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In first year as president, Christensen sees bright future for Clarkson
BY: Tom Graser
Watertown Daily Times
POTSDAM — Just shy of the first anniversary of his inauguration as Clarkson University president, Marc P. Christensen said that when many colleges struggle to survive, Clarkson is in a position to thrive.
He said one sign is the continued interest from tech companies in Clarkson graduates.
“We had 207 companies at our career fair on campus about three weeks ago,” Christensen said Tuesday. “Those 207 companies brought about 500 people to campus to interview our students. There were 19,000 job listings on our software portal for the students. For a small, private school like Clarkson, that’s absolutely astounding.”
Christensen came to Potsdam from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he was dean of the Lyle School of Engineering. He replaced longtime university president Anthony G. Collins, who retired in July 2022 after a 40-year career at Clarkson.
As a traditional technological university, Clarkson has a significant advantage, Christensen said.
“We’re focused on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math),” Christensen said. “We are graduating the graduates most in demand in the country.”
Clarkson, he said, has been making an impact on its students for a long time.
When he was first announced as Clarkson’s 17th president, he started to hear from alumni.
“They all had incredible stories to tell and wonderful things to say about Clarkson,” he said. “At the core of every story they told about Clarkson, was that the education provided here made their life possible. And having that many alumni all saying the same thing — completely loyal to the education and the skills they learned here, that sustained them through an entire career.”
And it is not just the students who benefit.
“This is a life-changing place, not only for them, but if you think about our first-generation college students and Pell-eligible students, we literally get to transform family trees,” Christensen said.
In a time when people are beginning to balk at the price of a college education, Christensen said people need to focus on the investment. The price isn’t the complete picture, he said.
“I would encourage people to think about the value of a college education. There are places you could go to pay less for a degree, but what I want to know is, are they going to provide the value and the access? What do you get when you furnish an education like we do at Clarkson?” Christensen said. “We have 97% in a job in their first 60 days, with high-paying salaries. It is a return on investment. This is the biggest investment individuals are going to make. You may buy a house, but that house you live in for an average of seven years. A college education is going to serve you for the rest of your life. Clarkson students are able to earn in a way that they can pay back whatever student debt they face. The ratio of student debt to starting salaries is something we can be very proud of here.”
This year Clarkson has seen a year-over-year increase in enrollment. With a total of about 3,000 undergrads, there are 668 new undergrads this fall compared to 642 last year.
There has been an increase in post-grad students too. There are 455 new post-grad students this year compared to 343, and a total of 1,236 with more coming in January.
One change Christensen said he would like to see in enrollment is students from other parts of the country finding Clarkson.
Right now, 97% of Clarkson students come from the Northeast.
“In the north country, Clarkson has a reputation that precedes it. We talk to anyone and they know what to expect from a Clarkson grad,” Christensen said. “When I talk to places around the other parts of the country, they don’t know Clarkson as well yet. So that’s a privilege I have. I get to carry the message of this incredible institution out to other parts of the country. I want people all across the globe to know what a gem Clarkson is, sitting right here in the north country.”
Clarkson is adding micro credential opportunities for its students to create graduates ready to work for today’s high-tech employers.
Christensen said there has always been tension between academia and companies on what students should know when they graduate.
Companies want to hire graduates, but they want them to come with specific skills, while universities want students to be able to think, not just use tools.
“And so when the industry comes and says we love your students, but we want these skills, the traditional response from the academia has been, well, we’d love to get them those skills, too. But we have accreditation, we have all these basic pieces, we need to teach them how to think, how to learn — not a specific skill,” Christensen said.
Micro credentials are one solution to the problem, he said.
“At Clarkson, that micro credential has to have three things in order to level up a student. It has to have a set of skills that the industry has defined as relevant,” he said. “The second thing it needs to have is a pedagogical designer that’s an expert in figuring out how to develop a hybrid system that has online courseware and the appropriate sort of testing mechanisms. And the third one, and this is what I think is really unique to Clarkson, is there has to be faculty associated with certifying the knowledge base.”
