Expanding access to higher education and increasing the success of its students are core values that comprise the first issue of the College’s strategic plan. Goals for student success include improving graduation and transfer rates; reducing achievement gaps among specific cohorts of students; developing a strong first-year experience; improving success in developmental courses; and aligning student success and support systems with these goals. In addition, the College’s second strategic issue of ensuring a quality, relevant, and coherent curriculum supports student success by sharpening the focus on academic quality, program relevancy, curriculum coherence, and innovation in pedagogy and program development and delivery.
In 2006, the College was selected to participate in “Achieving the Dream,” a national, multi-year initiative designed to help community colleges succeed. Through “Achieving the Dream,” the College works with national experts to identify strategies that increase student success, especially in the areas of achievement gaps among student groups that traditionally have faced barriers to success.
Featured nationally in the Chronicle for Higher Education for its innovations in developmental math, the College is working to increase the percentage of students who complete developmental courses and move on to credit-bearing courses. The College is also working to increase the percentage of students who enroll in and complete gatekeeper courses--those beginning courses required by some areas of study that students must complete before moving on to higher level courses. Increased student retention from one semester to the next and increased rates of degree and certificate completion are other areas of focus.
The College’s approach to improving student success is both curricular and co-curricular. Innovative curricular pilot programs—such as embedding upper-level math students into developmental math courses to provide supplemental instruction inside and outside of class—focus on improving academic achievement. Likewise, the refinement of placement testing and the subsequent development of courses that benefit students who place between levels of developmental or credit-bearing courses, ultimately improves success in the classroom.
However, the College’s academic efforts go hand-in-hand with the development of innovative student success support services, some of which were initiated in 2005 when the College was one of only 10 institutions in the country selected to participate in another national initiative, “Foundations of Excellence in the First College Year.” Some examples of the College’s student success support services include peer mentoring, expanded tutoring, veterans services, focused advising for at-risk students, and the development of learning communities. The College is currently working on the development of a mentoring program focused on closing the achievement gap in a specific population of at-risk students.
