This year’s Iowa graduates show how higher ed is changing

Iowa’s colleges and universities are getting more creative, open-minded, and flexible in how, when and who they educate — a response to student demands and workforce needs — with the evolution perhaps most evident in the growing diversity of their graduates.

All three of Iowa’s public universities are holding commencement ceremonies this week into the weekend — along with other private and community colleges in Iowa. Kirkwood Community College is celebrating 1,600 students who completed their programs this academic year at 10 a.m. Saturday in Cedar Rapids.

Although many students still follow traditional paths — jumping right into college after high school and finishing in four years — more are carving out the higher education experience that best suits their interests, curricular needs, career aspirations and personal demands.

Some start at a community college and transfer to a four-year university. Some enter college with enough credits from high school college classes to finish in two to three years.

Some are non-traditional students coming back after starting a family and entering the workforce. And, while demand remains high for in-person instruction, some are creating a mostly or entirely online schedule — making it easier to juggle other personal and professional demands.

Of the 5,364 University of Iowa undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree applicants this spring — down slightly from last year’s 5,458 — 68 percent are undergrads. Twenty percent are the first in their family to attend college. Sixteen percent have multiple majors

At Iowa State University, nearly 4,600 students are getting degrees this spring — down from last year’s 5,109. University of Northern Iowa is reporting 1,410 spring graduates — up from last spring’s 1,345 — including 399 identifying as first-generation students.

‘A whole life before this’

This spring’s UI graduating class represents 81 Iowa counties, 41 U.S. states and territories. and 60 countries. The oldest graduate is 69, the youngest 18.

Somewhere in the middle is Jamie Capps, 47, who made her way to Iowa City in 2021 by way of Los Angeles, Orange County, and South Hadley, Mass., where she graduated from Mount Holyoke College three years ago with a degree in studio art.

“I had a whole life before this,” Capps told The Gazette.

She is graduating this week with a master’s degree in book arts.

Capps said she married briefly at a young age and was raising her son in southern California, where she worked in warehousing and transportation logistics and then for the skate and surf shop Volcom in Costa Mesa, Calif.

“I just wasn't really happy in the job that I was in,” she said. “It was really stressful, and I'd always really loved art. And so I just decided I was just going to pursue that dream.”

Capps and her partner decided to move to Massachusetts, where her partner is from. Capps’ son, Arthur Hernandez, who’d just graduated from high school, decided to come along. Both Capps and her son started taking classes at Holyoke Community College.

“I kind of was worried about going to the same college as him because I didn't want him to feel pressure or weird about his mom,” she said. “But he would come in the halls, and I’d see him in passing, and he'd give me a hug.”

They both graduated with associates degrees in 2019 — Capps in studio arts and Hernandez in psychology. She then jumped into a bachelor’s program at Holyoke College and her son, now 27, finished his bachelor’s about 20 minutes away at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

It was at Holyoke where Capps met professors who introduced her to papermaking and the UI Center for the Book.

“I saw this class on papermaking, and I’m like, what is that?” Capps said. “I had never heard of a class on papermaking. So I emailed the instructor and said, ‘Can I please join your class?’ ”

She could and she did, and she took right to it.

“That professor actually talked to me a bit about Timothy Barrett,” Capps said. “She’s like, you need to read these books and watch these videos.”

She learned about the history of UI book arts and Barrett — who joined its Center for the Book in 1986 and oversaw its paper facilities, paper research, paper production and papermaking curriculum, stepping in a director of the center from 1996 to 2002, again in 2012, and in 2020.

When a second professor at Holyoke suggested Iowa might be a good fit for Capps — who was gaining a growing interest in papermaking, a field with few centers like the one at the UI — she applied and moved to Iowa in 2021.

Capps’ three years at Iowa included a summer abroad trip to meet generational papermakers in Asia. The experience was transformational, and Capps returned to campus with a focus on the history of Japanese yokai — like ghosts, demons and monsters.

“I translated that in my work to be kind of an American version of that,” she said.

Now headed to Minneapolis, where she plans to open her own papermaking and letterpress printing studio in the bustling arts community there, Capps said she has been forever imprinted with the literary prowess of the UI and the people she met here.

“They make all the graduates every year an apron for printmaking or papermaking with your name on it,” Capps said of her instructors. “Everybody’s apron is a color that’s associated with them and their work. It has a typeface that is associated with them and their work.”

Capps’ apron was black and her name was both in English and Japanese characters.

“It's really a special thing.”

‘Cultivated a love’

Among Iowa State’s graduates this spring is Khadija Mbacke — who was born in Philadelphia and moved with her family to Senegal in western Africa at age 6, where her father farmed and her mother tended to plants and trees in their yard, fostering in their daughter an early affinity for plants.

When she returned to the United States in 2019 after finishing high school at 17, Mbacke wanted to attend college but couldn’t afford it and instead worked two jobs in New York City.

“I didn’t really have a lot of support,” Mbacke told Iowa State. “A lot of people around me didn’t go to college, so it was hard figuring out how to navigate that. The workload that I had to do and stress of paying for it all, I knew I needed to go somewhere else with a more sustainable lifestyle.”

With the cost of living too high in New York, a cousin persuaded her to follow him from the East Coast to Iowa State — where she’s now graduating with a degree in agronomy and horticulture.

‘A love of the field’

Like Mbacke, graduating UI senior Abbi Shekleton’s childhood held significant persuasion over her future higher ed path. For starters, some of her earliest memories as a kid from western Iowa involved the UI campus.

“I was going to football games with my dad since I was 6. He kind of raised the Iowa culture within me,” Shekleton said.

She also had a stutter when she was young — an impediment that quickly resolved with the empathetic care of a therapist.

“She was really, really kind,” Shekleton said.

The experience stuck with her.

“She really cultivated a love of the field within me,” Shekleton said. “I saw a lot of potential in what can happen with a therapist who is kind, compassionate, and knowledgeable. I thought, ‘I want to be that person for someone else.’”

So the combination of Shekleton’s inclination toward Iowa and its legacy as the birthplace for speech therapy felt like destiny for the now 23-year-old. Having come to UI with college credits earned in high school, Shekleton completed her bachelor’s in speech and hearing science in three years and spent the past two years earning her master’s in speech pathology.

“I got involved in research right away as a first-year student, which is such a great thing about this university,” Shekleton said, reporting her interests gravitate more toward adults than kids.

“My great-grandpa had Alzheimer’s disease, and I knew that I wanted to work with the neurodegenerative disease population,” Shekleton said. “I love older adults, and I find that they’re an often-overlooked population.”

After graduating this weekend, Shekleton will prepare to start a yearlong clinical fellowship at UnityPoint Health-St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, where she plans to stay as a speech-language pathologist.

Although she could work with children occasionally, Shekleton said she’ll be primarily focused on adults in the inpatient, outpatient and rehabilitation units.

“I'll be kind of the float between those three floors, which I'm so excited about because I love being tested,” she said. “Being pulled in different directions keeps me on my toes.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

University commencements

The University of Iowa is holding a handful of ceremonies over the coming days, including two College of Liberal Arts and Sciences ceremonies Saturday. For more information, visit https://commencement.uiowa.edu/ceremonies.

Iowa State University is holding ceremonies beginning today and wrapping with three undergraduate ceremonies on Saturday. For more information, visit https://www.graduation.iastate.edu/spring-2024-commencement

The University of Northern Iowa is holding ceremonies both Friday and Saturday. For more information, visit https://registrar.uni.edu/graduation-and-commencement/commencement.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com