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.

 Academic Calendar 2023-2024

Fall 2023

CMC will be closed for the Winter break starting December 23, 2023, through January 2, 2024.

Spring 2024

Summer 2024

Mission, Vision, Values and Guiding Principles

Vision: Our desired future

We aspire to be the most inclusive and innovative student-centered college in the nation, elevating the economic, social, cultural and environmental vitality of our beautiful Rocky Mountain communities.

Mission: Why we exist, what we do, and what we offer

Colorado Mountain College offers a dynamic, innovative, and high-quality teaching and learning experience serving a diverse population in a student-centered, inclusive and personalized learning environment. Committed to both affordable and accessible education, CMC offers a comprehensive array of undergraduate programs and lifelong learning opportunities helping all students meet their individual educational goals. 

Values: The basis for ethical action

We believe higher education and lifelong learning provide a vital and necessary foundation for an egalitarian society.

We care about each other and treat everyone with civility, dignity and respect.

We encourage open and honest communication and honor all ideas and opinions.

We embrace diversity in its many forms and work actively to create an inclusive and welcoming college community.

We act with integrity to build trust in our personal and professional relationships.

Guiding Principles: Decision-making and resource allocation

We collaborate with one another and with external partners.

We apply the principles of sustainability to foster social equity, economic vitality and environmental health.

We strive for excellence and innovation in all we do.

We create a positive working environment and a stimulating and enjoyable teaching and learning experience.

We hold ourselves responsible and accountable for our actions.

We maintain the public trust through responsible stewardship and fiscal transparency. 

We meet challenges with thoughtful deliberation and purposeful action.

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.

Assessment is the right thing to do for our students. We need to understand how our students learn and be able to modify our teaching methods and our curriculum to ensure that they receive the best instruction we can offer to meet their individual 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

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.” (Excerpted from Civic Responsibility and Higher Education, edited by Thomas Ehrlich, published by Oryx Press, 2000, Preface, page vi.) 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. Transformative training: Designing programs for culture learning. In Contemporary leadership and intercultural competence: Understanding and utilizing cultural diversity to build successful organizations, ed. M. A. Moodian, 95-110. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.)

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”. 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. (From The European Commission. 2000. Commission staff working paper: A memorandum on lifelong learning. Retrieved September 3, 2003, www.see-educoop.net/education_in/pdf/lifelong-oth-enl-t02.pdf.)

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: 1(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 2023-24.

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.

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.
3.12.1 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
K Cesark, Associate Dean of Academic & Student Services, kcesark@coloradomtn.edu, (970) 236-0446 extension 2446

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, Assitant 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
Associate Dean for Student Affairs, (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, or email OCR@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 1(800) 669-4000.

Colorado Civil Rights Division, 1560 Broadway, Suite 1050, Denver, Colorado 80202. Telephone (303) 894-2997, or email 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 1(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.