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The second day of Middle States didn’t have a huge plenary speaker, so it was one of those “choose your own adventure” days comprised of lots of concurrent sessions. The theme that emerged from several sessions was that a huge infusion of money would help. Which, yes. But even without it, some measures can work.
I started with a panel on institutional transformation featuring Samuel Hirsch, VP for academic and student success at the Community College of Philadelphia, and Carolyn Bortz, VP for academic affairs at Northampton Community College (Pa.). Hirsch opened with a description of the guided pathways work at CCP, some of which resembled guided pathways work at other places: pathway mapping, three-credit student success courses, the ALP model for developmental English, compressed developmental math. But it added a few customizations. For instance, in the FYE course as I understood it, students have to develop three plans: a degree plan, a career plan and a financial plan. CCP has also developed “pathway communities” with faculty facilitators for each of the seven pathways, each with released time. More impressively, it hired 13 full-time professional advisers to ensure that students received as much individual attention as possible.
Not to be outdone, Bortz mentioned that Northampton has hired 20 (!) success navigators, so every student has an assigned adviser. It has also hired two people to work closely with the dozen high schools in its service area to align curricula in English and math so students won’t have to take any developmental course work. Northampton also reformatted its college success course into 7.5 weeks, on the theory that the shorter format would allow students to realize its benefits as they hit the home stretch of their first semester. I have to admit that I liked that one.
Afterward, a few of my New Jersey colleagues and I shared a sense of wonder at the resources they had to spend. I commend both schools for spending the money well, but having it in the first place would certainly make things easier.
I followed that with a panel on 3 + 1 agreements in the context of the new Rowan College of South Jersey. In a 3 + 1, students take three years at the community college (and at community college tuition and fee levels) before finishing the bachelor’s with one year at the four-year partner school. Sometimes the fourth year is taught on the community college campus, but it’s taught by the four-year school, so the model is the same. The presenters, Sheri Rodriguez and Lorraine Ricchezza, were admirably patient in answering a half dozen variations of the same question about financial aid for students in the third year.
Because Middle States isn’t restricted to community colleges, I was able to check out a presentation by some folks at a university to see how the other half lives. Daniel McDevitt, the director of student success at St. Joseph’s University (Pa.) and Kimberly Allen-Stuck, the AVP for student success and educational support there, shared a few interventions St. Joseph’s had used.
Although not every intervention would translate here, several would. St. Joseph’s has a “rebound” program for students who achieved a GPA below 2.0 in the first semester: those students have to participate in seven group workshops and have three individual mentor meetings during the following semester. They also developed a one-question exit interview in which every student who leaves is asked to rank the reasons from a set list. Over time, they’ve found that the top three reasons are finances, the social environment of the school and the school’s location. (As Allen-Stuck noted, “We haven’t moved …”) I liked the idea of a checklist of likely responses (and yes, “other” was an option) that could be tracked over time. They mentioned a 94 percent response rate for exit interviews, which struck me as extraordinary. The sheer simplicity of it is its genius. That one might actually survive the transplant.
Finally, I checked out Union County College’s (N.J.) presentation on how it quadrupled its graduation rate. Three vice presidents presented: Athos Brewer, from administrative services; Demond Hargrove, from student development; and Maris Lown, from academic affairs. Echoing Karen Stout’s Monday keynote, they made the points that consistent leadership over time was indispensable, and that results took time to reach fruition.
It wasn’t any one thing. They had a FIPSE grant to run a randomized control trial putting some students who had placed into developmental math into college-level math with mandatory tutoring sessions as part of the grade, and found that students thrived. Now it’s the default mode, although they have adopted a seven-week (there’s that number again) drop-down online developmental math course for the truly overmatched. The college practices “extreme cohort management,” with special, targeted supports for African American men, and it has a “presidential emergency fund” for students with abrupt, urgent financial needs. It has even organized fundraising around student supports, to ensure their sustainability.
Taken together, the panels were both frustrating and encouraging. They were frustrating to the extent that they assumed the availability of resources beyond what’s actually available. But they were encouraging to the extent that they suggested that persistence and pragmatism can lead to progress. (The one-question exit interview, for instance, shouldn’t cost much.) And maybe some of them can become the seeds for fundraising efforts …
On to day three.
