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The third meeting of FRCC’s Transitional Commencement Committee occurred on October 5 this semester. The first meeting of this Committee had covered the goals of said Committee, surveyed its members on ideas as to increase participation, attendance, and memorability, including through non-traditional means, the favorite parts of past commencements, and who students would like to hear from. That meeting ended on needing to evaluate data and each of the members’ venue research.
The second meeting, also per its meeting minutes, had the Committee evaluating heat maps of FRCC student addresses and FRCC student travel time before splitting into two breakout rooms to discuss ideas on how commencement could proceed. These groups ultimately came up with two ideas. The first discussed having one to two ceremonies in December and another two in May, while the second proposed a large ceremony in the spring, with three smaller ceremonies at each campus to celebrate their respective students.
However, both groups came to the consensus that more discussion time was needed. Finally, a student and alumni survey was agreed upon to garner more student perspectives and opinions. Larimer Campus’s SGA drafted this survey, with connections being made to Oliver Harper to update this survey for all three campuses plus alumni. The next steps laid out were to develop the survey and continue researching venue options, including availability.
Third Meeting
At the next meeting, professor John Kinsey, one of the members of the Committee and the Westminster Campus Faculty Senate President-elect, and Lilian Clemente, the Marketing representative for the Committee and a part of the FRCC President’s Cabinet, briefly summed up their breakout rooms’ discussions from the previous meeting. Kinsey discussed having two ceremonies instead of three, while Lilian discussed having a more “unified and consistent experience” and having one to two ceremonies, according to that meeting’s minutes.
Also according to the minutes, Clemente also discussed the benefits of having just one ceremony at this time, namely a “truly consistent experience”, the possibility of hiring a “noteworthy speaker”, and the large scale of said ceremony with a significant number of graduates, which would also add to the ceremony experience.
Concerns with the ceremony discussion that were brought up were the limited number of venue options and wanting to keep the ceremony to around 2 hours in length. Bus transportation was also discussed as a way to increase guest attendance and augment participation.
Kinsey discussed this transportation more in-depth, saying that “If we did have a single location that we would offer either buses or Uber coupons.”
He had personally disagreed with this, adding that “you’re creating barriers of inconvenience … If I parked at, for example, the Westminster campus and then took a bus that was 45 minutes to wherever, I would be locked in to whatever that was until the event was over and everybody came home. And I saw that as a potential deterrent.”
In response to this, Gabriel Castaño, one of the co-chairs of this Committee, had “suggested that we try to see if we can get Uber coupons or Uber vouchers or something like that so that people could leave when they wanted to,” according to Kinsey.
Kinsey had a counterpoint to this, responding that “the inverse of that problem would be people bailing, right? … The commencement, not the last one, but the one before, I believe, we had like 50 people … [going] up on stage, shook their hand, got their little fake diploma and then just walked straight out. And of course, we don’t want to do that because then the people in the back of the alphabet have a really, you know, less than awesome time than the people at the beginning of the alphabet.”
Kinsey also mentioned a particular remark made at around this time. Faculty and facilities brought up that, with a single ceremony taking place, “a significant portion of students would have to have an extended drive time or an extended travel to get there,” potentially causing a negative impact on student attendance and experience.
Someone replied that “‘it will only be painful or inconvenient to people graduating now. Future students won’t know the difference.’ … I kind of went back and forth on that for a while to the point that I thought it was unproductive.”
Kinsey added that “I think … there’s this portion of the Committee that wants to standardize an idea, even if that idea is impractical, with the belief that once it becomes standard, people won’t question it.” While not wanting to name specifically who remarked it, he mentioned it was “on the marketing side of the conversation.”
Lilian Clemente, Executive Director of Marketing & Communications, did not respond for comment regarding this remark nor Marketing’s overall view regarding commencement.
He also discussed a shift in priorities for the Committee at large. He stated that “I think the easiest way to frame it, at least for me, is when this committee was formed, they perhaps had overly optimistic assumptions as to how quickly we would be able to solve these problems. And now that these problems have proven to take us longer than what they were expecting, we’re getting to the point where we have to shift our priorities to find a venue for Westminster as soon as possible.”
Afterwards, the Committee reviewed the survey draft, making final edits to question phrasing. It was also noted that Ryan Lambert, Director of Institutional Research at FRCC, would finalize this survey and send it out by October 9 at the latest. The meeting ended with deciding to look at the survey results at the next meeting, noting that 2024’s commencement may look different from commencements onward from that point, and hoping more information may come about with regards to the availability of venues.
Fourth Meeting
The fourth meeting of the Committee took place on October 19th. It was firstly acknowledged that venue options were becoming extremely limited and that other recommendations would be for an “ideal future state” that may not be realized until Spring 2025. It was at this point that the meeting leadership was passed to Drew Arnold, who provided an overview on the availability of venues for Spring 2024.
