When I was little, I wanted curly hair.
My mother had curls — wild, full, unapologetic ones. I spent years chasing them. Perms that smelled like regret. Rollers I slept on. None of it worked. My hair was straight. It was always going to be straight. Fighting that wasn't ambition. It was just damage.
Eventually I stopped — and something unexpected happened. Once I quit treating my hair like a problem to solve, it became one of the things people noticed about me. Not because straight hair is remarkable, but because I finally embraced it.
I think about those years every time I watch The Evergreen State College chase enrollment by competing for a share of the sustainability MBA market against 18 better-resourced institutions, or building online certificates in skills AI is already automating. It looks exactly like sleeping in rollers. A lot of discomfort, and at the end you still don't have curls.
Evergreen is not a conventional college that fell behind. It is a structurally different institution that has spent 50 years doing something the rest of higher education is now desperately trying to replicate: no letter grades, no siloed majors, narrative evaluations, coordinated studies programs integrating multiple disciplines, and independent learning contracts that build genuine self-direction.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects AI will displace 92 million jobs while creating 170 million new ones. The premium skills — critical thinking, adaptability, ethical reasoning, cross-domain synthesis — are not things Evergreen added in response to AI. They are Evergreen's curriculum. They have been since 1971.
There is also an economic argument that rarely gets named. When a student enrolls online, they stay where they are — eating, renting, spending there. The college collects tuition and the local community gets nothing. An in-person student at Evergreen is an Olympia resident for four years. Online expansion is not just an educational trade-off. It is a choice to extract tuition while sending nothing back to the community Evergreen lives in.
The broader culture is telling us something, too. The pandemic was supposed to prove remote was the future. Instead, it proved people need people. Companies that went fully remote are calling workers back. The hunger for physical presence — for being in a room together, working through something — proved more durable than any argument against it. The pendulum is swinging back. This is the moment to be the destination for students who want the real thing.
So what should Evergreen build? An arts, arts administration, and entrepreneurship pathway — integrated, in-person, unlike anything else at a public institution in Washington state. The creative economy needs people who can hold the artistic vision and the organizational sustainability question at the same time. Those capacities are almost never taught together. Evergreen's model is built to do exactly that.
Evergreen already has the Changemaker Lab — an eight-year old entrepreneurship program built on the Finnish Team Academy model, connected to MIT, operating in more than 10 countries. Imagine those students developing a real business plan for a creative enterprise in direct partnership with performing arts students developing the work those enterprises would present. That collision is what Evergreen's model was designed to generate.
The need is documented. Through Evergreen Growing's June 2026 listening sessions, multiple students described moving across the country to attend a performing arts program that no longer exists. One sold her belongings, rehomed her cat, flew in with two suitcases and her father's guitar — and arrived to find a locked stage. The Washington Center for the Performing Arts now brings a crew from Seattle, 60 miles away, for productions Evergreen graduates once staffed. That pipeline closed, and the regional arts economy pays for it every time.
The stage exists. The Changemaker Lab exists. The infrastructure is there. What is missing is the institutional decision to use it.
My straight hair did not become something I was proud of because I changed it. It became something I was proud of because I embraced it. I walked into rooms and it was just mine. Not a problem — an asset.
Evergreen has an unusual model. The rest of higher education spent decades treating that as a quirk. The World Economic Forum has since corroborated, with labor market data, what Evergreen figured out in 1971. This is not the moment to abandon it. It is the moment to walk into the room and say: we have been here all along.
The stage is there. The students are waiting outside. Open the doors.
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Amalie O'Connor is an Olympia resident, former educator and federal budget analyst and founder of Evergreen Growing, a community advocacy organization supporting Evergreen State College. To submit an opinion to the Thurston Chronicle, email news@thurstonchronicle.com
