2024-2025 Catalog

Welcome to Colorado Mountain College!

We want you to be successful. So please take the time to learn about the requirements and procedures in this catalog. This is the road map to reaching your goals. We look forward to working with you throughout your CMC adventure.

 Academic Calendar 2024-2025

See the CMC Academic Calendar page for further information. 

Fall 2024

CMC will be closed for the Winter break starting December 23, 2024, through January 1, 2025.

Spring 2025

Summer 2025

Vision, Mission and Commitments

Our Vision

Colorado Mountain College aspires to serve and elevate the economic, social, cultural, and environmental vitality of its beautiful Rocky Mountain region by welcoming all learners through its doors, delivering highly relevant education and training, and serving as a trusted partner for strategic collaboration and innovation.

Our Purpose (Mission)

As a uniquely financed, Dual Mission, Hispanic Serving Institution, Colorado Mountain College offers accessible, personalized, and affordable programs across a vast array of disciplines - from the liberal and visual arts to career and outdoor industry training. Through specialized certificate and undergraduate degree programs, adult basic education, and lifelong learning opportunities, CMC’s faculty and staff inspire, challenge, and prepare students to meaningfully impact Colorado’s Western Slope and beyond. With a shared commitment to the health and well-being of place and one another, CMC maintains an enduring responsibility to contribute to the strength, resiliency, and sustainability of its local mountain communities.

Our Commitments 

To fulfill its vision and purpose, CMC’s actions will be guided by commitments to Equity, Care, Innovation and Integrity. These commitments are not intended to encompass all of the strategies, initiatives, and projects underway at the College. Rather, and combined, they represent a compass to guide future directions and communicate priorities - both internally and externally.

Equity

CMC warmly welcomes all learners and strives to ensure that each experiences success through personalized academic and specialized training pathways as well as positive, often targeted, high-impact engagement. To accomplish excellence and achieve equity throughout the College, every member of the CMC community shares a responsibility to promote an environment in which all individuals enjoy respect and acceptance, civility abounds, and diversity of thought and expression are encouraged and celebrated. CMC strives to feel like a safe place for all who choose to interact with, work, learn and grow at the College.

Care

CMC is an integral part of Colorado’s high country and the only higher education institution operating in its region. These are both facts and treasured responsibilities. As the mountain economy goes, so too goes CMC. Therefore, as an essential component of its rugged and vast region, the College intends to deliver educational excellence while modeling ethical conduct and sincere appreciation for its people, its communities and its environment. In short, CMC cares.

Innovation

CMC is a preeminent rural college and Hispanic Serving Institution that takes risks for the benefit of students and rebuffs the status quo when it impedes progress. At the same time, CMC accepts that adapting to change is not a choice in higher education and that mountain communities continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace. Therefore, CMC must continuously innovate while upholding the tried-and-true strategies and practices that have enabled the success of countless students. Leveraging its unique structure and funding, creative capacities, and data-informed approaches, CMC must confidently reach students with exceptional teaching and learning, deliver personalized support services, and create bold solutions to address the needs of employees and the communities the College serves.

Integrity

CMC’s unique locations and funding model enable it to focus on its purpose without the fiscal stresses and distractions that are common in public higher education. While the College is held in high esteem in its communities and has stewarded its resources responsibly and ethically, these attributes are earned - not assured - and must be maintained with principled effort. To ensure that the College has the resources necessary to fulfill the commitments outlined in this plan, CMC must manage its affairs with steadfast integrity. By demonstrating a return on the community’s investments and forging thoughtful, strategic collaborations and partnerships, CMC will continue to dream bigger and accomplish more than might be assumed possible by a rural open-access college with few peers regionally or nationally.

General Education Philosophy

A general education benefits students by encouraging them to acquire intellectual tools, knowledge and creative capabilities necessary to study the world as it is, as it has been understood and as it might become. General education prepares students for fulfilling lives as educated persons, and effective contributors to a democratic society.

To develop breadth of knowledge, general education courses familiarize students with methods of inquiry across various academic disciplines, as well as prepare students for employment. Effective general education helps students act ethically and responsibly, and develop habits of critical thinking, intellectual sophistication, and an orientation to lifelong learning and investigation.

Understanding Student Learning Through Assessment

Student learning is more than just grades. It is a deeper dive into evaluating what our students are able to master in terms of the cognitive (knowing), psychomotor (doing), and affective (expressing) domains throughout all of our academic courses and co-curricular student experiences. This requires an intentional and comprehensive methodology to assess how our students perform against the various outcomes that we wish them to achieve. This methodology in an academic environment is generally referred to as “Assessment” and is an institution-wide initiative that encompasses all activities, academic and co-curricular, that involve our students.

