If poverty is an island, Rachel Solemsaas said she wants to be captain of the boat sailing over to help.
Over the years, Solemsaas has voyaged aboard multiple boats — all with similar missions of eradicating poverty. On Friday, when Solemsaas assumes her new role as Hawaii Community College’s chancellor, she hopes it will be her most-streamlined vessel yet.
“It’s not the career, that’s not the island for me,” Solemsaas said during an interview Tuesday in her soon-to-be new office at HawCC. “For me, the island is getting as many children out of poverty as possible — creating an island with no poverty. Being chancellor, as a boat, provides several more opportunities to help children and students in poverty.”
Solemsaas, 50, is replacing interim chancellor Joni Onishi. The college’s previous chancellor retired in 2015. Solemsaas comes from a job as vice president for finance and administrative services at Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada.
Prior to that, she worked in multiple finance positions in the Seattle area and as an administrator at two Washington state community colleges.
But from early on, she said she’s had a passion for helping people in poverty. She’s originally from a suburb of Manila in the Philippines. In her youth, she remembers passing by squatters. Instead of shying away, she said she was intrigued.
“I always leaned toward them and wanted to get to know them,” she said.
Solemsaas immigrated with her family to the United States at age 20. She said her first role in community college administration years ago left her impressed with the system and its ability to educate low-income students.
She’s worked at community colleges since. Eventually, she earned a doctorate in higher education with emphasis on community college leadership, where she researched topics including financial barriers among foster youth in accessing community college education.
“Poverty is really a billion-dollar industry because we can’t do it right — we can’t get the prevention side,” she said. “And what’s the prevention? It’s education. If there’s anything sustainable to get people out of poverty, it’s education. And community college is the door, it’s the door to all these opportunities.”
Solemsaas said she also wants to push for programs and offerings at HawCC that lead to “sustainable, living wage” jobs for students in poverty.
Statistics show Hawaii County has the highest number of low-income residents in the state. At a meeting in April designed for students in the UH system to weigh in on a proposed tuition plan, many HawCC students spoke of working multiple jobs and having difficulty making ends meet.
“There’s a lot of working students trying to balance family and jobs and going to school full time,” Solemsaas said. “We ought to really help them succeed … . Gone are the days where we can just get them into the door, get them to college and then turn around … and watch them be indebted and not have a degree at the end of it.”
Solemsaas is president of the National Asian Pacific Islander Council, an affiliate council of the American Association of Community Colleges. As president, she said she works to raise awareness about the challenges Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders face.
She said she wants to continue helping those students at HawCC, along with Native Hawaiian students, complete their education and successfully enter the workforce.
“At Hawaii Community College we’ve achieved the goal of getting Native Hawaiians more into college, but we have not done a good job of having them complete and succeed,” she said. “And that’s a nice challenge to be able to pursue.”
Rachel Solemsaas: Q&A
Several HawCC students had questions of their own for Rachel Solemsaas. Here are four of them. Solemsaas’ responses are edited for length and clarity.
1. HawCC’s Palamanui campus is less than 1 year old. Do you have any building or budget plans for the campus for the next five, 10 or 20 years?
Solemsaas: There was a reason why the campus was built. There was a demand and there was a need. Definitely our commitment is to make sure that we are building that resource to meet the demand and see what the opportunities are to provide students so they can extend that learning opportunity. There’s been some work through the local chamber of commerce to look at workforce demand. There was a survey that went out to employers and industries, and now we’re taking that survey and information for a workforce summit in August to find out what kind of offerings and programs we can offer on the west side. It’s really some exciting times at Palamanui.
2. How do you plan to maximize your exposure to the student body? Do you plan to be involved in student activities?
Solemsaas: Well, at the end of the day, what I’m here for is the students. I want to be there for whatever the students need. We’ve got data and data and data on students. And it’s great data, and we should be held accountable on that data. There are a lot of quantitative ways to measure students. But there’s something about the relationships you build with students, the qualitative side, and you don’t get that by not being around. So I’m committed to being around. Certainly working very closely with the student government association. They’re the voice of the students.
And I’m having my kids show me all types of social media. Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat. I’ll learn all that. That’s one way this generation engages. Hopefully we can do just as much face-to-face, but I’ll certainly get into the social media aspect of that as well.
3. What are your top five goals for HawCC?
Solemsaas: I would say my role as a chancellor is really to serve the institution. So I don’t want to come in and say, “This is my goal, therefore it’s our goal.” So the first goal is really to engage and embrace the goals the institution has set for itself. At the end of the day, it really boils down to one thing: the success of the students.
If there’s any goal, we want to help each and every student who comes to our college navigate the system to achieve their goals in the shortest possible time with the minimum amount of debts. But at the same time, see that they come here with a love of learning and they’re engaged in our community and engaged in the world. We want a holistic person coming out of our college.
4. What advice do you have for HawCC students?
Solemsaas: Do not understate the power of your will. You have to will to succeed. Once you make that first journey, know that you have the will and have that tenacity from beginning to the end. The road is not always easy, and there will be challenges and barriers. But here’s the second thing I want to tell students: Ask for help. A lot of students who succeed in college, it’s because they also made that first step to ask. There are a lot of resources available. They should pursue it. Because it’s all part of succeeding, and you can’t do it alone.