Front Range currently had a hold on Blue Arena (formerly the Budweiser Arenas Center) for May 9th, with the Denver Coliseum available for May 6th through 8th and the Vance Brand Auditorium being available for May 6th and 8th. The Macky Auditorium, CU Events Center, and the National Western Center Complex, among other venues, were not available, and no venues were available on Saturday, May 11th.
Kinsey acknowledged that at this point, “I think just because everybody’s busy, we’ve lost probably a quarter of the people: just that they couldn’t make it to [this] last meeting. I had to attend half of it in my car.” He further explained this, saying that “[I think that everyone is like] ‘this Committee isn’t what I got this job for, right?’ And that’s true for everybody. … We’re calling it initiative fatigue because everybody’s stretched so thin. It’s hard to get anybody to buy in on anything.”
A review of how the Committee would develop their recommendations over the meeting was then gone over, with the primary focus being the logistics of the event. To be focused on here was how many ceremonies there would be, the days and times of the ceremonies, the geographic location of these ceremonies (taking into consideration travel time), and transportation support options. These would be discussed in breakout rooms, with each room developing one to two recommendations about these logistics.
Next, the data from the survey was reviewed. 54% of past graduates who took the Alumni survey said they attended the Westminster campus graduation (in accordance with the RSVP numbers for the academic years of 2022 and 2023 – this number was 52%). 28% of graduates answered they attended the Larimer County campus graduation compared to 31% on the RSVP numbers, while 18% of graduates attended the Boulder County campus compared to 17% on the RSVP numbers.
50% of current students indicated they would be willing to travel 25-35 minutes for an “improved and noteworthy commencement ceremony”, while another 50% was willing to travel 35-45 minutes or 45-60 minutes. Current students also seemed to have several preferences for a preferred time of day for commencement. 74% of current students preferred a Saturday morning commencement from 10 am to 1 pm, 54% preferred a weekday evening ceremony from 5:30 to 8:30 pm, and 21% of current students preferred commencement to occur on a weekday day from 10 am to 1 pm.
The Committee and the meeting minutes for this fourth meeting interpreted the travel time data as being that 50% of current students would be willing to drive over 35 minutes or up to 45 minutes to arrive at commencement, respectively. John Kinsey had found this odd, stating “I was like, ‘That’s not what I’m seeing when I look at that data!’ I see that over half are not willing to drive more than 25 minutes. So if you went 35 minutes, you would be cutting it in half, right? … [For me], overwhelmingly, people want it to be geographically convenient for them.” He did acknowledge, however, that the data was still not final at that point.
Then, the breakout rooms were held. After discussions in these were over, the first group proposed two spring ceremonies near Westminster and Fort Collins respectively and an additional fall ceremony near Longmont. In the spring, one ceremony would happen on a weeknight, and the other would happen on a Saturday morning or afternoon. In the fall, there could be a Saturday morning or afternoon option.
The second group, meanwhile, proposed two fall ceremonies, one occurring on a weekday and the other Saturday before or after the weekday ceremony. This group was concerned with the venues being able to accommodate students who had not proactively RSVPed as well as hosting graduations south of Westminster and thus inconveniencing Boulder County Campus students. They also expressed challenges of holding a commencement at the Vance Brand Auditorium, which is in Longmont: the space was at capacity and Westminster students could push it over capacity, and the space could only allocate seating for two persons that required wheelchair accommodations.
John Kinsey explained the first group’s proposal further. “The only pain point on that [spring commencement on a Saturday] proposal is that means a lot of staff and faculty will be off contract because normally we go till that Thursday. So the grades are due like that Wednesday and then we have to clean up on that Thursday. So that means that there’ll be a lot of voluntary participation, which isn’t great, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” he explained. And then the weeknight one, we’re gonna have to, like, play around and see which weeknight works the best. … Depending on what venues we find and what days work best, it’ll kinda unfold that way.”
This proposal was done in accordance with the results of the student and alumni survey up to that point. Kinsey further explained that “[either] the winter or the spring will be on a Saturday, and then the other one will be on a weeknight. Right now the proposal is [this way], because with the survey data, the most popular day was Saturday morning.”
Both groups expressed a desire to have one venue that was in equal distance to all three campuses, but they acknowledged a venue that met these desires did not exist. Kinsey put it another way, saying “if we found a magic venue that would be a fair driving time to everybody that we could afford, then we would have a single event. I don’t think that such a venue exists, but if it comes into existence later, great. And if there is one, none of us have found it.”
Kinsey said that the Blue Arena was a likely choice for commencement. He explained that “I think this commencement is just gonna be whatever we can get, and Blue Arena is on top of the chart right now. I don’t know if that will be a contender moving forward, but that’s where we’re headed now.”
