ACC Board of Trustees Candidates Are Thinking About Affordability

Austin Community College Rio Grande Campus (photo by John Anderson)

Cole Wilson had barely made it through high school. He was living at home and had no concrete plan to continue his education.

“I was making what my mother called 'questionable decisions,’” Wilson said. “My brother called me up and said, 'Get up here to Austin, move in with me, and try your hand at college for a minute.’ It changed my life.”

In 2012, Wilson began attending Austin Community College, the local institution that has changed a lot of lives in its 51-year history. ACC occupies a sweet spot in the community, providing high-quality instruction, often from professors who work or have worked at UT, for a fraction of UT’s cost – and, currently, for free if you’re a Central Texas high school graduate.

ACC serves 70,000 students at 11 campuses across the region and is in the midst of yet another expansion, thanks to a $770 million bond approved by voters in 2022. Its students are everything from teenage mothers to grandparents returning for a second or third degree. Nearly 80% of those who graduate go on to work in Texas. Many continue their education at other colleges and universities.

Wilson was one such student. After ACC, he attended UT and received a master’s degree from Harvard. Now he’s back in Austin, working as the legislative director for State Rep. Vicki Goodwin and running against Sherri Taylor for Place 7 on ACC’s board of trustees. (The Chronicle attempted to reach Taylor but found she did not have a campaign website or contact information available online. An ACC administrator said they were unable to help us find contact information.) Wilson told us that if he’s elected his first priority will be lowering housing costs for students.

“It’s gonna have to be 101 different ways of attacking this issue,” Wilson said, emphasizing the importance of building on-campus housing during the upcoming expansions. “You look at the Highland campus as a relatively good example, right? You build the campus and you make sure the developers are coming in with mixed use multifamily. That’s the perfect scenario: mixed use, affordable multifamily. It’s a tough nut to crack, but it’s one that needs to be cracked.”

Julie Ann Nitsch is running for re-election in Place 9 and also prioritizes housing affordability. She was homeless when she attended ACC in her early 20s, sleeping in the basement of the library building.

Nitsch points out that a significant chunk of the student body faces homelessness. A survey during the 2021-2022 school year found more than one in 10 had been homeless. “And what people don’t understand is that housing insecurity means that you’re staying with somebody, you’re crashing on somebody’s couch, or you’re living in an environment that doesn’t feel safe or secure. So that’s huge, when [a lot] of our students don’t feel like they have stable living arrangements.”

Nitsch has served on the board since 2016 and strongly supported last year’s pilot program eliminating tuition, which is set to expire with the class of 2028. She wants to make the program permanent and expand it to all students regardless of where they’re from. Nitsch was also instrumental in the effort to increase the minimum wage for ACC employees to $23 and has worked to get students access to child care, free bus passes, and free food.

Nitsch’s opponent, former ACC Chief Information Officer Joseph Sefton, believes in many of the same priorities as Nitsch and Wilson. But he said he would like to streamline services, particularly tech services, to keep taxes from rising. “I’m different than everybody else running,” Sefton said. “They want to do all these great things at taxpayer expense, and, to me, we’re already feeding in quite a bit of money.... So the idea is, I’m here to save the taxpayer money by repurposing those dollars rapidly and then providing them back to the students.”

Current trustee Stephanie Gharakhanian is running uncontested in Place 8.