EvCC president keeps a steadying hand in turbulent times

David Beyer believes it’s called a community college for a reason.

Since the first day of classes in 1941, when 128 students gathered in an old elementary school building, Everett Community College has been providing higher education to local students, and many of those students have used what they’ve learned to give back to their community.

“Success has been here a long time,” said Beyer, EvCC’s president. “We’ve touched a lot of individuals who have been successful and influential in Snohomish County.”

Beyer, 66, has made two-year colleges his life’s work. He’s been a teacher and an administrator at them for four decades, and he even earned his Ph.D. in community college administration.

Since taking the reins of EvCC in 2006, Beyer has overseen a period of tremendous expansion in both campus size and curriculum.

With the arrival of Washington State University North Puget Sound last July, the region gained a research institution and the campus expanded its portfolio of in-demand transfer programs.

Several months later, the Advanced Manufacturing Training &Education Center opened, immediately becoming a hub for workforce training as well as workforce development.

For his efforts in redefining EvCC’s role in the region without shedding the school’s local identity, Beyer has been named the 2015 Herald Business Journal Executive of the Year.

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The oldest of seven children, Beyer was born and raised in northern Iowa. He was taught from a young age to value education.

“My mom was the oldest of six, and no one went to college in her family. My dad is the youngest of six, and he’s the only one who went to college,” Beyer said. “They were so adamant about education, and us pursuing education, and also us being involved in education.”

Nearly all of Beyer’s siblings have been teachers at some point in their lives. Beyer’s father, a World War II veteran, attended a small college on the G.I. Bill and taught business classes at a high school.

Beyer followed closely in his dad’s footsteps, graduating from an Iowa university and teaching and counseling high school students. He had the summer off, so he took some part-time work at a nearby community college.

“I thought, ‘Boy this would be an interesting place to work,’” Beyer said. “Two years later, I had a job at a community college. That’s how I got involved with these institutions, and I’ve been involved ever since.”

There was something special about the two-year college that attracted Beyer, something uniquely American.

“We borrowed all of our education from other countries, but community college was actually established in the United States in 1901, with Joliet Junior College,” Beyer said, referencing the Illinois institution. “Other countries now look at the two-year institution as something they want to borrow from us.”

Today, community colleges provide instruction to almost half of all American students pursuing higher education. Beyer has worked with these students in four different states as both a teacher and administrator. He eventually took his first presidency at Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, Montana.

By 2006, he had made his way out to Vancouver, Washington, and was doing some consulting for Boise State University. The late Tom Koenninger, a member of the Washington State Board for Community &Technical Colleges at the time, nominated Beyer for the vacant EvCC presidency. Beyer visited the area and liked what he saw.

“Lo and behold, they hired me,” he said.

Tom Gaffney, a former member of EvCC’s Board of Trustees, was part of the committee that hired Beyer.

“In hindsight, that was probably the best thing I ever did as a trustee,” Gaffney said. “All the credentials were there, but the more important thing is you just connected with the guy. You felt like it was a good fit.”

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Beyer’s administration hit the ground running. Soon after his arrival, EvCC and Providence Regional Medial Center Everett finalized a land swap that doubled the size of the campus. But as the school’s physical opportunity for growth expanded, resources diminished. From 2008 to 2014, state support for EvCC dropped by $9 million. Excitement was tempered, grand ideas put on hold.

One of those ideas was for the Advanced Manufacturing Training &Education Center (AMTEC), which had been mapped out in the early 2000s due to the region’s demand for manufacturing and aerospace talent.

Even so, the college forged ahead on the center. Instead of waiting for the state to fund the $7 million project, EvCC combined nearly $4 million in its savings with $3 million from grants and outside stakeholders.

“David is well-known and well respected in the community,” Gaffney said. “That helps when you’re approaching organizations to help fund programs.”

AMTEC opened in October. It combines four existing EvCC programs — welding and fabrication, precision machining, composites, and engineering technology — to replicate a factory setting. Industry professionals work with the college to design the curriculum, and the students have a high rate of becoming industry professionals themselves (90 percent of precision machining grads have found work within 30 days of finishing the program).

