After more than 30 years in the community college sector, alumna Liz Silvers ’91 looks back on her career
For the past 34 years Liz Silvers ’91 has worked in the community college system. She has worked as a coordinator for marketing, director of institutional effectiveness at two different institutions, head of an on-campus child development center, and, until this December, she will be vice president of instruction at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute in Lenoir (CCC&TI).
Her long career in the field of education traces back even further, however, to her time at Lees-McRae where she studied teacher education. When she began her time at the college the school was a two-year institution, and Silvers was among the first class to have the opportunity to earn their bachelor’s degrees from Lees-McRae when it expanded to a four-year college. Silvers completed her bachelor’s degree as a Bobcat before earning a master’s from Appalachian State University, but she traces much of her foundation in education to her time at the college.
“In preparation for this job, I learned so many skills at Lees-McRae,” Silvers said, referencing one of her professors who had an outsize impact on her personal and professional philosophy. “I can hear her in my head sometimes talking about how to treat students, and what’s important to students, and making sure that you’re serving the whole student not just what you have in front of you. ‘What’s going on in their lives?’ That has always stuck with me.”
While Lees-McRae taught her a lot about how to best serve students, she didn’t determine her specific professional path until later. In school Silvers prepared to be a teacher, and despite an excess of North Carolina educators looking for jobs at the time she graduated, Silvers taught for a few years at Avery Middle School and Mitchell High School before realizing that leading a classroom was not the best fit for her.
“In the back of my mind, to be completely transparent, I don’t know that I really wanted to be a teacher. I think that may have been my mom’s dream for me. My dream has always been education, and once I found the community college sector it has been very dear to me,” she said. “I was not always in instruction, I was in various opportunities and roles that created what I am now, and I’ve brought that to this position. I think I understand students really well because of my background at Lees-McRae and the life experience of realizing that I didn’t want to be a teacher.”
As vice president of instruction at CCC&TI Silvers oversees all areas of instruction for the institution, including the school’s continuing education courses, GED program, and its four main academic divisions. She has been in the role for just over four years and will retire in December. Silvers deeply values the collaborative relationships she maintains with the academic deans she oversees, and the opportunities she has to make a difference in the lives of students.
Dedication to her work and a passion for creating change is something she said she gained from her time at Lees-McRae. Despite a long commute and even longer days in the office, Silvers said she wouldn’t change a thing because of the impact she knows she has every day.
“Impacting students is just my top priority. Helping them get ahead in life, whether that’s taking a paralegal class, or whether they’re taking a notary class; providing those opportunities for our students and listening to our students [is so important],” Silvers said. “We have this little saying, and it’s very simple: ‘Students first. Every decision, every action, every time.’ That’s what we go by. It’s worth it to make that change for a student. That’s just who we are. It’s a culture. It’s a lot like Lees-McRae, that’s why I love it.”
