Earlier this summer, Clackamas Community College President Tim Cook embarked on a unique and physically daunting challenge: running roughly 1,500 miles to visit all 17 community colleges in Oregon. He kicked off his run on June 16 at Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario as a way to raise money and awareness of the financial hardships community college students in Oregon face, from food insecurity to not having enough money to pay rent or utility bills. In 2023, for example, nearly two-thirds of Portland Community College students who responded to a basic needs survey reported experiencing either homelessness, housing insecurity or food insecurity.
On Wednesday, Cook completed the last leg of his 52-day journey in Hood River when he arrived at Columbia Gorge Community College. His “Running for Oregon Community College Students” campaign has raised so far more than $130,000 for community colleges to distribute directly to students in need. Cook joins us for more details and to share his thoughts about the current and long-term challenges Oregon community colleges face.
Editor’s Note: Tim Cook arrived at the last community college on his itinerary, Columbia Gorge Community College in Hood River, on Wednesday, Aug. 6. The celebration to mark the end of his run, however, happened the next morning, when Cook ran 2.5 miles with the Columbia Gorge President and several staff members from CGCC to the Columbia River.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Tim Cook went for a run on June 16 – and then the next day and the day after that. In fact, he ran every day up until yesterday, 52 days straight, totaling nearly 1,500 miles. Cook is the president of Clackamas Community College. His marathon of marathons was actually a tour of every community college in the state, all 17 of them, from Treasure Valley Community College in Malheur County, to Klamath Community College in the south, to Clatsop Community College at the mouth of the Columbia River. He did all this to raise money for and awareness of the financial hardships that community college students in Oregon are facing these days. He joins us now to talk about all of this. Congratulations and welcome to the show.
Tim Cook: Thank you so much, Dave. It’s great being here.
Miller: How are you feeling physically?
Cook: Physically, I feel great. Yeah, I actually felt like I got stronger as I went along, so I feel really good.
Miller: Had you ever done anything like this?
Cook: Nothing remotely like this. I’ve run marathons for about 20 years and I’ve run ultramarathons. I’ve run some back to backs, but nothing remotely along these lines.
Miller: What was the daily mileage?
Cook: The daily mileage averaged a little over 27 miles. The longest day was about 35 miles and then I had a few shorter days, but overall it was over a marathon a day.
Miller: Where’d you get the idea for doing this run?
Cook: I have to give credit to a faculty member from Clatsop Community College named Fernando Rojas. In 2021, he did a solo bike tour of all the community colleges to raise money for students at Clatsop. And when he came to Clackamas, I remember in my head thinking, “huh, I wonder if it’s possible to actually do that as a run” and really look at that as awareness. So it took a few years to kind of germinate, but I have to go back and give Fernando credit.
Miller: As I mentioned, you did this to call attention to the needs of community college students in Oregon right now. Can you give us a sense for what your students and those 16 other community colleges are facing right now?
Cook: Absolutely. So for many years, and this is even pre-pandemic, I’d noticed that more and more of our students were having struggles with food insecurity. We, like most colleges now, had food pantries and those were getting decimated every week, so I was seeing students go hungry. Then I was seeing more and more students that were either camping around campus or living in their cars. And then we were getting requests from our foundation for things like help paying for electricity bills and some other things.
So those numbers of students just seemed to really concern me and I think even more so when I would talk to people about it. I think many people just sort of thought that was just part of college life or sort of an everyday reality, and I just didn’t see it that way.
Miller: What do you mean by that? I mean, what are the maybe misconceptions that you would identify when you would talk to people in the community?
Cook: Yeah, I’ll give you an example. I remember talking about it one time to a group and just saying this is something that we really need to be thinking about. And somebody actually said, “When I was in college, I’d eat top ramen. I don’t really understand what the big deal is. When you’re a college student, you’re not gonna have a lot of money.” I think there’s this conception that many of our students are the 18-year-old that maybe is struggling a little bit to pay bills or eat. But really our students average in their 30s, they’re parents, they are part-time students, and they’re working and trying to to put all that together.
So it’s different than that traditional-age student … Myself and many others kind of had that experience where you might struggle to find some meals, but these are students who are really trying to make it work every day to go to school.
