Walla Walla Community College has been named one of 10 national finalists for a $1 million prize to highlight two-year colleges that do exceptional work in educating students and training them for good jobs.

The winner and up to three runners-up will share the Aspen Prize for College Excellence, which will be awarded by the nonprofit Aspen Institute in December.

Walla Walla was chosen because its full-time, first-year students have a college graduation and transfer rate that's about 12 percent higher than the national average, that rate is improving, and minority students do equally as well as nonminority students, said Josh Wyner, executive director of the institute's College Excellence Program.

"At all three fronts, they've exceeded the national average," he said.

Walla Walla also scored well because it has been nimble at changing its degree offerings as the local economy has changed, Wyner said. Its enology (the study of winemaking) and viticulture (the study of growing grapevines for winemaking) programs have helped fuel the expansion of wineries in the Walla Walla area by teaching students how to make great wine.

"This is exactly what community colleges that are incredibly effective do — they look at the labor markets around them, they look at the future and they devise programs that enable students to get the skills they need to be effective in the workplace," Wyner said.

Walla Walla has been successful at graduating students, in part, by offering a variety of support programs, said college President Steve VanAusdle.

"Our door is open to all kinds of students," he said. "Once a student is here, we want them to finish what they start."

VanAusdle said that in rural Walla Walla, the biggest challenge is creating jobs. "The more prepared the workforce is, the more it will lead to jobs," he said.

The school's enology and viticulture program has won national acclaim. It was the first community college in the country to set up its own commercial winery, College Cellars.

But the winemaking program, with an enrollment of 60 students, is just one small component of a school with an enrollment of more than 5,000, and which serves about 13,000 students throughout the year.

Now that Walla Walla's wines have put the town on the tourist map, the college is expanding its culinary, performing- and visual-arts programs — the kinds of entertainment that wine-tasting tourists seek out when planning a vacation, VanAusdle said.

Nationally, the Obama administration has promoted the value of community colleges, both for their low cost — a year at a Washington community college costs about $3,700 for in-state students — and for their mission of providing both a jumping-off point to a four-year degree and a place to gain specific workforce-skills training.

But Wyner, of the Aspen Institute, said fewer than 40 percent of students who start at a community college finish their degree. "We've got to do better than that," he said.

He said the institute is visiting each of the top-10 schools to examine more closely what they're doing right. The institute hopes to come up with a list of eight to 10 practices that help students either finish their certificate or degree, or transfer on to a four-year school — practices that could be replicated by other community colleges.

Nationally, only about 24 percent of full-time, first-time community-college students graduate on time. At Walla Walla, that rate is 36 percent, Wyner said. In the initial round, the Aspen Institute selected 120 finalists, including Pierce College at Fort Steilacoom in Lakewood, Spokane Falls Community College and Spokane Community College. Walla Walla was the only Washington school to make the finalists list.

The winner of the Aspen Prize will receive $700,000, and the three runners-up will receive $100,000 apiece. The competition is being funded by the Joyce Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation and the JPMorgan Chase Foundation.

The other schools named as finalists are: Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College; Miami Dade College in Florida; Lake Area Technical Institute in South Dakota; West Kentucky Community and Technical College; Mott Community College in Michigan; Northeast Iowa Community College; Santa Barbara City College in California; Southwest Texas Junior College; and Valencia College in Florida.

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@seattletimes.com