The College President Who Broke Ranks

 Coconino Community College was founded in 1991 to serve the county around Flagstaff, Arizona, amid fears that, as a local paper editorialized back then, many people there “cannot afford to or are not allowed to enroll at Northern Arizona University,” the local state school. For 30 years since, the community college has embraced its obligation to those underserved people, many of them low-income minorities, in keeping with its motto: “Start Small, Go Big.” Each spring CCC has held commencement on its small campus in Flagstaff, where it celebrates the modest number of graduates who move on to four-year schools. That is, until this May, when Coconino students received their first-ever invite to hold graduation at the big university down the road.

On the sprawling grounds of Northern Arizona University, a steady roar of applause and cheers greeted the graduates as they marched across the stage of NAU’s 1,350-seat auditorium to “Pomp and Circumstance,” wearing black and gold regalia and broad smiles. In a chorus of testimonials that brought attendees to tears, students recounted the many challenges that could have easily derailed this special day. Sawyer Anna Allison-Begay spoke about how she had to make the daily 100-mile round-trip journey from her Navajo Nation reservation to the community college so she could become the first in her family to earn an associate’s degree. This fall, she will continue her studies at the University of Arizona. Many of her classmates, however, planned to finish their bachelor’s degrees at their host for the day, NAU—something that the larger school’s new president not only welcomes but openly celebrates. During the ceremony, José Luis Cruz Rivera told the graduating class of mostly low-income, first-generation Hispanic students that each of them had a place at NAU. 

“The milestone that together we celebrate here today is a powerful reminder that better days are sure to come,” he told the students, pausing to summon the audience to deliver a rousing applause for those CCC students who will transfer to NAU in the fall.

Hosting the community college’s graduation ceremony is an example of a broader—and highly unconventional—strategy Cruz Rivera has brought to Northern Arizona University since his arrival as the school’s 17th president in 2021. A former state teacher’s college that has grown over time into a well-regarded regional university, NAU provides a wide array of four-year and graduate degree programs to an economically and racially diverse population of mostly in-state students. But in the pecking order of status and public funds, the school sits behind the state’s flagship, the University of Arizona, and the burgeoning Arizona State. 

Normally, an ambitious college president coming to a place like NAU would seek to make the school “better” in certain prescribed ways. One is to admit a “better” class of students—that is, become more academically selective, which also brings students from wealthier families and hence more tuition dollars. Another is to become a nationally recognized research institution—the strategy Cruz Rivera’s predecessor followed. Such moves help colleges rise on the indexes that most determine prestige in the higher ed world—the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which doles out coveted “R1” designations for universities that spend big money on research, and U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings. 

What striving college presidents almost never do is make their institutions less selective and pour funds into programs that meet local needs rather than burnish their national reputations. Yet that’s precisely what Cruz Rivera has done. Over the last three years he has loosened NAU’s admissions standards to accept almost anyone from Arizona who applies. He has implemented free tuition for students from families earning less than $65,000. He has ramped up outreach to community colleges, high schools in low-income and minority areas, and members of Indigenous tribes. He has created partnerships with Arizona employers so his students have a better chance of landing decent jobs when they graduate. And he has begun to build a new school of medicine to train physicians to work in underserved areas of the state. 

It is not, in short, a strategy designed to elevate NAU’s place on U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings—though it might just boost its position on the Washington Monthly’s. And that’s fine with Cruz Rivera. His ultimate aim at Northern Arizona University is to redefine what “better” means in higher education. On a Monday-afternoon stroll through campus this past May, Cruz Rivera’s eyes widened with excitement as he talked to me about NAU’s future. “We’re interested in postcollege outcomes for our students,” he added. “Are they getting good, high-paying jobs that will provide them with family-sustaining wages? Are they positioned for success in their careers? Are they getting into graduate schools that will allow them to meet their full potential?” 

Though Cruz Rivera’s strategy for NAU is unconventional, it is garnering praise from political leaders on both sides of the aisle in Arizona—and attention from organizations that matter in the world of higher education reform. That includes foundations, which have invested more than $50 million in NAU since Cruz Rivera’s arrival. Bill Gates, who was NAU’s 2023 commencement speaker, marveled that “something remarkable and all too rare is happening in Flagstaff.” 

Truth be told, Cruz Rivera wasn’t looking for a job when he received a call out of the blue in late 2020 asking if he might be interested in becoming NAU’s next president. The nation was then in the throes of a global pandemic, and the soft-spoken administrator seemed perfectly content as the executive vice chancellor and university provost of the City University of New York. Cruz Rivera was second in command of the largest urban university system in the nation, where he oversaw 25 campuses, a student population of about 500,000, and a broad portfolio that included academic affairs, student affairs, enrollment management, and research. To take a job at this regional university of about 30,000students might have looked like a step down for an academic who was at the apex of a long career that had included stints as president and provost at CUNY and Cal State schools.