Finally, Kinsey said that he was “happy with this plan. I hope this sticks.” He also acknowledged that, even if someone was dissatisfied with the plan, “I can’t see anybody, you know, rallying to get a mutiny going ‘cause we’re just too tired.”
Final Meeting
A fifth meeting was necessary at this point. The final step of this meeting was that the complete data from the surveys would be reviewed at this next meeting, and that current proposals and recommendations would be developed into formal recommendations that the Committee would approve. Recommendations regarding the event experience (such as to speakers, swag, student recognition, celebration experience, and music) would also be developed at this next meeting.
As to why a fifth meeting was necessary, Gabriel Castaño explained that an additional meeting was hosted “mostly because we shortened [the] length of the meetings, so that our students could participate between classes, so we needed one more meeting to get things done.” The co-chairs also had “asked Dr. Simpson for a small deadline extension which she agreed to. We added one more meeting, which added 1 more week to our process. We did not want to rush this process and it was very important to make sure we were data-informed and that our student’s [sic] had a voice in the process.”
John Kinsey, shortly after the fourth meeting, hypothesized that it was due to the scope of the problems. He stated that “[my opinion is that] they didn’t account for how complicated this was going to be, which I think that’s pretty obvious. But that, you know, that’s been Front Range for about two years now.”
This fifth meeting was held on October 26th. The recommendations from the fourth meeting were reviewed first, and Chico Garcia, the Dean of Student Development, suggested a recommendation of one spring ceremony and one fall ceremony. Oliver Hatcher, Larimer Campus’s SGA representative, became concerned that this would stick and lead down the path of one spring commencement, which was not possible because of the non-existence of the aforementioned “magic venue.”
The Committee overall decided to stick with a third recommendation but only if there were a “critical mass of graduates” in both the fall and spring, deciding also that the second recommendation of two spring ceremonies was preferable. The final data of the surveys were then presented and reviewed. The data reviewed at the fourth meeting was not focused on here, but essentially remained the same with minor differences.
Survey questions that were focused on in the meeting were what would make someone proud to be an FRCC graduate and to create a meaningful, memorable experience on the student survey, and what factors made alumni attend commencement as well as the most enjoyable parts of commencement to alumni on their respective survey.
An alumni t-shirt and swag garnered the most responses on the student survey (over 230), while music and an inspirational speaker were in second and third place, garnering nearly 170 responses each. Celebrating with family was overwhelmingly the top response on factors for attending commencement, with over 40 alumni answering this. Finally, crossing the stage was the most enjoyable part of commencement, with 36 alumni answering this. In second place was “marking the occasion in traditional cap and gown”, with 30 responses.
Recommendations concerning the event experience were instructed to be made, with the Committee split into two breakout groups. They devised some strategies to keep the commencement to around 2 hours in length, namely grouping students by degrees, hiring professional name callers (which was considered a critical recommendation to see to this and student names being pronounced correctly), and having 2 lines of students.
The Committee also agreed to keep the speakers to two: one keynote speaker and a student speaker, in line with data from the surveys. They also discussed the idea of sharing on social media speeches of students that had not been selected to speak but who expressed a desire to. The Committee also recommended the commencement planning teams to allow students to wear cords and stoles that highlight club and organization involvement, with clubs and student organizations being involved in this.
Finally, the Committee was open to livestreaming the event, encouraging social media engagement and possibly creating a mural that students and their families and other guests could take pictures in front of. As for music, the playing of bagpipes and the song Pomp and Circumstance were considered highly important to occur at the ceremony, with the students on the Committee relaying the importance of the former.
The final step of this Committee was that the co-chairs and Drew Arnold would draft these event experience recommendations. These would be presented alongside the other recommendations by John Kinsey, Oliver Hatcher, and Rocio Villalobos-Quintero, Boulder County Campus’s sole student representative on the Committee, to the President’s Cabinet on November 13th.
According to Castaño, Oliver and Rocio did not help present this data, leaving only Kinsey to do so. Additionally, “President Simpson has tasked the Commencement Planning Team with bringing these recommendations to life,” he said.
At the end of all this, Gabriel Castaño seemed to be satisfied with the Committee’s progress, simply stating, “I feel it was very successful. … I believe this was a perfect example of how to use quantitative and qualitative data from our systems, from students directly, and from faculty and staff to develop recommendations that truly speak to the desires of our community.”
“Ultimately, this committee’s role was simply to collect data, evaluate data, and provide several recommendations to the President and her Cabinet. The committee did just that,” he continued. “I was personally excited to hear our students say, and I quote, ‘I feel heard’. It was very important to me that students were a part of this process.”
Be on the lookout for a follow-up to this article about the graduation plans for Spring 2024’s commencement sometime early next semester!