The micro credential is as rigorous as a short course and when a student completes one, they get a stamp that says, this is what I know and here is what I learned, Christensen said.
“So imagine that you’re NYPA (New York Power Authority) and you want the engineers you’re hiring to know certain pieces you use regularly. It’s the things you might be training them in during their first two years on the job,” he said. “You can create a micro credential for that, we’ll put the students through it and now the students that are headed into that sector know this is what the industry is looking for.”
Companies have supported courses at Clarkson in specific software applications like Python language syntax, which is used heavily in web development, data science and data analysis, machine learning, startups and the finance industry. Micro credentials in digital transformation, advanced project management tools and techniques, and introduction to major building systems are some of the most popular, according to the university.
Christensen said Clarkson’s relationship with state officials is invaluable and unique.
“When I realized the resources that the state government had put into Clarkson, a private institution, in the past, in terms of both its infrastructure and buildings,” Christensen said. “We’re able to support job creation with the Center for Advanced Material Processing and in our Healthy Water Solution Center. In other states, those typically reside only at state institutions. The fact that New York is forward-looking enough to realize that education and higher education lifts all boats is incredibly, incredibly attractive and forward-looking and basically, lets us unlock some value that a lot of places will have hidden away other places.”
Clarkson is positioned to be a big part of the Micron project in the Syracuse area, Christensen said. In 2022, Micron announced its plans to build the largest semiconductor fabrication facility in the history of the United States. Micron intends to invest up to $100 billion over the next 20-plus years to construct a new megafab in Clay, with the first-phase investment of $20 billion planned by the end of this decade.
Micron said the new megafab will increase the domestic supply of leading-edge memory, create nearly 50,000 New York jobs and represent the most significant private investment in New York’s history.
“There’s two areas of expertise that Clarkson brings, that they have decade-long experience in. The first is chemical-mechanical planarization,” Christensen said. “It’s how to take the semiconductor wafers — and as you put these tiny features and build up these mountains of transistor technology — how do you get it to keep it flat enough between steps to be able to continue to do smaller and smaller features? That’s something that we have 30 years of experience with.”
The other has to do with clean water. He said Micron has pledged to have water leaving the fabrication facility to be cleaner than when it went in.
“We had one of the first research contracts in place with Micron; it was on clean water because they knew how critical this was going to be for their green fab(rication),” Christensen said.
Empire State Development Commissioner Hope Knight, speaking at the recent Center for Advanced Materials Processing’s Chemical Mechanical Planarization Conference in Lake Placid, cited the economic impact of Clarkson’s CAMP, one of 15 Centers for Advanced Technology in the state.
Over the past decade, CAMP has helped New York companies generate $245 million in economic impact, she said, creating and retaining nearly 400 jobs.
Christensen said they can’t get complacent despite his optimistic outlook for Clarkson.
“If you’re not gaining, you’re losing ground,” he said. “If we don’t keep moving, there are going to be other people who have great job placement statistics, who are graduating fantastic graduates, so we’ve got to be pushing forward and advancing all the time.”
Christensen recently led a values exercise with students, faculty, staff, alumni and donors as part of building up to a strategic planning activity.
“This has to be a 10-year audacious vision of who we are and what we should do. And so it started with the values to say, OK, these are the values of Clarkson,” he said.
They will determine what the institution is doing that impacts the community — What students and faculty are being recruited? What new curriculum could be developed? What new jobs could be created?
“And that becomes a playbook,” he said.
A little over a year ago, Christensen was in Dallas, fighting the heat and the traffic. He is in a very different place now.
“Nobody gets to Potsdam by accident,” Christensen said. “I’m here on purpose. We have things to do. It is astounding to me how many things are lined up for Clarkson in the future. Bright days are ahead.”