Miller: How much is what you’re talking about about community colleges or community college students specifically, as opposed to economic precarity more broadly?
Cook: I think there’s definitely a strong correlation to that and I feel like it’s exacerbated with just the economy right now, where things are. So I don’t know that they’re extraordinarily unusual in that way. But in my mind, it was what I was seeing every day and then along the lines of really seeing people that were trying to better themselves, or really trying to get degrees, get better jobs and better lives for their families. So that was, I think what concerned me, too, so many of them were so close to having to drop out because they couldn’t pay for daily needs.
Miller: What do you see as the reasons for this?
Cook: A number of things, right? Just costs are more. So, just paying for housing is so much more expensive, paying for food’s so much more expensive, and making choices along those lines. And there’s a cost to going to school. If you’re taking classes and you can’t work that much, that’s less money than you might normally be getting. So I think there’s a number of things.
Miller: The difference in the scale of the colleges that you visited is striking. Portland Community College, the largest, has over 50,000 full and part-time students – the total number of people who would take classes over the course of a year. Treasure Valley, where you started, has fewer than 1,500 total. Despite that, I’m curious about the commonalities that you found when you talked to students, faculty or staff at these very different schools.
Cook: Yeah, you go across 17 different communities, community colleges across the state, and there really are differences in some of the rural communities as opposed to some of the urban communities. I would say there might be more opportunities for resources for Portland Community College students than there would be for a Treasure Valley Community College student.
On the flip side of that though, I’d say with the smaller numbers, oftentimes the staff and folks there, they’re less likely to get lost in the shuffle. So they might be able to help some of the students more. But a commonality: every school has food pantries, every school has students that are struggling with housing. And that was something that is just happening all over Oregon and I’m sure over the country. I know it’s happening all over the country. I was just focused on Oregon.
Miller: As you noted, you started thinking about this run long before the current presidential administration. This was based on a bike ride that a Clatsop County faculty member did four years ago. But I’m curious how the current administration’s policies have already and might affect your students in the future.
Cook: I’ve had a lot of concerns about that actually. We are already struggling before this administration and just getting resources to students doing that. And now with cuts to SNAP benefits, cuts to Medicaid and other federal resources, I’m much more concerned about the impact that this is having or going to have on students. And some of that is directly translated to federal dollars coming in. Some of it will depend on what the state needs to pick up or can’t pick up for our funding down the road, too. So no, if anything, as I was out there running, I kept thinking boy, this problem is just continuing to get worse.
Miller: You mentioned state questions. What level of funding did Oregon lawmakers provide for community colleges in the session that just ended?
Cook: We were fortunate to get our current service level funding. So we didn’t take a cut, so to speak. But without getting too wonky about it, our current service level funding has been far below for several years what we really believe we need to serve our communities. We had asked for about $75 million more statewide than what we were able to get from the state. So I’m grateful that we got the current service level, but there’s still much more need that we have.
Miller: When we talk to professors at, or presidents of, other public universities – four-year schools in Oregon – and we hear about this piece of the question of state support, it’s often tied to tuition. You haven’t mentioned tuition yet and there are differences in terms of how much community college students would have to pay than four-year students would have to pay. But what’s the connection between state support for a community college and the kinds of issues that you were talking about earlier: paying for rent, say, or paying for food?
Cook: At Clackamas, about 40% of our funding comes from state dollars; about another 25% comes from local property tax. So, about a third or so comes directly from tuition. To put it in context, a 5-credit class, which is a pretty common class – a math class, psychology class or something like that – costs about $122 per credit. So, what’s that roughly … $600 for that class. So if you’re going full time, you’re paying $5,000-$6,000 per year in tuition, you’re paying for whatever the cost is for books and some other supplies, and that’s where I think people are having to make choices.
I remind people a lot that at Clackamas, over 70% of our students are part-time, not because they want to be, it’s because they’re trying to piece together how they pay for each of their classes and go on that way. They’re also paying for rent or they’re paying for food and the rest.
