An Expanding Arizona City Seeks a College to Grow With It

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By KARIN FISCHER

Ask James M. Cavanaugh, the mayor of Goodyear, Ariz., to envision what his booming community 20 minutes west of downtown Phoenix will look like in a decade, and he offers the image of a thriving city, with bustling shops, fine dining, and comfortable, well-educated families.

To achieve that dream, the mayor believes, the city must persuade a college to locate in Goodyear.

In February city officials sent out a request for information to hundreds of private colleges across the country, pitching Goodyear as a site to establish a four-year college or branch campus and seeking information about the academic philosophy, financial prospects, and strategic plan of potential suitors.

"We have tremendous growth here, but we want to make Goodyear more attractive to young people, to families, to employers looking for an educated work force," Mr. Cavanaugh says. "Having a college campus will make us more attractive."

While community leaders are beginning to emphasize the role of higher education in the economic fortunes of older, once-industrialized cities in the Northeast and Midwest, a handful of public officials in expanding communities in the West and South have also identified colleges as a key to attaining their development ambitions.

City leaders in Tracy, in California's San Joaquin Valley, have considered offering a parcel of municipally owned land to a college, public or private, that will build a campus there. In Lake Havasu City, in western Arizona, advocates formed a foundation to lobby for a four-year university and have been in discussions with Northern Arizona University, a public institution, about establishing a branch campus there.

The communities' efforts "harken back to an earlier era," says Jon W. Fuller, a consultant to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

A century ago, towns regularly competed to attract new campuses or to lure existing colleges to relocate. For example, Rollins College was founded in 1885 in Winter Park, Fla., after the community put together the strongest bid to attract the Congregationalist institution, Mr. Fuller says. Pomona College, named after its original hometown, relocated in 1889 to nearby Claremont, Calif., when college officials were offered an unfinished hotel and adjacent property.

"Colleges were seen as an important community resource," Mr. Fuller says. "They were what you needed to be a really first-class town."

But Mr. Fuller says it is far more difficult today to persuade a college, particularly a private institution, to relocate or to build a new campus. Most colleges, he says, "are pretty well established."

Goodyear's 16-question solicitation yielded nine responses from institutions across the country, and three college presidents have already visited to see the town firsthand, says Kelly Dalton, management assistant to the mayor and the City Council. City officials are putting together a group of experts in higher-education finance and accrediting issues to review the colleges' responses and to determine the next steps in the selection process..

Mr. Cavanaugh says he thinks there is pent-up demand for higher education in Arizona, the nation's second-fastest-growing state, which has just three major public universities and a handful of private colleges. Goodyear's population, now 40,000, is projected to grow at a rate of 17 percent annually, to 100,000 by 2010.

"People ask me why we're doing this," says Mr. Cavanaugh, who proposed the idea in his inaugural speech. "It's simple — I saw something lacking."