“I thought this would be my last job,” he told me, matter-of-factly.

What striving college presidents almost never do is make their institutions less selective and pour funds into programs that meet local needs rather than burnish their national reputations. Yet that’s precisely what Cruz Rivera has done.

But Cruz Rivera saw the NAU opening as an exciting opportunity. At the beginning of his career, he rose through University of Puerto Rico schools to become chief student affairs officer for the entire system, before moving to the mainland. Now he had the chance to work for another Hispanic-serving institution—a federal designation that NAU received in 2021—but this time as president, with the power to transform the school. And as it happened, Cruz Rivera was brimming with ideas. He had just finished serving on the Post-secondary Value Commission, a nationwide panel of higher ed leaders and experts focused on making college a better return on investment, both for students and for society. “Postsecondary value” is a bit of higher ed jargon that refers to the ways to measure the returns colleges and universities provide for the money we put into them. Those could be economic payoffs, like producing graduates who can support themselves with productive work that’s valuable to society, and they could be more abstract, like encouraging civic participation and social justice, promoting arts and culture. Cruz Rivera decided to focus his presidency on increasing postsecondary value, making his primary concern not the welfare of his institution but that of its graduates and the community around it.

“As we went through the search process, during each stage, it became a little more evident that this was the kind of job description that I had been working toward,” said Cruz Rivera, who is the first Latino to lead NAU. “It had all the major elements: a big emphasis on access, student success, cultivating a teacher-scholar model rather than a high-intensity research effort, better engaging with the community, serving underserved communities. It all seemed to make sense.” 

In the immediate years prior to Cruz Rivera’s arrival, NAU had been facing an identity crisis. Like other college presidents throughout the nation, his predecessor, Rita Hartung Cheng, had taken steps to position NAU as an R1 school, confident that such a designation as a high-activity research institution would make the school much more prestigious and competitive. 

But not everyone was convinced that this was the right strategy. NAU had a limited base of financial resources and research power with which to pursue a determined campaign in the U.S. News rankings. Meanwhile, many professors and administrators felt that a hunt for prestige was less important than making NAU accessible to the community, which has been a priority since the university’s early years. When the school was founded in 1899 as a teacher’s college, it served as an economic backstop during the Depression years, when it trained up jobless people and placed them into the local workforce through New Deal programs. In the postwar years, NAU built a diverse student population and grew steadily to become competitive in enrollment with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona. Chasing cachet above all else wasn’t the NAU way.

“It just felt like a stretch,” Julie Mueller, who is currently the chief economic adviser to the president and has taught economics at NAU since 2008, said of the focus on research. Facing pushback on her vision and controversy over a state audit of her travel expenditures, Cheng decided not to renew her contract in 2021.

When Cruz Rivera was hired to replace her, he didn’t waste time getting started. In fact, he arrived in Flagstaff in April 2021, three months before he officially began his new job, to commence what he called a “learning tour.” It was important to him both to understand the campus’s needs and to get to know the university leaders whose buy-in could help him achieve his goals. To that end, he filled his cabinet with advisers who knew the campus and shared his priorities—advisers like Mueller, who had been skeptical of NAU’s prior focus. “It was really exciting to hear what [Cruz Rivera’s] vision was for the institution because it felt like something we could do really well and that resonates here,” Mueller told me.

When he formally started work, in June 2021, Cruz Rivera convened a presidential transition committee, assembling seven different university-wide working groups to chart out a strategic plan for the next three years. What emerged from that process in May 2022 was a new road map that acknowledged the school’s legacy of inclusion while updating its methods for the future. The plan is based on three main pillars: creating a universal admissions program with an academic pathway for every student who applies; making tuition-free college education available and accessible to every Arizona resident with a household income of $65,000 or below; and dramatically increasing the number of Indigenous people who enroll at NAU and finish degrees. In short, Cruz Rivera hopes to get more students from underserved backgrounds into NAU, to get them their degrees on time or even early, and to ensure that they’re civically engaged and ready for the workforce. “And we do all of this while keeping the cost affordable for students and parents,” he told me. 

Laurie Dickson, vice president for university strategy and senior associate to the president, recalled that although there was excitement about the arrival of the new president, the campus was still feeling some “skepticism” about big changes after the past few years of Cheng’s leadership. However appealing his message, Cruz Rivera was another university president coming in with big policy changes to sell—changes that would require a lot of work from faculty and administrators to implement. But, she told me, “listening to him speak, he is also very convincing because he is so authentic, and it truly aligned with the vast majority of people, especially those of us who have been here for a very long time.” 

