Student Access and Success

The Editor provides some thoughts on the back story to the current budget crisis in California. In addition, he includes an overview of this issue’s articles focusing on the challenges and opportunities in student services, innovative ways to reduce budget expenses and amazing programs to help at-risk students succeed.

Our sponsor for this edition is Higher One. Founded in 2000, Higher One provides higher education institutions and their students with efficient, convenient and easy-to-use solutions to handle financial disbursements. This case study identifies the impact and savings that their service can provide a college campus.

Chancellor Diane Woodruff discussed the issues, cited the challenges and shared the opportunities that face California's community college system to open the 2008 California Community Colleges Student Services Conference on April 9, 2008, at the LA Westin Hotel. Speaking to more than 800 attendees in Los Angeles that included student services vice presidents, program directors, counselors and staff from community colleges throughout the state, Chancellor Woodruff provided a budget update and asked the audience to get involved in efforts to preserve community college funding. She also addressed efforts underway to improve student success rates; shared a number of programs that are working to close the achievement gap for African-American, Latino and Native American students; and discussed system initiatives to help high school students better prepare for college. Chancellor Woodruff thanked the audience for helping students succeed in realizing their dreams.

College leaders can obtain valuable help from institutional researchers for decision making during these trying times of budget pressure. The experiences and skills of institutional researchers enable them to support sound decision making by bringing forth empirical data from the institutional data systems and relevant information from past studies (that may even have occurred elsewhere). Often, institutional researchers can act as independent and objective sources of information and advice and as expert evaluators of information quality that may enter into a decision making process. Therefore, institutional researchers can play a valuable role in the process of identifying those "best practices" that college leaders may need to implement.

A regular sponsor for the iJournal, the author shares his thoughts on ways to reduce cost in this tight budget year. California community colleges will be confronting a $180 million reduction in their state funding in the 2009 fiscal year. Insurance, risk management and employee benefits are areas of significant expense, and the author suggests that by applying strategic approaches to these areas, community colleges can make a difference, immediately and in future years.

According to the Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994, one of the greatest areas of weakness and an area needing the most improvement within the higher education system, is student achievement in mathematics and science education. More than 10 years later, this challenge continues to present barriers to student access and success at community colleges across the nation. This article introduces one approach for closing the achievement gap in math and science. As part of Tacoma Community College's TRIO-funded program, a project was initiated which implemented the Treisman Model in developing collaborative learning communities for math and science. The Project deviates from traditional individual tutoring techniques and instead concentrates on building collaborative groups focused on gaining mastery of math and science skills. Through the use of workshops/seminars students are introduced to the concept of "team" as a learning environment, where members set and share high, but achievable goals related to their specific math or science course. Initial results of this project indicated an increase in the retention and success of participating students.

Over the past fifteen years, students with psychological disabilities have become the fastest growing disability group to attend community colleges. Because of the recent recovery and employment emphasis in community mental health and the additional funding provided by the Mental Health Services Act, there has never been a better time for colleges to develop partnerships with local mental health and rehabilitation agencies to meet the student support needs of this growing population. Now with the spotlight on these disabilities due to the tragedies at colleges in Virginia and Iowa, college leaders are finding it necessary to reach out to the community for assistance. The additional challenge in tight budgetary times is to find the right balance between safety and cost.

Our small Staff Development section lists one conference on sustainability. Now is the time to identify the key conference workshops and important events for our readers for 2008-09 and send them to the edition for the October issue.

In this article, the author makes a case for the transformation of existing institutional paradigms which confine innovative approaches to student retention and persistence within narrow contexts and dualistic systems that separate the public from the private, promote mind/body splits, and support compartmentalization. What results is a fragmented, disembodied student attending a fragmented, disembodied educational system, proposing fragmented and a-historical solutions to complex realities. It is this duality, this mind/body split that needs to be challenged and overhauled.