The college the county voted itself in 1965

In 1965, the people of Montcalm County voted to tax themselves for a college that didn’t exist yet. They approved a community-college district, and out of that vote came Montcalm Community College — built not in one of the bigger towns but on College Drive near Sidney, smack in the middle of the county, where it would be a roughly equal drive from anywhere. A second campus later opened in Greenville, on Yellow Jacket Drive.

The logic was distance and money. For a recent high-school graduate in a rural county, the nearest four-year university was a move and a loan away. A two-year college close to home let them knock out general credits cheaply and transfer those credits onward, or pick up a job certificate, or — for an adult laid off from a plant — retrain for whatever came next. When the Electrolux refrigerator plant down in Greenville closed in 2006 and took 2,700 jobs with it, a community college twenty minutes away was exactly the kind of place displaced workers could land.

MCC also reaches back into the high schools, with dual-enrollment and early-college options that let some students walk across the graduation stage already holding college credit. It’s a small campus, the sort where the same instructor might teach your welding class and wave to you at the grocery store.

Sixty years on, the bet the 1965 voters made still reads as a shrewd one: keep the on-ramp to a degree inside the county line, and you keep more of your young people — and your retrained older ones — close to home.