Colleges are well-known drivers of economic and social mobility—yet for many aspiring students, the barriers to entry are too high. This is true even with community colleges, which offer a more affordable education and few, if any, admission requirements.
But, says Nate Mackinnon MC/MPA 2014, people are still left behind. “Even at a low price point for a community college, access can be out of reach when you’re living paycheck to paycheck and have family responsibilities—and it’s even more complicated for individuals where English is their second language.”
As executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Community Colleges (MACC), Mackinnon is working to change this. MACC, an organization that works on behalf of the state’s 15 two-year colleges, played a key role in helping the commonwealth take a giant leap forward last year, when the legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill to make community college free for all state residents.
Mackinnon worked with legislative leaders to build coalitions, devise policy options and shepherd this groundbreaking initiative through the legislature to the governor’s desk. “It was a really Herculean effort with a lot of different stakeholders,” he says. Using skills he learned at HKS, including adaptive leadership, negotiations, and applied statistics, Mackinnon formed a task force that included students, legislators and their staff, people from the business community and the governor’s office, and more.
“We spent nine months meeting every two weeks, working through aspects of the plan like, What will it cover? What about books and supplies? What about the interaction with other aid programs? Should we limit it to only low-income individuals? Should it be only certain degree programs, etc.?” With a team of consultants that included other HKS alumni, MACC answered these questions, maximizing state resources while offering a simple message for constituents: that community college was now free for all.
Mackinnon knows firsthand the value of education. Living mostly with his mother throughout middle and high school, Mackinnon says academics weren’t a big focus. “No one in my mom’s family had ever even gone to college—you just went to high school and you found a job.” While he was very involved in student activities at his high school in the Boston suburbs, he says, “I was also a C student at best, until my senior year.”
That’s when one of his teachers, with whom he remains close, sat him down and said, “You’re not going to get into any colleges; your grades are too low. You need to buckle down.” With this teacher’s help, says Mackinnon, “I figured out that when I actually applied myself, I could do it.”
He began college at Fitchburg State University, where he fell in love with political science after taking a course on race, sex, and the Constitution. Two years in, he received a scholarship to transfer to Northeastern University, which had a political science and co-op program that allowed him to gain significant work experience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Massachusetts state Senate. He leveraged these internships to positions in educational policy, including as research director for the Massachusetts legislature’s Joint Committee on Education. “I got to experience legislative politics and how you can shape education policy through the state budget and through law. My motivation was to make sure that other students like me don’t take an off-ramp that’s accidental. That’s what guided me then, and still guides me today.”
Mackinnon is proud to have played a role in opening doors for students who may otherwise have been left behind. “Many of us take for granted that going to college is what we do and what we expect our children to do. But that’s simply not the case for so many students, who never imagine themselves prepared or because they couldn’t afford it. I get to look back and say that I was part of a team that got us to where Massachusetts arguably has the most universal access to free community college in the nation.”
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Photography by Ella Adams, MASSterlist