With a plan in place, Cruz Rivera started off by making structural changes to NAU’s bureaucracy. Too often at large universities, leaders are siloed in their own offices—admissions, athletics, financial aid, academic support—and miss opportunities to collaborate. One of Cruz Rivera’s first official acts after releasing the strategic plan, in June 2022, was to announce an office of “Social Mobility and Economic Impact,” which would consider university-wide changes that could help students from underserved communities get access to an education at NAU and finish their degrees. To lead the office, Cruz Rivera brought in Jonathan S. Gagliardi, a longtime CUNY colleague who has led social mobility and student retention efforts both in that system and nationwide.

Gagliardi’s team launched into a top-to-bottom evaluation of the school’s financial aid process, which had not been updated in some time. What they found, according to Anika Olsen, vice president of enrollment management at NAU, were long-standing inequitable gaps in how the school assessed students for admission. They learned that approximately 50,000 high school students, many of them students of color, attended schools where they were only required to take 14 core courses to graduate. By comparison, NAU and the other four-year public institutions in Arizona had long required 16 core courses and a 3.0 GPA. 

“That was not equitable, and that was policy,” Olsen told me. Those admissions standards were set by the Arizona Board of Regents, which meant that statewide policy had to change. Administrators at NAU worked with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, and in February 2022 persuaded the board to reduce the requirement from 16 core courses to 14. Now, any Arizona high school student is offered admission to NAU if they have a 2.75 or higher core GPA (based on a 4.0 scale and calculated using only the 14 required core courses).

One of the officials Cruz Rivera had to lobby to change the statewide rules was Lyndel Manson, a former chair of the Arizona Board of Regents. Manson, who was appointed by former Republican Governor Doug Ducey, heralded NAU’s decision as a bold intervention. “I think we have pigeonholed ourselves in this state in terms of who goes to college, and I think we have missed an opportunity to serve more broadly,” Manson said when the new admissions criteria were announced. “I think [this is] going to be truly important moving forward to meet the broader needs of the state.”

It is one thing to open admissions to students who had previously been shut out, quite another for those students to afford to attend. To make the latter possible, Cruz Rivera successfully lobbied for extra state funding, and last fall, the university began offering free tuition for every Arizona resident from a family with a household income of $65,000 or below. Approximately 50 percent of Arizona households currently meet this financial threshold. 

When admitted students apply for financial aid, they’re often confused by the bureaucratic language involved, especially if they’re the first in their families to attend college. So the university removed jargony terms like “Pell eligible” and instead stated plainly what the family income threshold for tuition assistance is. No longer does the university leave students second-guessing if they can even afford an education in the first place. 

These changes weren’t just serving NAU’s goals; they also were meeting the state’s workforce needs. In Arizona’s booming economy, nearly seven out of 10 jobs require some kind of education or training after high school, whether a certificate, license, or college degree. Meanwhile, as Cruz Rivera noted to me, the state ranks poorly in educational attainment and the percentage of adults with a college degree. 

One way to boost those numbers, the NAU team knew, was to lure back to campus former students who had accumulated credits but had left without earning a degree. Thanks to support from the Lumina Foundation, the university in July 2022 launched Jacks on Track—a program to attract students back to NAU who dropped out sometime in the 2020–21 academic year. (Jacks is a reference to the Lumberjack, NAU’s mascot.) Although the number of returning NAU students remains small—about 11 percent—it is still much higher than the national return rate of about 2 percent.

“When students are debating whether to come back and complete, they’re thinking, ‘How am I going to fit this into my life?’ ” Olsen told me, adding that the outreach strategy has been to focus on students who have already earned 90 or more credits and are close to reaching the 120 needed to complete the degree. 

Another way for NAU to meet the workforce needs of the state is to ensure that its curricula are aligned to the job requirements that graduates will need for the future. To that end, Cruz Rivera created the Office of Workforce Development, which works directly with businesses like the Phoenix Suns and Kind Hospitality, a restaurant management company, to make sure that students have the skills needed for work and jobs waiting for them after college. Earlier this year, NAU’s School of Hotel and Restaurant Management opened a workforce development center in partnership with Kind Hospitality near the Phoenix-Mesa airport, where undergraduate business students can train in the hospitality industry and enter a pipeline to jobs in the Phoenix area.

It is one thing to open admissions to students who had previously been shut out, quite another for those students to afford to attend. To make the latter possible, Cruz Rivera successfully lobbied for extra state funding.

