Colorado Mountain College
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Colorado Mountain College (CMC)is a network of seven community college campuses in western Colorado. Three of the campuses are residential campuses with student residence halls and cafeterias, and are located in Steamboat Springs, Leadville and Glenwood Springs. CMC also offers several courses transmitted across the district via live interactive video, allowing students at one location to hear and speak with their teachers at other college sites. CMC offers many of the same introductory courses in arts and sciences found at most four-year colleges, but it also has strong outdoor education and wilderness studies courses.
Other heavily enrolled programs include Ski Business, which incorporates ski tuning, boot fitting, retail shop management, marketing; and Ski Area Operations, which offers hands-on courses in Slope Maintenance and Grooming, and Ski Lift Maintenance and Operations. Courses in Hotel and Resort Management are also offered, and graduates of these courses help to sustain the winter, and summer, tourism driven economies of Colorado.
The Steamboat Springs campus offers a program for training police officers. The program includes legal instruction as well as courses in arrest techniques and gun combat. It is taught by local prosecutors and law enforcement officers. The college also offers criminal justice classes for other students as well.
Many Colorado Mountain College instructors are local professionals that teach at the college part time. They draw on their own professional experience as well as academic sources when teaching classes, giving Colorado Mountain College courses a 'real world' emphasis. Some instructors are also students, as the college allows instructors to take a tuition free course for every course they teach (in addition to salary and benefits). Thus it is not uncommon to see someone teaching a class one day and taking one the next day.