Through assessment of student learning, we continually modify our curriculum and instruction to ensure students receive the best instruction possible to meet their educational goals. We define our educational quality by how well our students learn and understand that the public’s expectation for higher education is that we are accountable to ensure that students learn what they need to know to attain personal success and fulfill their public responsibilities in a global and diverse society.

CMC Institutional Student Learning Outcomes

Colorado Mountain College prepares students for the world where they will work, play, live, and lead. As a Dual Mission, Hispanic Serving Institution, CMC expects students to gain mastery of Knowledge, Involvement, and Application in all our programs. These Institutional Student Learning Outcomes, described below, equip students with the skills, confidence, and abilities to thrive in today’s world.

Knowledge

Students will demonstrate various intellectual and practical skills for personal, creative, and professional pursuits by learning about human cultures and the world around us.

Learning experiences are focused on engagement with big questions, both contemporary and enduring, and practiced extensively across the curriculum and co-curriculum, in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects and standards for performance.

Inquiry and Analysis

Inquiry is a systematic process of exploring issues, objects or works through the collection and analysis of evidence that results in informed conclusions or judgments. Analysis is the process of breaking complex topics or issues into parts to gain a better understanding of them.

Critical and Creative Thinking

Critical thinking is a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion. Creative thinking is both the capacity to combine or synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking and risk taking.

Communication - Written and Oral

Oral communication is a prepared, purposeful presentation designed to intentionally listen to others, acknowledge incoming communication, increase a listener’s knowledge, to foster understanding, and/or to promote change in the listeners’ attitudes, values, beliefs or behaviors. Written communication is the development and expression of ideas in writing. Written communication involves learning to work in many genres and styles. It can involve working with many different writing technologies and mixing texts, data and images. Written communication abilities develop through iterative experiences across the curriculum.

Quantitative Literacy

A competency and comfort in working with numerical data. Individuals with strong Quantitative Literacy skills possess the ability to reason and solve quantitative problems from a wide array of authentic contexts and everyday life situations. They understand and can create sophisticated arguments supported by quantitative evidence and they can clearly communicate those arguments in a variety of formats (using words, tables, graphs, mathematical equations, etc., as appropriate).

Information Literacy

The set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.

Teamwork/Collaboration

Teamwork is behaviors under the control of individual team members (effort they put into team tasks, their manner of interacting with others on the team, and the quantity and quality of contributions they make to team discussions).

Problem Solving

The process of designing, evaluating, and implementing a strategy to answer an open-ended question or achieve a desired goal.

Involvement

Students will develop the knowledge and skills to serve and contribute to the integral social, economic, and environmental well-being of local and global communities in order to enact the College’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Learning experiences will be anchored in active involvement with diverse communities and real-world challenges.

Civic Knowledge and Engagement - Local and Global

“Working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.” (Ed. Ehrlich, 2000). In addition, civic engagement encompasses actions wherein individuals participate in activities of personal and public concern that are both individually life enriching and socially beneficial to the community.

Global Learning

Global learning is a critical analysis of and an engagement with complex, interdependent global systems and legacies (such as natural, physical, social, cultural, economic and political) and their implications for people’s lives and the earth’s sustainability. Through global learning, students should 1) become informed, open-minded, and responsible people who are attentive to diversity across the spectrum of differences, 2) seek to understand how their actions affect both local and global communities, and 3) address the world’s most pressing and enduring issues collaboratively and equitably.

Intercultural Knowledge and Competence

“A set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts.” (Bennett, J. M. 2008).

Ethical Reasoning and Action

Reasoning about right and wrong human conduct. It requires students to be able to assess their own ethical values and the social context of problems, recognize ethical issues in a variety of settings, think about how different ethical perspectives might be applied to ethical dilemmas, and consider the ramifications of alternative actions. Students’ ethical self-identity evolves as they practice ethical decision-making skills and learn how to describe and analyze positions on ethical issues.

Application

Students will pose challenging questions, address complex issues, and develop cooperative and creative responses through integrated, multidisciplinary, and innovative experiences.

Learning experiences will be focused on the application of knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to new settings and complex problems.

Synthesis and Advanced Accomplishment Across General and Specialized Studies

Integrative learning is an understanding and a disposition that a student builds across the curriculum and co-curriculum, from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond campus.

Foundations and Skills for Lifelong Learning

“All purposeful learning activity, undertaken on an ongoing basis with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competence” (The European Commission, 2000). An endeavor of higher education is to prepare students to be this type of learner by developing specific dispositions and skills described in this rubric while in school. 

