A Conversation With ... Lance Ratcliff

You joined Cox College in January as vice president of academic affairs and just nine months later was named president. How did you rise through the ranks so quickly?
Having been in New Mexico, I learned a lot, but I knew long term, it wasn’t where I wanted to be. I had a contract where I could leave at any time and this position came open and I started in January.

Dr. Anne Brett was looking for the right time to retire. In education, things come in cycles. She saw last spring as the ending of a cycle for the college and someone else could come in over the summer and take the reins. If she waited another year, that might not have been the case because we have a Higher Learning Commission accreditation visit in 2015. She didn’t want someone coming in 2014 and having it all thrown in their lap. She had the foresight to see that. When she announced her retirement in March, effective Aug. 1, the board had enacted a national search process. But doing a national search takes time. The board asked me to serve as interim president, and I gladly did that. I submitted my materials and went through the interview process the same as anybody else would and about mid-September the board made the decision to ask me to be president.

Now, instead of being vice president of academic affairs and interim president, I’m president and interim vice president of academic affairs. I had two hats on and now I’m just wearing one a bit tighter. We are hoping to [have a] new vice in place by January.

Springfield is a college town, with numerous options available for potential students. Where do you see Cox College fitting into the community?
My background growing up and playing sports is pretty competitive, but from a higher education standpoint and really from a business standpoint, Cox College is not best served for me to try to compete with Missouri State, Evangel, Drury and OTC. All of those institutions are different, unique from each other and different from Cox College. What is best to prepare our students, engage them and further their career path? That is a collaborative path. Cox College has done many significant collaborative missions with Drury for 50 or 60 years. Today, students who want to take general education courses through us take those at Drury. That contract has been renewed often. Right now, it runs through 2017–18. Drury students have a number of advantages for a guaranteed seat in our nursing programs. We have similar agreements with Evangel and Central Bible College. Many of our students also take courses at OTC and transfer here.

We are in the process of starting a master’s level occupational therapy program. How can OTC’s associate program come into our master’s program? We are working on that right now through conversations and an open dialogue.

The U.S. currently has a nursing shortage, expected to intensify as baby boomers age and the need for health care grows. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, to help meet demand the number of employed nurses will grow from 2.74 million in 2010 to 3.45 million in 2020. How is the college addressing the issue?
This semester, we have 875 students. In any given semester, roughly half are going into nursing. We have multiple nursing programs in addition to the traditional registered nurse, which is a little bit more than, but is considered an associate degree. With the need to become more educated, and technological and medical advances, the knowledge base needed to be deeper. We also have the Bachelor of Science in nursing. We also have a bridge program from the RN at the associate level to the bachelor’s level. That’s typically a lot of nurses who have been working in the field for a while. CoxHealth is now on magnet status, where they are trying to get a higher level of degrees across the board. Specifically for nursing, they want more to have a bachelor’s degree.

We also have a bachelor’s in nursing accelerated program. That would be people who already have a bachelor’s degree in something else, but want to be a nurse. They go year-round for 16 months.

Beginning as Burge School of Nursing, Cox College has more than 100 years of service to the Springfield community. How do you plan to build on that reputation?
I think we need to embrace our strengths and one of those is our history. One of things we can do a better job of focusing on is how we engage the community and how we engage our alumni. We don’t have sports. I don’t know if we ever will. It makes it tough to have a big homecoming where everybody comes back for the game to fosters that sense of pride, when you don’t have a game. Within the health care industry, it’s an industry of caring. We have the opportunity to foster new alumni networks because of the personalities of the students; they are caring individuals. We have cohort style programs, so it really builds a sense of community into our programs. I think we could do a better job of continuing that community.

We also have moved into an interprofessional curriculum. We encourage different course or lab experience for students across multiple programs. Radiology students might not be in two or three of the same courses with nursing students, but if they go through a couple clinical simulations with our nursing students, they might be better radiologists. The same with nursing, they will have a better understanding so when a patient asks a question about an X-ray, they understand where the other disciplines are coming from. Part of our history, part of are strength and what we will continue to do is collaborate. Synergy is key. Health care is a team sport. Even at the hospital, multiple professionals care for you. The same should be said for how we educate those professionals.[[In-content Ad]]