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College Of The Canyons Looks To The Future With Chancellor Dianne Van Hook

Dianne Van Hook first took the helm of College of the Canyons in 1988 – six months after Santa Clarita was incorporated as a city – and has served in that position ever since, watching the city grow and fostering the college to mature alongside it.


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Dr. Dianne G. Van Hook joins your Hometown Station KHTS!

Posted by KHTS Radio on Tuesday, August 7, 2018

In August, one month into her 31st year as College of the Canyons’ chancellor, Van Hook sat down for an on-air interview with KHTS to discuss the growth of the community college over the past three decades, and where she sees it moving in the future.

“When I first started here, this was a pretty sleepy town,” Van Hook said. “We had a Kmart and a Do It Center and The Ranch House Inn. We had a few restaurants other than fast food, but not a lot of resources here.”

But rather than viewing the lack of establishments as an obstacle, Van Hook saw opportunity, and the chance to be a driving force in how the Santa Clarita Valley developed economically and culturally.

“We work with about 850 businesses a year to train their workforce in whatever they need, as businesses will always reinvent themselves; that’s the nature and the impact of technology on the economic viability of a region,” she said. “We love working with business and industry.”

When Van Hook’s tenure began, around 4,000 students were enrolled at COC. Now, she said, the college regularly enrolls around 32,000 students every year.

One of Van Hook’s crowning achievements during her tenure was the 2008 opening of COC’s second campus: a satellite location in Canyon Country, on the opposite side of the Santa Clarita Valley from the main Valencia campus.

“Typically when you open a new campus it takes about five years for you to hit your enrollment target. We hit our enrollment target the day we opened the campus,” the chancellor said.

The smaller campus opened with a student target of 3,500. On opening day, 3,532 had signed up for classes.

When the second campus opened, Van Hook and other COC officials were hoping state funding would help bring the Canyon Country campus up to the level of the main campus. But as California dragged its feet on releasing any of the bond measure funding, they began to look locally for assistance.

Related: COC Canyon Country Campus Holds Groundbreaking Ceremony For New Science Building

“We, in the meantime, two years ago passed Measure E, which included millions of dollars to be able to either enable us to maximize funds by matching state dollars, or in the absence of the state’s ability or willingness to move, we could move ahead so we could serve our community and meet its needs.”

One of the tangible signs of Measure E at work is the Canyon Country campus’ science center. The 55,000-square-foot building broke ground in January, and is expected to be completed sometime in the 2019-2020 school year.

“It will have more labs for all of the sciences than we currently have on our Valencia side,” Van Hook said. “So as far as people pursuing a STEM degree, this is going to be an amazing resource for them, because it more than doubles our ability to provide state-of-the-art and current science classes either for employment in the field, nursing, medical lab tech or for transfer.”

Another project Van Hook focused her attention on is the College Promise program, which provides free tuition for up to 500 first-year students.

“We were one of 15 colleges to receive a $750,000 grant last year to provide the first year of college free for first-time, full time students,” Van Hook said. “The students did just amazingly well. We had, I believe, 90 percent of them complete their first two semesters with a 3.0 or above GPA.”

College of the Canyons is still enrolling new students in the program, which has reduced the entrance requirements from the first year. College officials hope to enroll all 500 students possible in the 2018-2019 school year.

The longtime educator said the plan brings back the free tuition system of the 60s, 70s and early 80s (COC had no tuition costs until 1984). But even for students not eligible for the College Promise program, California’s community college tuition remains the most affordable in the country.

“We’ve been fortunate since 1984 to keep them very reasonable,” Van Hook said of tuition costs. “They’ve started at $5 (per unit) and they went to $13 and then they went to $26 … They’ve been at $46 per unit for a number of years now, and that’s been a real priority in advocacy on the part of our system in the colleges themselves.”

Part of Van Hook and the college’s advocacy is to keep community college tuitions from rising.

“The next (lowest tuition) is about $108 per unit, and some are $300 or $400/ per unit at a public community college,” Van Hook said.

Related: College Of The Canyons Focuses On Students With Food Insecurities Through Food Pantry

Over the next dozen years, Van Hook predicted the low tuition costs and wide variety of options offered at College of the Canyons will attract even more students, especially as projects such as the updated Valencia Campus University Center and the Canyon Country planetarium are brought to fruition.

“I think that more people that currently participate and engage with us in the learning opportunity will do so. I would venture to say that it’s going to at least double,” she said. “I will say that the Canyon Country Campus will be complete by the year 2030, and hopefully a lot sooner.”

Van Hook said outreach to younger students is also a priority, so that students as young as six years old will know College of the Canyons is an option for their higher education.

“I think that we will have a fully implemented college-going initiative in all of the elementary schools so that children are learning about college choices when they are in the first grade, not when they’re in the 12th,” she said. “And I think that the percentage of high school students that will be concurrently enrolled in one or more of the many options that we have for them in this valley will grow to at least one out of every two high school students.”

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College Of The Canyons Looks To The Future With Chancellor Dianne Van Hook

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About Chris McCrory

Chris McCrory is the acting News Director for KHTS Radio. He set up a profile picture in his first week as an intern in 2015, and still isn't sure how to change it. He will graduate from Arizona State University with a BA in Journalism in December 2018.