History
In 1999, the Nevada Legislature created the Advisory Committee to Examine Locating a 4-Year State College in Henderson, Nev. In December 1999, the Nevada Board of Regents approved the establishment of Nevada State College.
In February 2000, the committee recommended that the new institution be named Nevada State College at Henderson. The committee members determined that Henderson should be part of the official name as they felt additional state colleges would be created in the state in the future. Later that month, the Henderson City Council, after having evaluated several potential sites, voted to locate Nevada State College on a site northeast of Lake Mead Drive and Boulder Highway that was to be part of The LandWell Company’s Provenance master-planned community. In March, James Rogers, owner of several television stations who would later become chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, agreed to chair the college’s foundation.
Opponents of the creation of Nevada State College feared at the time that its creation would take resources from UNLV. However, proponents of the college argued that the “proposed college would be up to $3,000 cheaper than educating them at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The savings would come from smaller salaries for professors, who would teach four classes (per semester), rather than the three or fewer taught by UNLV professors.”
In April 2000, the Board of Regents voted 8-3 to begin negotiations for the Boulder Highway / Lake Mead site despite some concerns that the site was located near a permanent toxic waste storage facility. In June 2000, the Regents requested $5.2 million for start-up costs for the campus and $7 million for instruction costs for its first cohort of students in 2002-03 as well as $43.5 million for capital construction which was to include a library. Nevada Gov. Guinn’s 2001-2003 executive budget, which was developed later in 2000, reduced the Regents' request by recommending "$22.8 million in state funding, 6.8 million to open it to 1,000 full-time students in the fall of 2002, and $16 million to help construct the first campus building.”
Nevada State College opened in 2002. The college acquired accreditation, moved with its master plan for a 509-acre (2.06 km2) campus, and its first permanent building, the Liberal Arts and Sciences building, opened in August 2008. In 2008 Nevada State College launched a campus-wide recruitment and retention initiative. Between the Spring 2009 and Spring 2010 semesters, Nevada State College increased enrollment by over 20%, to over 2,600 students.
As of the end of spring 2008, Nevada State College has graduated 16% of the full-time students who registered as freshmen in fall 2002, and 11% of 2003's incoming freshmen. A graduation rate of 16% is one-third that of California’s public state colleges. School officials characterize the rate as low, and are launching programs to increase student retention. The average six-year graduation rate for colleges in the United States is 57%.
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“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
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“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)