Miller: So you raised over $130,000, but as you’ve pointed out before, if there are around 200,000 community college students in the state, it doesn’t go very far if you divide that by the number of students. So really, this is less about a financial fix as a fundraiser and more about calling attention to the broader picture. What do you want listeners to do? What do you want people you passed along the way to do?
Cook: Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. For me, the most important piece of this whole run, this whole time out there, was to really raise awareness. You know, 200,000 community college students statewide; 52% of all higher ed students – public, private – in Oregon are community college students. We have small marketing budgets. We don’t have big sports teams. So we’re in the communities across the state, but I think often we get overlooked. So it was really important for me to just raise awareness about how phenomenal community colleges are and the work that we do, but that we’re underfunded. So that, I feel really good about, just raising awareness.
Secondly, that goal of $150,000 – we’re close, but we’re still not there – I hope we get to that $150,000 goal. It’s just barely scratching the surface, as you said, and it’s a one-time, I’m not doing this again. I’ve told a number of people that I’m not gonna go out and run the state again. So I’m really hoping that that will, in those communities, help a little bit, maybe it sparks some interest. I know at Clackamas, we’re thinking about more of an endowment so that there’s some continuing funds, and really fundraising for those types of things while we try to get more state and federal funds.
Miller: You ran a little bit along the way with some people you’d meet or people who’d meet up with you there. But my understanding is a lot of the time you were just by yourself, mile after mile. What was that like?
Cook: Yes, I ran about eight hours a day. I ran really slowly because I knew I had a lot of miles to put in. There were a number of times, because of the heat and elevation, that I walked. So I was out about eight hours a day every day and many days entirely by myself. Sometimes I was able to listen to music, podcasts or books. Many times, I was trying to be safe along some narrow shoulders and I was watching traffic.
I had lots of time to solve the world’s problems, really just think about life, and really enjoy just where I was and what was happening around me. It was pretty amazing.
Miller: What do you feel like you learned from this? The point of this was more to teach Oregonians about the life for community college students right now, but I’m curious what you yourself learned.
Cook: I just stopped yesterday, so I think I’m still learning. I’m still processing all of it. So my answer might be different in a week than it is today.
I hope this doesn’t sound trite – I’m a native Oregonian, but there are so many places that I got to see in the state that I’ve never seen before. I might have driven through, but I know there were towns that I’d never even heard of that I was running through. And you just see different things when you’re on foot than you do in a car and …
Miller: You have longer to see them. You have no choice but to look at them for longer. And you also have a different perspective.
Cook: And a different perspective. All over the state, people often were curious. They’d see our van. It had all the information about what we’re doing, so they’d ask about it. Oftentimes, I’d hear great stories about their experience at a community college, or their kids or somebody else that went there. It was pretty phenomenal just to meet people over and over again as we’re in these different places throughout the state. I say “we” because my wife drove the support van the entire time. There were other people helping, crew, but it was really the two of us that were together the whole time.
Miller: Is there one image that stands out to you today just as we’re talking?
Cook: There are a number of images that stand out to me today. The vistas I would see when I scale a mountain or something in the Cascades, in the Siskiyous or somewhere, and be going through forests by myself all day, get to the top and see these amazing views, and just think, wow, what a state we live in. After several days of 90 degree heat, getting to the coast, really feeling cooler weather and seeing the ocean is something I won’t forget. There are just so many images like that.
I tell people this a lot: running to each college was fun because each college had some sort of celebration as I came in. Tiny, little Tillamook Bay Community College, I got to run in with a little calf named Tinker Bell. That was pretty awesome. [Laughter]
Miller: So today is the first day that you haven’t had to run in 52 days. When do you plan to run again?
Cook: I’m trying to do a marathon in all 50 states. I have 38 states done. I’ll be running the Atlantic City Marathon in mid-October.
Miller: So you have to ramp up again.
Cook: I’ll take a few weeks off and then, yeah, ramp up again.
Miller: Tim Cook, congratulations and thanks very much.
Cook: Thanks very much for having me. This is really enjoyable.
Miller: Tim Cook is the president of Clackamas Community College. He spent most of the summer running a grand tour of every community college in Oregon, nearly 1,500 miles, to call attention to the financial hardships that their students are facing these days.
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