Q&A: Gavilan Community College President Pedro Avila

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It took more than two decades for Gavilan College to deliver on its promise to build a campus in Hollister. 

Though the Gavilan Joint Community College District offered classes in the city-owned Briggs Building, the new Hollister campus’ opening last year marked the district’s real return to its founding county. It had failed to construct anything after a 2004 bond measure was passed on the understanding that Gavilan would build classrooms, labs and a library. 

While the school used funds from that measure to buy the property on the corner of Fairview Road and Hwy 25 in 2012, nothing was built until after voters passed an additional bond in 2018 for the same purpose. 

As Gavilan marked the Hollister campus’s first anniversary in January, BenitoLink spoke with President and Superintendent Pedro Avila on the next steps and status of the community college district. 

BenitoLink: After serving almost four years as Gavilan’s superintendent/president, what are you most proud of, and what goals are you still pursuing?

Avila: There are a number of things that I’m really proud of.

It’s really been our team at Gavilan, our faculty, our staff, our management team and the No. 1 is the enrollment recovery. As of this year, we broke 11,000 students district-wide, which is a peak number from the last seven years. 

And that was really important because it protects the budget. There are colleges in the state that have not recovered from the COVID enrollment loss. But Gavilan is one that very quickly recovered. And that was one of my first goals. 

When I got here, we had lost about 25% of our enrollment. And we’ve grown by about 40% in enrollment since I got here. We’ve been very aggressive with some of these initiatives that we rolled out, such as the Gavilan for Free, where we offered free tuition for a year and a half. That was very, very effective. 

At our MESA [Mathematics, Engineering, Science, Achievement] ceremony, one student mentioned that the reason he’s here is because he got a postcard in the mail that said Gav for free, and he’s like, ‘I was already 19, I had been a year out of school. And that motivated me to come and here I am, and I love it.’ I think we did a great job with our free tuition initiative.

Explain how enrollment protects the budget. 

We’re funded by the number of hours that the students are in the classroom. So, the more students you have, the more hours that they’re in the classroom. What happened during COVID is that many colleges lost enrollment, but the state was protecting the budget (providing funding based on pre-COVID enrollment) because it was a result of COVID, but they gave us an ultimatum that by 2025 we had to be back up to the enrollment that we were before COVID. 

And for those colleges that didn’t get their enrollment recovered, they are now not getting any additional funding from the state. So they’re still getting their base funding, but they’re not getting any additional funding, whereas we are. We’re still getting our cost of living adjustment and enrollment growth. That is very important because for the sustainability of Gavilan and also for the growth of Gavilan

Between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, enrollment increased by about 1,000 students. Since then Gavilan has rebounded. Does the district expect that trend to continue?

We don’t anticipate it to keep growing at the rate that we grew during the last couple years. Part of it was recovery. We covered a main need that was there. We know that the population growth in Santa Clara County is not keeping up with San Benito County. 

We’re still growing at about 2 to 3 percent per year. Our biggest challenge right now is because we’ve grown so much, we’ve hit the limit that the state is allowing us to grow. For example, last year it allowed us to grow 1.5 percent. And we grew way more than 1.5 percent. We grew about 4 percent. The challenge with that is any investments that we make for growth we probably won’t see revenue from the state. We have to balance that, so we can’t be as aggressive as we were a couple years ago with growth. 

There is a lot of potential to grow. The challenge is that the state is not giving us the funding to support that growth. That’s what’s keeping us from being able to grow at the pace we were growing. 

In the first year of the Hollister campus, what were some successes and some of the challenges that the district faced?

Success No. 1 is we have a beautiful building, a state-of-the-art facility. Great location. It blends in with the mountains. And we also had a significant growth in enrollment there. We almost doubled our enrollment from when we were back at the Briggs Building downtown. Last year, we served 1,000 students in our first year. 

Also the community has received it with a lot of excitement, I think the community was very pleased and very proud of what we were able to deliver. They’ve really embraced it. We just had our first year anniversary celebration. I think we had about 300 people that showed up to celebrate with us and express how pleased they were with the new campus.