“The I-5 corridor is the major manufacturing corridor not only in the state, but in this region,” Beyer said. “If you read all the statistics, we’re probably one of the largest manufacturing corridors in the country.”

John Bonner, executive director of Corporate &Continuing Education at EvCC, said AMTEC “simply wouldn’t have happened without Beyer’s leadership.”

“The idea floated around, but the college didn’t have the funding or the vision in place to go out there and make it happen,” Bonner said. “He recognized the need in the community to move now.”

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AMTEC is based in a warehouse that EvCC secured in the Providence land swap. Also planned on space from that trade is the new 95,000-square feet University Center building. The Legislature is considering in this session a request by WSU to spend more than $50 million on constructing the building.

Last year, EvCC transferred control of the center, a consortium of four-year colleges currently based in Gray Wolf Hall, to the Pullman-based research institution.

The new building is set to open as early as 2017. WSU has offered a mechanical engineering degree at the center since 2012, but establishing WSU North Puget Sound has allowed the school to set up four-year programs in mechanical and electrical engineering, as well as hospitality management and communication.

“We always want our four-year partners to be close to us,” Beyer said. “The closer the better.”

There were initially concerns that the other four-year schools would be pushed out of the center upon WSU’s arrival, but that hasn’t happened.

“Everett Community College did a wonderful job managing the University Center, no question about that. But things change,” said Bob Drewel, the interim chancellor of WSU Everett.

Drewel, who was the president of EvCC from the late 80’s to the early 90’s, said Beyer has done an excellent job managing the handoff.

“There’s that old saying, ‘When the seas get rough, you look for a buoy.’ David’s that buoy for Everett Community College,” Drewel said.

One of the other four-year schools at the center is the University of Washington Bothell, which last year partnered with EvCC for a nursing program called “1+2+1.” The program allows students to begin college at UW Bothell, spend the next two years at EvCC and then return to UW Bothell to graduate.

All the changes have come with their fair share of headaches. There are space concerns, parking issues, a lack of student housing. State funding has dropped and tuition has increased. And then there’s an ideological problem: how can the school keep growing without compromising its identity?

“In any organization, when you’re growing rapidly you feel like you’re losing sense of who you are and where you’ve been,” Beyer admitted. “You lose people who have been here for a lot of years. You lose a lot of institutional memory. But if we engage ourselves with the community, we can balance and manage who we are, and what we want to be, and what we want to do for the community.”

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Beyer says what keeps him coming back to EvCC is the same simple thing that has kept him in education for 40 years: he likes it.

“I like my work more than I’ve ever liked it, which is interesting because I’m entering the sunset of my career. If I get to the end of my contract, I’ll be kind of surprised,” said Beyer, whose contract ends in 2018. “That’s the way I feel today — but, I’m in the fourth quarter of a long academic year.”

For Gigi Burke, the chair of the EvCC Board of Trustees, anytime Beyer chooses to leave the college will be too soon.

“I don’t want to see David ever leave,” Burke said. “That will be a sad day, and those will be huge shoes to fill. That’s going to be a difficult, difficult challenge.”

Beyer lives in rural Snohomish with his wife, Janelle. They have one son and a new granddaughter. In his free time he cycles and takes walks. He likes to be out in his garden, which reminds him of time spent with his grandfather when he was growing up.

“I think of him when I’m outdoors all the time, him telling me things about keeping the weeds out of your flowerbed, and raising your vegetable garden. I remember those things almost like it was yesterday,” Beyer said. “History is important to me, the history of where I came from and how I got to who I am.”

The history of Everett Community College has also been valuable to him. He has studied it, learned from it, respected it and now become part of it.

The relationships he has helped forge led to unprecedented expansion, and with a backdrop of increasingly global employers, EvCC’s reach is farther than ever before. But thanks in large part to the steady hand of David Beyer, the college will continue to remain what it has always been: a part of the community.