.
Last year, the college awarded 471 associate degrees. The Carroll County Times asked Mince about the future of the college and any changes the community may expect from her leadership. I don’t think that people will immediately see a big difference, but I think they’re going to see some renewed energy and some new priorities.
What starts that off is that we will have a new strategic plan. As Dr. Ball is retiring, we’re in our fifth year of a five-year strategic plan, and so it’s great timing for me to come in and have this fall semester to work with the college community to build the next strategic plan and determine where we want to go.
We’re going to build out a four-year strategic plan instead of a five-year, and a big difference is that there’s going to be very wide input to the development of the plan. Not only will we have all of the internal stakeholders, but we’re going to have a survey that’s going to go out, so that anyone in Carroll County can respond to the survey and give input regarding where they think the future of the college needs to be. We’re going to have focus groups, we’re going to have open forum, and we’re going to have a big day on August 29 where we’re bringing in speakers and we’re inviting in folks from the community to come in, listen to where we are, and help plan where we where we want to go.
[It’s an] opportunity for the larger community, not only those of us who work here and go to school here, but everyone in Carroll County, to have a voice in what they would like Carroll Community College to look like over the next four years. I’m looking forward to that. The theme of the next strategic plan is going to be “enter to learn.
” On the walls of our great hall in our main administrative building, overtop of the door it says, “enter to learn,” and that really strikes me as something that’s a little bit unique to Carol. [It] really speaks to the openness with which we welcome people from the community to come in, so “enter to learn” will be that underlying thing, like, come here for all kinds of experiences. Be it credit, non-credit, workforce transfer, come for the arts, come for experiences, come for athletics.
There’re lots of reasons to come to Carroll, and then we’re going to take great care of you and make sure that you achieve your goals. That’s the big framing language, if you will, around that. What’s most important to me is that I listen to where other people want the college to go.
I’m not coming in with it all worked out that, “here’s what it’s going to look like.” The fall will be very much about gathering info and then distilling where we want to go. Every community college in Maryland is required to have a 10-year plan with the state of Maryland on the books, that projects where they want to go, what programs they’re anticipating, and so on, and that’s called the Facilities Master Plan.
We are right now in the process of developing Carroll’s next 10-year Facilities Master Plan, so we’re working with architects and experts in the field, and we’re required to bring in external consultants to help develop and submit the plan, so we’ll see what comes out of that and what recommendations they would have to improve the space that we currently have, and to take maximum advantage of what we have here and what we can’t do here, where else we would have to look? I imagine that we’re going to continue to be using space at the career and tech center for years to come, as well as all these other off-site locations They ask for our hopes, our dreams and our wants. After all that’s done, we’ll prioritize what we absolutely have to have. And we have to stay up to code with anything that’s happening.
Some of our buildings are 30+ years old, and when they were originally put in, there were different requirements than there are now, ADA compliance and all those kinds of things. So it’s a continuous upgrade to the facility, and we are very, very thankful to the county. They take great care of us.
One of the things that the college is known for is its beauty and care. It’s kept spotless, and it’s just a nice place to be. [It gives] students a good, good feeling when they’re on campus, so that’s important to us.
Certainly the biggest challenge is the budget, because we are funded from three primary sources: the state, the county, and through student tuition. We never want student tuition to be the primary source of our budget, because we don’t want it to be on the backs of students. That’s why our foundation is so important to the work that we do, because they help offset that burden on students through scholarships, support, and so on.
When the state is in a challenging budget situation, that trickles down to the county being in a challenging situation, which then impacts us. We’re being creative and finding ways to support the college and the students, such as The other big challenge is space. We don’t have physical space on campus to do the things that we want to do.
We don’t have a gymnasium, so how do you have athletic teams when you know you don’t have a gym? You have to be really creative, and how you do that? We borrow space, we rent space, we get creative with the little bit of space that we have. We use outdoor space, we do whatever we can. Down the road, a dream would be to have a building that would have a full-sized gymnasium, and that’s where we would be able to have these additional programs that we want to offer.
We’re going to be leasing space to expand our programming, and if that goes really well, then that’ll probably be a 10-year commitment to those programs, and those exciting things could be happening in 10 years. A message that is clear, is that the Board of Trustees is not looking for major change to the institution, and that’s why they went with an internal candidate, because they’re very happy with the operations of the college. We’re very fiscally responsible.
