As Iowa’s community college system marks six decades, three EICC voices reflect on what has changed, what has endured and why opportunity close to home still matters.
When Mardell Mommsen Flippen first walked through the doors of EICC’s Clinton campus in 1978, she was fresh out of high school and enrolled in the secretarial program. One of her first classes? Typing. Not on a laptop. Not even on a memory (otherwise known as electronic) typewriter.
“On a typewriter,” she said.
After graduating, Flippen took a job at the college and never really left. More than
46 years later, she serves as Clinton Community College’s registrar. She has watched
mimeograph machines give way to computers, floppy disks disappear and online learning
completely change when, where and how students go to college.
But ask what has kept her here through all that change, and the answer comes easily.
“Students. And seeing them succeed.”
In many ways, her answer gets at the heart of a story much bigger than one campus — or one piece of technology.
This year marks 60 years since Iowa legislators passed the Area Schools Act in 1966, helping create the statewide community college system we know today. Two-year colleges and trade schools were already serving students across Iowa, but the legislation brought them together into a coordinated system built around local access.
60 Years in Muscatine
The idea was simple: Iowans should be able to learn, build skills and create better lives without having to leave their communities to do it.
Over the years, what that looks like has grown considerably. Today, community colleges prepare students to transfer to universities, train for careers, earn college credit while still in high school, build new skills for the workplace and keep learning at every stage of life.
At Eastern Iowa Community Colleges, that 60-year story lives in the people who helped shape it — and the students who continue to walk through our doors.
Building something new
Robert Bina remembers when EICC’s Scott campus was still becoming the comprehensive college students know today.
An artist and educator, Bina was teaching part time at Palmer Junior College while also serving in the Iowa Legislature when he received a call from then-college leader Mike Crawford. Crawford wanted to talk about bringing Palmer Junior College and Eastern Iowa Community Colleges together.
The conversations and decisions that followed in the late 1970s brought Palmer’s arts and sciences offerings into Scott Community College, adding programs such as art, music, art history and other transfer disciplines alongside the college’s technical programs.
“So it was a blending then of the opportunities,” Bina recalled.
And the students reflected that mix. Bina remembers teaching people at all different ages and stages of life. One group in particular stands out: women returning to college.
Some were raising children. Some were beginning again after years away from school. Others were finally pursuing an opportunity that had not been possible earlier in their lives.
They were motivated, Bina said, and together with recent high school graduates and other students, they created a diverse classroom filled with people heading in all kinds of directions.
60 years in Scott
That was part of what Bina loved about community college teaching. He had worked in several educational settings, but here he found people looking for an opportunity — to transfer, learn a skill, try something new or simply figure out what might come next.
Decades later, Bina is still doing a little of that himself. After retiring, traveling the world and spending years away from the college, he recently returned through EICC’s free community college month classes. His course list was eclectic: tire repair, automotive work, poetry and gaming.
Coming back gave him a chance to see just how much had changed. It also reminded him
of what had not.
“You are still serving the community in the same diversified way,” he said, adding
that the college has “blossomed” in the many ways it now reaches people.
From six credits to 50
Carrie Jackson’s EICC story begins in a much different era.
As a high school student in the late 1990s, Jackson was among the early students able to take advantage of concurrent enrollment. There weren’t nearly as many options as students have today. To take English Composition I and II, she traveled to EICC’s Scott campus. For a high school student, that was part of the fun.
“You got to come to the Scott campus, and it kind of made you feel like you’re pretty important,” Jackson recalled.
It also gave her an early look at what college would be like. She learned how to read a syllabus, tackled the heavier writing load of a college English course and graduated from high school with six college credits already behind her. Because her high school covered the tuition, those credits also came at no cost to her family.
Six credits might not sound like much today. But for Jackson, they were the start
of something much bigger.
She continued at EICC, completed her general education courses and earned her degree
in Health Information Management. Eventually, she came back to the college as an employee,
first as a faculty member and now as dean of health sciences.
And now her story has come full circle. This year, Jackson’s daughter is beginning college, too. Only she is starting with more than 50 college credits already completed.
For Jackson, the difference between her six credits and her daughter’s 50-plus shows just how far concurrent enrollment has come.
“When I first started, we didn’t have as many offerings as we do now,” she said.
Today, high school students across the region can earn college credit in their schools, online, on EICC campuses and through career academies across the district. What once gave Jackson a six-credit head start can now put students well on their way toward a degree before they ever receive a high school diploma.
Of course, the savings matter. But Jackson believes the experience gives students something else, too: momentum.
“You’ve already got that path started,” she said. “Once you start taking college classes, you’re more apt to keep taking them even after you graduate high school.”
Changing with the community
Typewriters became laptops. Courses moved online. New programs opened. New careers emerged. New facilities changed the way students learn. High school students went from earning a handful of credits to sometimes finishing much of a degree before graduation. Workforce training changed alongside the employers and industries EICC serves.
And through it all, the students changed, too.
Flippen has watched generations of them arrive at Clinton Community College nervous, unsure and sometimes hesitant to ask for help. Then, little by little, she watches many of them find their footing. They gain confidence. They get involved. They become leaders.
“I learn something new from everybody that walks through those doors,” she said. “I learn a new way to help that student succeed.”
It is why she still tells students there is no such thing as a bad question. The only bad question, she says, is the one you go home wishing you had asked.
60 Years in Clinton
Flippen can give plenty of reasons students choose a community college — affordability, great instructors and the ability to stay close to home among them. But there is something else she believes matters just as much.
“Once you get here, we’re all family,” she said.
Sixty years have brought plenty of change, but that sense of belonging — and the larger promise behind Iowa’s community colleges — has endured.
Meet people where they are. Pay attention to what communities need. Make education feel possible.
Bina saw it in adults returning to the classroom decades ago. Flippen has watched it happen one student at a time for more than 46 years. Jackson experienced it first as a high school student and now helps create those same opportunities for the next generation.
Ask Jackson what EICC means to her after all these years, and she comes back to a phrase that could just as easily describe the idea Iowa set in motion 60 years ago.
“It’s college for everybody,” she said.
Different ages. Different backgrounds. Different goals. That is the point.
Because buildings will change. Technology will change. The jobs students are preparing for will change.
But after 60 years, the most important part of the community college story remains the same: Open the door — and help students walk through it.