Page 8 - Campus Technology, July 2017

COMMUNITY COLLEGES
practice of drop-add. Drop-add creates chaos in the learning environment. That cost us enrollment at the time. We learned how to work with that new system so well that I don’t think it hurt in the medium term, and I think it helps us in the long term with retention.
CT: It looks like the college makes a big deal about getting students into pathways or tracks with specific goals as quickly as possible. Are students coming in with specific careers in mind or is the college helping them pin that down?
We started with purpose. When we bring students in through the new student experience, they’re all required to go through a three-credit-hour general education core course where we help them to discern what their purpose is in being here, then what pathways they might be interested in and how to explore them.
And then they write a plan to graduate, all the way through graduation. That’s really a key issue. Most colleges don’t ask students to write and turn in a plan to graduate until their last semester. It’s called an application for graduation. We want to put that at the front end, so they have a plan to follow. Then we want to attach a person to them who’s intimately involved with them in the development of that sense of purpose and plan — a faculty member who teaches that class. And that person becomes their personal adviser for at least a year.
CT: I read an article in which you were quoted as saying you maintain a “radical commitment to personhood” — that somebody on campus will know your name. The college has 61,000 students. How do you achieve that?
Shugart: We’re facing a postmodern generation [of students] who are not just suspicious but deeply distrustful of all institutions. All institutions. They are that way because we made them that way. We did it by depersonalizing them. We treat them as raw material or we treat them as a customer,
“Colleges are really paying a lot of attention to completion — which is a good thing — and are reforming the living daylights out of student affairs, but they’re not making much of an impact on teaching and learning.”
But we put enrollment at risk to give our students a better start to college. We call it “Start Right.” Lots of colleges do that now, but it was revolutionary at the time. We’re going to respect the learning environment.
Colleges are really paying a lot of attention to completion — which is a good thing — and are reforming the living daylights out of student affairs, but they’re not making much of an impact on teaching and learning. If you put learning first and say, “Completion is a function of learning,” then you have to deal with teaching and learning with the classroom. We started there. Our faculty led our efforts. And we spent enormous resources with them under their leadership, both hiring differently and inducting faculty into our organization differently.
Shugart: Before the pathways comes a bigger question. As we worked with students over the years and did lots and lots of focus groups as well as quantitative analysis, what we discerned was that one of the best predictors of success at the college and ultimately graduation is if the student knows why they’re here — if they have a purpose. For some it was a sublime purpose. I can remember Rafaela, who wanted to become a doctor someday so she could go back to the Amazon Basin where she came from and treat children. For others it’s very pragmatic — “My husband left me and I’ve got no career,” or “I’ve been a police officer for 15 years and someday I’m going to make sergeant.” If they could articulate a real purpose for their presence here, their likelihood of graduating was much higher than students who looked just like them but weren’t quite sure why they were here.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | July 2017