Great Basin College President Joyce Helens to retire in 2024

Joyce Helens, president of the Elko-based Great Basin College (GBC), announced in an email to faculty and staff late Tuesday that she plans to retire about a year from now following the completion of a planned “consolidation” under UNR expected sometime next year. 

Her planned retirement on June 30, 2024, makes Helens the second Nevada community college president to signal an exit next summer. It follows a similar announcement from College of Southern Nevada (CSN) President Federico Zaragoza earlier this month. 

Appointed to the job in 2017 after a 10-year stint at a Minnesota community college, Helens’ announcement took aim at higher education funding levels set by state lawmakers — which vary based on institution type and student body makeup and have remained mixed following deep cuts during the pandemic and dating back to the Great Recession. 

“But because of this mission to support and build healthy communities in a rural setting, funding never measures up to the challenge regardless of our success, high graduation rates and online presence,” Helens said. 

Founded in 1967 as Elko Community College, GBC now serves more than 3,300 students with more than 400 faculty and staff spread across rural Nevada, including a main campus in Elko and satellite campuses in Battle Mountain, Ely, Pahrump and Winnemucca.

But beginning last year — after two years of enrollment attrition accelerated by the COVID pandemic — GBC and UNR announced a plan to “consolidate” operations under the university, a process administrators have pledged will retain GBC’s name and rural operations even as it becomes a college under UNR. 

“Continuing the legacy of rural access to higher education and training into the future is what has led me to help create unprecedented collaborations with the University of Nevada Reno which proved successful,” Helens said in her statement, adding that the “consolidation” is expected to finish by the end of 2024.

Helens did not immediately respond to an email requesting additional comment. However, speaking to The Nevada Independent about the UNR deal in August 2022, Helens pushed back on a description of it as a “merger,” and instead argued it would preserve the “legacy of higher education in rural Nevada.”

The post Great Basin College President Joyce Helens to retire in 2024 appeared first on The Nevada Independent.