Things are going extremely well, so you look for someone who’s going to continue all those things that are going well, but also who has vision and energy to take on new initiatives and lead us into the future. That characterizes what they were looking for in me: someone who’s going to keep strong, steady, all the things that Carroll was known for, that got us the great reputation that we have..
. One real benefit in being an internal candidate is that I already had very strong relationships with people at the college. A lot of new presidents coming in have to spend a lot of time getting to know everyone, how everything works.
And so a beauty, of an internal candidate, is that I hit the ground running, knowing the people, knowing how things work. Already having really strong relationships with people all across the college was a real plus to the board. Board members will say my passion comes through a lot of energy, enthusiasm and positivity that I bring to the position.
I’ve been a community college student. I’ve been a parent of a community college student. I’ve been an adjunct faculty member.
.. I was an adjunct faculty member.
I was a full time faculty member, so I’ve held lots and lots of different roles, and so I really feel like I can appreciate where different people are coming from, and put myself in their shoes I think that gives me a lot of credibility, because I’ve been there. I’m a very good problem solver. Right away, when I’m hearing about an issue, I’m already thinking, “what are we going to do about this? How do we make this better? How do we keep students supported in whatever we’re doing and moving forward?” I believe that people have confidence in me, and it’s important that they know that they can get behind their leader.
.. The number one thing for me is to take care of the people, so the people who work here, people who come to school here, the people who live in the county.
[I’m] very centered on on how to take care of people, versus take care of the building or taking care of the budget. It’s about the humans. The Board of Trustees giving me the position of associate president in January, then having a six-month period to work so closely with Dr.
Ball and really shadow him and learn the role before I officially stepped into it in July, was just a tremendous gift, not only to me, but really to the entire college, because it’s made the transition so smooth. Some of the big, big, big things that we can attribute to Dr. Ball’s presidency, which was a decade from 2014 to 2024, was the launch of dual enrollment.
That really started in a very small way when I came over as Vice President of Academic and Student Affairs seven years ago, and has steadily increased since that time to be a major portion of what we do here at the college. About a third of our enrollment now is dual enrollment. His leadership through the pandemic was just stellar during that time.
He really maintained things, led us through what everybody knows was an upheaval that was. That’s one of the accolades that I absolutely would tribute to him, was maintaining operations through the pandemic, gradually reopening the campus, keeping things safe and allowing us to quickly recover from the pandemic. A big thing that we attribute to Dr.
Ball is college athletics, which started in 2019. Then we went through the whole branding of the college with a new mascot and the lynx, and that has just been a really fun thing that has brought much more community to the college, in having the lynx to go around. Another thing that Dr.
Ball was really great at was strategic planning and bringing on new programs. Our cybersecurity program, our digital fabrication program, our small unmanned aircraft systems or drone program, were all under his area, under his time. Another big thing is bringing Clyde Johnson on as our Executive Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, [which was a new office].
The Blueprint is very complicated, and what we hear in the news is the streamlined version of things, because we can only take in so much. You’re not going to read the hundreds of pages of documents that back it up, but there are five pillars to the Blueprint, and the college plays a role in all of those. One of them has to do with universal pre-K.
We are partnering to have students who qualify for that program be part of our littlest learners program here on campus, and get their pre-K experience here. We’re also training teachers to work in the public school system, and we have a great history of our graduates being hired and doing exceedingly well as teachers for the school system. That’s just one example of one of the pillars we tend to focus a lot on, the workforce pillar, where we have students who can come to Carroll to get career development and skills to complement to what they’re doing at the career and tech center, or in program areas that aren’t offered at the career and tech center.
They can come to the college for those programs, for students who want to go the more traditional route and know that they want to get a degree from Carroll or transfer to a four-year institution, that’s where we have the dual enrollment, so it’s widespread. We want to be the first place that people think of when they think of anything related to to the college and growth and opportunity..
. That’s really my goal, is that we are front-of-mind when people think about anything that has to do with growth, development, opportunity and change, and that’s businesses that want to grow. It’s entrepreneurs who want to start a new business, it’s people who want to make a change in their life.
They need somewhere to get started and someone to talk to about what the possibilities are. That’s my dream, is that we are the first place that people think of, and then that we deliver on helping them meet their dreams..
