“We need to make sure that our students can … hit the ground running when they leave”
Jane Kolodinsky has some big plans for the Western Colorado University School of Business. As the School’s new dean, she’s looking to use her vast experience in higher education to increase enrollment, grow the number of course offerings for students and change the way they interact with the campus and the community.
Dr. Jane Kolodinsky’s Career
Dr. Kolodinsky brings to Western all of the lessons learned over a nearly 30-year career at the University of Vermont, where she was a professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Chair of the Community Development and Applied Economics Department. During her tenure, that program saw tremendous growth in enrollment of both undergraduate and graduate students and brought in over $1 million a year in outside funding.
She was also the Director of the Center for Rural Studies at the University of Vermont, and because of Gunnison’s location and size, what she sees at Western is similar to what she first found there. “I helped that program grow and thought, ‘I can do it again, or I can go somewhere else and help it grow.’ And Western’s size is very appealing to me,” Kolodinsky said.
Dr. Kolodinsky’s Goals as Dean of Western’s School of Business
Since the School of Business already provides an excellent business education, she said in the short term she plans to focus on reenergizing the program’s focus on entrepreneurship and innovation and forge stronger partnerships with other programs on campus and in the community, like the Paul M. Rady School of Computer Science & Engineering and the ICELab.
At the same time, she hopes to reach out to other disciplines on campus that haven’t always been closely aligned with the School of Business, like communications, The Clark Family School of Environment, and the Recreation & Outdoor Education.
“I want to really start exploring the possibility of more and better-coordinated internships and service learning experiences,” Kolodinsky said. “We need to make sure that our students can find their professional pathway early on and be ready to hit the ground running and be employed when they leave.”
In the long term, Kolodinsky has made it a top priority to explore a path to official accreditation of the business school through the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, which is one of the primary ways students who are interested in earning a degree in business find programs they might want to attend.
She also wants to look at new curricula that would attract students from all over the campus. “Entrepreneurship is in everything, so we want students to explore an entrepreneurial mindset,” she said.
Connecting with Western Colorado University
But Kolodinsky believes that the business school shouldn’t only benefit those on campus. The seven “Community Capitals” are central to her philosophy as she sets out to build the School of Business into a force that shapes and serves the Gunnison Valley community. That framework looks to balance natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial, and built capital to create healthy and well-rounded places for people to live.
While the Valley has an abundance of natural, cultural, and social capital, she thinks the Business School can help improve the built capital, which would include things like housing, and financial capital, which can help stabilize the community.
“I’m a strong believer in the Community Capitals. It’s not about development from the top down because what happens to the one-horse town when the one horse leaves?” she said. “It has to be spread out. People want to be able to live, work and play here and focus on developing that sense of place.”