With programs like these, Cruz Rivera is leaning into one of the inherent strengths of institutions like NAU. Unlike elite flagships, which attract many students from out of state who then scatter across the country and the world after graduation, regional universities like NAU overwhelmingly educate in-state students who go on to build their careers in the state. This means that the money state governments spend on regional universities has, according to recent studies, a better rate of return for taxpayers than dollars spent on flagship universities. (See Zach Marcus, “Those Colleges With ‘State’ in Their Names.”) 

Cruz Rivera’s constant efforts to train low- and middle-income students for jobs in the local workforce have also helped him to avoid culture wars over “wokeness” in higher education. Even as he works to increase the diversity of NAU’s population—half of which is now people of color, slightly ahead of ASU and UA—he has avoided Republican wrath over “DEI” by relentlessly focusing on jobs.

The region around NAU has its own character and particular needs. Much of it is made up of Indian reservations. There are pockets of wealth, like Sedona, and a great deal of poverty. If the new mission of NAU was to better meet the region’s needs, Cruz Rivera realized, he was going to need to do some institution building.

One problem that has plagued the region—and the whole state, for that matter—is a shortage of physicians and access to health care, especially in rural, Indigenous, and other underserved communities. In September 2023, Cruz Rivera announced the creation of the NAU College of Medicine, which he believes will address those disparities by training doctors and partnering directly with Native American nations to fill health care gaps. Schools of medicine typically bring money and prestige to their institutions by charging high tuition to teach students in lucrative specialties like orthopedic surgery. Building a med school that prepares doctors in less lucrative specialties like primary care in order to serve the community, not the college, is rare. 

Meanwhile, to bring more Native American students to the campus, NAU made its new tuition waivers available to all Indigenous students regardless of family income. Just as importantly, to get them to graduation, Cruz Rivera needed programs to make them feel welcome and secure. He created the Seven Generations Signature Initiative, a residential community where Native American students can live together and explore Indigenous intellectual, social, and cultural life. But whereas the new medical school could be funded by tuition and grants, to pay for Seven Generations and several other key programs he turned to the private sector. 

After Cruz Rivera secured $5 million from the Mellon Foundation to bolster the school’s work with the Indigenous community, he convinced the NAU Foundation that they should match the initiative with $5 million. 

“I would have loved that when I was in college,” says Ann Marie Chischilly, vice president of Native American Initiatives, a cabinet-level position in Cruz Rivera’s administration. “You’re with students who understand your cultural obligations, your family obligations.” 

Chischilly, who is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation (Diné), said 150 students have participated in the living-learning community. Thanks to a renewed focus on this demographic, coupled with a slew of wraparound services to provide academic and social supports, the enrolling Native American freshman class has increased by 47 percent over the past year. Indigenous students currently make up about 8 percent of NAU’s student body, up from about 5 percent last year. 

The policy reforms Cruz Rivera has made at NAU have happened in record time, according to experts I talked with who study how university leaders bring about change. And more are on the way. For instance, a statewide collaboration with 10 community college districts, including Coconino Community College, aims to boost the state’s college-going rate through dual credit programs, career and college advising, and automatic admission to four-year institutions. This last initiative will connect any applicant who doesn’t meet NAU’s academic requirements to a local community college, after which they can transfer to the university without any further application once they’re ready. A pilot program for the fall 2023 semester with CCC drew nearly 700 students from that school alone.

It’s that kind of fast-paced collaboration that has the state’s community college leaders singing Cruz Rivera’s praises. “He is the first university president that I’ve worked with who gets the mission of the community college and sees the relationship as complementary and not competitive,” Eric Heiser, the president of CCC, told me. “He and I are brothers from another mother.”

The jury is still out on what kind of long-term impact all these changes will have at NAU, and whether these efforts can or will be replicated at other institutions across the nation. What is clear is that Cruz Rivera has succeeded in turning abstract ideas about the value of college into concrete reality. And at a time when so many college leaders are averse to taking risks, his ideas are generating chatter across academe and beyond. 

Cruz Rivera likes to walk or bike the two and a half miles from his home to the campus each day. It’s an opportunity for him to interact and engage with students, who now recognize him from his presence on Instagram, where he posts selfies with community members, mini reviews of restaurants, and videos of his miniature dachshund, Jax. 

Last spring, he returned to the classroom for the first time in more than a decade, where he taught 35 first-year students in an electrical engineering course that met twice a week. He has signed up to teach the class again this fall. 

“It was exciting and nerve-racking because I had not taught in 13 years and I had never taught freshmen,” he said. “Students have changed in terms of the way that they learn and interact and so I wasn’t sure what quite to expect, but it was a remarkable experience.”

He is more sure of what kind of school he ultimately wants NAU to be. “I want to get out of the business of sending rejection letters,” he told me, “and into the business of providing options, because if somebody gets to the point where they aspire to higher education, we have to then meet them where they are and give them the options so that they can meet their full potential.”

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