The biggest challenge we’re having right now: we still don’t have a bus route. We’ve been working with the Council of San Benito County Governments [COG], the agency that handles transportation in San Benito County, for the last three years. 

Today, we still don’t have a bus route. The college has been having to come up with its own transit program by providing free Uber rides to our Hollister and San Juan Bautista students. And so that’s something that’s still a challenge for us.

What else is the district pursuing to improve access to the campus? 

We’re working with COG to request funding from the state for transit. We did put in a letter to Senator John Laird to request funding to be able to support the cost of that new transit route. We’ve been working with them, we’ve been giving COG all the data that they need to be able to develop that route.

COG is saying that the bus route would cost them $240,000 to $250,000. 

At this point, we’re also looking at expanding our Uber program because it doesn’t look like we’re going to have a route soon. The Uber program was supposed to be a temporary thing until we got the route. 

How is the Uber program funded?

It’s funded by the college through our basic needs department. Any student enrolled with Gavilan and confirmed to be taking classes gets a link that they can use to connect their Uber app to our program. The Uber system allows them to take free rides from their home to the Hollister campus and then from the Hollister campus to their home.

In February, we had 250 rides. All rides that we paid for.

In a way, It’s probably more convenient than a bus route because it picks you up at your house.

The facilities master plan for the Hollister campus includes the theater, library and athletic fields. Now that Phase One is completed, does the district have a timeline for expanding the current campus?  

Right now, we’re looking at our enrollment data.

The facilities plan that you’re referring to was done many, many years ago. We’re working on updating it. Right now we’re looking at identifying some career education programs or work experience programs that we can anchor in Hollister. 

And then the other thing that we’re looking at is some type of outdoor exercise facility because there’s nothing on that campus for health and wellness. And so those are two things that we’re exploring right now. 

But we’re still far from having a stadium and a theater. We’re talking many, many, many years from now.

Is there an enrollment threshold that triggers an expansion of services?

The state has a requirement it calls 1,000 full-time equivalent students, which in reality is about 3,000 students. At that point, we get additional funding from the state to be able to provide more services. We’re still about one-third of the way in enrollment, so we would have to grow by another 2,000 students. 

How is the district looking to fund expanding the campus?

Any construction for a community college is funded through a bond because we don’t get money from the state to build facilities. In order for us to expand the footprint of that campus it would require a future bond.

You’ve previously mentioned the need for student housing. The 2018 Facilities Master Plan identifies an area for on-campus housing on the Hollister campus. Is that still a consideration?

I think these were just very aspirational concepts that they were throwing around. And I don’t know that that was necessarily student housing. They might have been exploring workforce housing.

This is all prior to my arrival. When I got here, we finalized the actual plan for that campus. 

What’s the timeline for updating the facilities plan? 

That will happen within a year. We’re going to start working on that, probably starting this summer through next summer.

Is there anything else that you think San Benito County residents should know about what’s happening at Gavilan College? 

To your earlier question, the other thing that I’m really proud of is that more of our high school graduates are choosing Gavilan College. 

We look at the percentage of high school seniors that graduate from our local high schools and the percentage of the seniors that actually enrolled at Gavilan College

In ’24 and ’25 we implemented a new initiative called Ram-O–Rama where we made an agreement with all superintendents to bring their high school seniors to the campus for a day so we can reintroduce them to Gavilan, get them excited about being here. And immediately we saw a 3 percent jump each year. And now, we’re at 30, almost 40 percent. My goal is to get that number up to 50 percent so that the majority of our students are choosing to come to Gavilan..

What I want the community to know is that I’m committed to these communities. I want to be here for a long time. And we have plans to continue building. We have plans to continue growing. We’re looking constantly at creating new partnerships like the one we created with Rebekah Children’s Services where we partnered with the culinary program and created a culinary school through Chef Carlos Pineda. 

We have a long-term vision of what we want to do for the community and make sure that people feel proud of Gavilan College and feel like this is their best option. We want students to feel that Gavilan College is their college of choice.

We don’t want students to be driving to the Bay Area to San Jose or some of the bigger colleges in the Bay Area because of the perception that somehow there’s something better over there. Gavilan College is really good, and it’s just getting better and better.

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