Dr. DeRionne Pollard never intended to go into education. An apt reader and writer, the Chicagoan had purposeful dreams of becoming an attorney. But during her time at Iowa State University, education became “a safe space that I never left,” she explains.

“[College] was a place where I got to be surrounded by big ideas and people who were so much smarter than me, so I stayed in it,” Pollard says. “Then I started teaching, and I found that I was pretty good at that.”

More than good, actually. A first-generation college graduate who once relied on food stamps, Pollard earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, earned a Ph.D in educational leadership and policy studies in higher education, and rose through the administrative ranks, spending 25 years working in community colleges around Illinois, Maryland and California.

“I’ve always chosen to work at institutions that have this mission that serve little kids like me,” she says. “I’m a little brown girl from the south side of Chicago, and I know every day that education changed my life.”

Now, as the first Black female president of Nevada State College, she sounds determined to make that vision a reality for students around the Valley.

“The student population that Nevada State serves, these were me,” she says. “The majority of our students are first-generation, the majority of our students are Black and brown. Many of our students have very complex lives, whether they’re parenting or working multiple jobs.”

These are the people Pollard calls the “new majority,” and they’re everywhere. Today’s collegiate makeup is vast, diversified and growing at an exciting rate.

Since 2019, Nevada State College’s enrollment increased by 29%, and NSC is the only Nevada State Higher Education (NSHE) institution to grow its student headcount during the pandemic, Pollard says. She adds that NSC, which now serves more than 7,000 students, had its largest graduating class last semester.

“We’re an institution that’s just turning 20 years old,” she says. “[And] as a result, we’ve gone through periods where people are like, ‘Do we actually even need this institution? How are we going to fund this institution?’ Here we are 20 years later. And I tell people, we’re no longer an experiment.”

Pollard says she sees four crucial factors contributing to NSC’s growth: having a strong teaching institution (“I’ve sat in some classes and observed our faculty. They’re there for the right reasons. You don’t get [teaching assistants] when you come here. You don’t have a whole bunch of folks just choosing to teach because they couldn’t do it someplace else. Our folks teach.”); providing support services where they’re needed most; being intentional about how culture gets cultivated (“We don’t want to get comfortable saying, ‘This worked out well. Let’s just stay that way.’ We’re young and hungry. You know, kind of like Hamilton. We’re in the midst of really building something.”); and staying connected to the community through active listening.

It’s a formula for success that’s clearly resonating. But there’s still more to be done. Pollard acknowledges there’s a deeper responsibility to NSC’s mission. “Our success is essential to economic development here,” she says, so the school offers majors that are relevant to the needs of the Las Vegas community, including nursing, education, business administration and criminal justice.

And though NSC is enjoying its recent success, Pollard says she’s prepared to see some “natural contraction” in enrollment at some point.

“Higher education will not look the same when we are truly post-pandemic, because, let’s be honest, we’re grappling with the intersection of four pandemics at one time that nobody really is talking about,” she says, referring not only to COVID-19 but also racism, opioids and mental health.

Pollard says NSC will remain focused on the students it has, rather than chasing additional growth. “But here’s the thing, they keep coming,” she says.

NSC’s original campus master plan projected that a full campus build-out could accommodate up to 30,000 students over the next decade or so. With the way things are going, “I suspect that will probably occur more quickly,” Pollard says. The campus, located in southern Henderson, has approximately 500 acres of land on which to develop, and ideas for “a greater presence up north” are being tossed around, Pollard says.

Amid all that planning, the NSC president says she keeps three meditative musings in mind—“Absorb chaos, project calm, build confidence”—along with wise words from hockey legend Wayne Gretzky.

“They’d ask him, ‘Why were you so great?’ He’d say, ‘Everyone else skates to where the puck is. I skate to where I think the puck is going to be.’ That’s what I’m trying to do with Nevada State. There’s these images and models about what higher-ed is going to be and what college universities look like. That’s great. But I want to move to what we’re going to become.”

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