CMC’s Institutional Student Learning Outcomes were developed using the American Association of Colleges and Universities Value Rubrics. See the AAC&U website for more information. 

Accreditation

Colorado Mountain College is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. The Commission can be reached at:

230 South LaSalle Street, Suite 7-500
Chicago, IL 60604-1411
Telephone: (800) 621-7440
Email: info@hlcommission.org

Please see the Higher Learning Commission and Colorado Department of Higher Education complaint procedure pages for more information regarding student complaints.   

In November 2019, the Institutional Actions Council of the Higher Learning Commission continued the accreditation of Colorado Mountain College with the next Reaffirmation of Accreditation to take place in April 2024.

For a list of program-specific accreditations and approvals, please view our Accreditation Table.

Notice of Nondiscrimination

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Colorado Mountain College does not discriminate on the basis of age, color, disability, gender identity, marital status, national or ethnic origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, veteran status, and family and genetic information, in its programs and activities as required by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, and as provided in other applicable statutes and College policies. The College prohibits sexual and gender-based harassment, including sexual assault, and other forms of interpersonal violence. Colorado Mountain College will take steps to assure that the lack of English language skills will not be a barrier to admission and participation in vocational education programs.

The College has established procedures for the filing and disposition of student and employee discrimination complaints. The procedures are available by selecting the following links:

• 6-N President’s Procedure Resolving Discrimination Complaints for discrimination not involving Sexual Misconduct.
• 3_A Sexual Misconduct Procedure for discrimination involving Sexual Misconduct.

Student Inquiries

The following person has been designated to serve as the overall coordinator of student inquiries under Title IX, the Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act and other College policies prohibiting discrimination:

Lisa Doak
Title IX coordinator
ldoak@coloradomtn.edu
(970) 947-8351
802 Grand Avenue
Glenwood Springs, Colorado 81601

Students also may contact the following persons who have been designated as Deputy Title IX Coordinators:

Aspen and Carbondale campuses
Lisa Runck, associate dean for student affairs, lrunck@coloradomtn.edu, (970) 947-8212

Breckenridge and Dillon campuses
Nicole Fazande Larson, associate dean of academic & student services, nfazande@coloradomtn.edu, (970) 968-5805 extension 2805

Leadville and Salida campuses
Evan Weatherbie, assistant dean of student affairs, eweatherbie@coloradomtn.edu, (970) 486-4290

Rifle Campus
Jennifer Boone, assistant dean of student affairs, jboone@coloradomtn.edu, (970) 625-6928

Spring Valley and Glenwood Springs campuses
Lisa Runck, associate dean for student affairs, lrunck@coloradomtn.edu, (970) 947-8212

Steamboat Springs campus
Sean Griffin, associate dean for student affairs, smgriffin@coloradomtn.edu, (970) 870-4463

Vail Valley at Edwards campus
Paula Hauswirth-Cummings, associate dean of academic & student services, pcummings@coloradomtn.edu, (970) 569-2922

Employee Inquiries

The following person has been designated to handle employee inquiries regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and other employee complaints of unlawful discrimination other than Title IX matters:

Angela Wurtsmith
executive director of human resources
awurtsmith@coloradomtn.edu
(970) 947-8311
802 Grand Avenue
Glenwood Springs, Colorado 81601

Employee inquiries under Title IX should be directed to the Title IX Coordinator listed under Student Inquiries above.

Other Resources 

Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education, Cesar E. Chavez Memorial Building, 1244 Speer Boulevard, Suite 310, Denver, CO 80204-3582. Telephone: (303) 844-5695, OCR.Denver@ed.gov. 

Colorado Department of Higher Education, 1600 Broadway, Suite 2200, Denver, CO 80202. Telephone: (303) 862-3001.

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Denver Field Office, 950 17th Street, Suite 300, Denver, Colorado 80202. Telephone: (800) 669-4000.

Colorado Civil Rights Division, 1560 Broadway, Suite 825, Denver, Colorado 80202. Telephone: (303) 894-2997, DORA_CCRD@State.co.us.

Contact Us

Current information, services and contact information are available on the Colorado Mountain College website. 

We offer online registration and payment processing via the website. Class listings and times are available in our class schedules.

Call our Central Services Office at (970) 945-8691 or (800) 621-8559.

Colorado Mountain College - (USPS 023-404) is a published quarterly during the months of August, December, April and June with multiple editions of each publication (except June). Publications are produced by campus and central staff of Colorado Mountain College at 802 Grand Avenue, Glenwood Springs, CO 81601. Periodical postage rates paid at Glenwood Springs, CO and additional mailing offices.