College Celebrates 25th Anniversary

Mission College, the newest of the Los Angeles Community College District’s campuses, celebrated its 25th anniversary Thursday with the groundbreaking of a new building and a gathering of San Fernando Valley dignitaries.

After dedicating Mission’s planned 20,000-square-foot Collaborative Studies classroom and office building, about 400 people, including Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar) and Mark Drummond, chancellor of the college district, attended a three-hour luncheon.

Five of Mission College’s past presidents attended, as did Herbert Ravetch, its founding president, who delivered the keynote address.

“We walked down memory lane,” said Thom Oliver, Mission’s interim president. “Back in 1975, we had 19 graduates. We had 261 last June.”

It was Ravetch who led the district feasibility study in 1974 to assess the need for a third community college in the Valley. At the time, twice as many residents in the predominantly white West Valley and central Valley attended community college as in the ethnically diverse northeast Valley.

Mission College was founded the next year and operated out of storefronts until it obtained its present 22-acre site next to El Cariso Regional Park and Golf Course in Sylmar.

It is the smallest campus in the district but its enrollment has grown at one of the district’s fastest rates. Administrators are working with county and state officials to expand Mission’s overcrowded campus.