Editor’s note: The April 3 edition of Kitsap Week, this newspaper’s feature section, will include a special section about Olympic College, its programs, and what being an Aspen Award nominee means to the college’s future.

POULSBO — Olympic College didn’t win the money, but it sure won bragging rights.

Every other year, the Aspen Institute picks 150 community colleges in the nation to consider for its prestigious Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. The 2015 award is only its third, but twice OC has been asked to apply for the honor.

This year, OC was chosen as one of the top 10 community colleges in the nation when it comes to student success.

“I think it’s awesome,” OC communications director Amanda Gebhardt-Fuentes said. “This is just an amazing honor, to be in this position and to be able to be in the top 10 in the nation. I think it’s outstanding.”

The Aspen Institute, after narrowing down the choices to the top 10, then chose a grand prize winner (Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida) and three runners-up to receive monetary awards as well as bragging rights. Santa Fe College receives $800,000. The three runners-up — Lake Area Technical Institute in Watertown, South Dakota; West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah, Kentucky; and Kennedy-King College in Chicago, Illinois — each receive $100,000.

The finalists: Brazosport College in Lake Jackson, Texas; El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas; Eugenio María de Hostos Community College in Bronx, New York; Indian River State College in Fort Pierce, Florida; Olympic College; and Renton Technical College in Renton.

While OC wasn’t the winner or a runner-up, being in the top 10 in the whole nation is still a huge achievement for the community college, which is based in Bremerton with additional campuses in Poulsbo and Shelton.

“It’s definitely an honor,” said Mary Garguile, OC’s vice president of instruction. “I think it’s the recognition of the hard work that many people at the college have been engaged in, worked around helping students progress, helping to retain our students and helping them complete their educational goal.”

The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C. According to its website, its mission is to “foster leadership based on enduring values and provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues.” The institute’s 74-member board of trustees includes former U.S. secretaries of state Madeline Albright and Condoleeza Rice, former Disney Corp. chairman Michael Eisner, former nine-term member of Congress Jane Harman, former CNN CEO Walter Isaacson, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Selection of the Aspen award winner, runners-up and finalists is no small process.

Leading researchers and community college practitioners examine data and advise the Aspen Institute on measures by which community college performance and improvement in performance can be measured fairly and accurately. Former community college presidents and faculty, along with researchers and policy experts, review applications and data for each eligible community college to select a set of finalists. Teams of experienced researchers and practitioners conduct two-day site visits to each of the 10 finalists. Then, a jury of former elected officials and other prominent business, labor, education and civil rights leaders review the final data and select a winner and three runners-up.

The 10-member jury was co-chaired by former Indiana governor Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., and former member of Congress George Miller of California.

Honorees were selected based on student learning, certificate and degree completion, employment and earnings, and “high levels of access and success for minority and low-income students.”

“It’s really in line with our mission to serve all students,” OC president David Mitchell said. “We were just thrilled when we heard about it. We didn’t win, but being in the top 10 puts you in the top 1 percent in the nation.”

OC Foundation director Dave Emmons said, “I am extremely excited and pleased to work for a community college that is doing such great work with student success. I’m just really, really proud of the fact that we are a community college in the top 10. I think that says a lot about the college and about … the communities we represent.”

Garguile said being recognized as one of the leading schools in the areas of student success does not mean the school is satisfied.

“We know that there’s more that we can do, and certainly with more resources and more hard work and more thinking and strategizing,” she said. “We’re going to just keep pressing on and working to do the best we can. There’s some things we can learn from these other colleges.”

According to an OC press release, OC has a 57 percent student retention rate — 5 percent higher than the national average of students remaining at a school for a second year. And OC’s close ties with its communities are “reflected in dozens of programs in skilled trades, from which 90 percent of students complete and 100 percent are placed in jobs.”

Also, OC’s close partnerships with Western Washington and Washington State universities, as well as a collaborative engineering program on the Bremerton campus, provides students with clear pathways to earning a bachelor’s degree.

“Olympic College is a great school and we’re very fortunate to have it in our community,” Garguile said, “and have the wonderful faculty and administrators and staff. It’s a great benefit for our community that we have the college here.”

She added, “We have to applaud the students. They’re certainly the ones doing the hard work.”