With three-year completion rates under 30 percent, community colleges are innovating to improve retention, completion and transfer rates, according to the Hechinger Report.
Several two-year colleges in Minnesota are rolling out student success programs.
At Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota, students are urged to “Finish What You Start.” Students are grouped in “learning communities” that take two or three class together, often linked to common themes or questions. Those who need remediation, take an intensive one-semester class.
Normandale Community College set an application deadline for new full-time students after realizing that students who enroll at the last minute often end up on probation.
Century College requires new students who test at a pre-college reading level to take a two-credit “New Student Seminar” and to meet with advisers twice a semester.
Five years ago, the college also set up learning communities for remedial students. Century now has 500 students in 23 groups. A community might take a joint reading and writing class and a speech class with “The American Dream” as a theme.
Developmental reading students in learning communities averaged a 2.45 GPA, compared to a 1.89 GPA for similar students who didn’t participate. Fall-to-fall retention in learning communities was up 20 percent; withdrawal was down 7 percent.
In the last year, the first- to second-year retention rate for Minnesota colleges and universities inched up by 2 percent, said Leslie Mercer, the system’s associate vice chancellor for research, planning and effectiveness. By collecting more data on what works for students, colleges hope to improve.
“If you think about what Amazon.com does when you order a book, they say, ‘People like you who read that book would like these other seven books,’ ” Mercer said. “We’re a ways away from that, but that’s what we’d like to do so that we could say to the student who’s coming in, ‘Oh, people like you who had this kind of experience in high school and want to become a nurse … do best when we do these following things for you, and you do the following things.’ ”
Achieving the Dream has named eight leader colleges that show three years of improvement in course completion, retention rates and advancement from remedial education to credit-bearing courses, reports Community College Week.
Yakima Valley Community College created an Office of Institutional Effectiveness to collect and analyze data, resulting in interventions to help Hispanic students with math and English skills.
The most recent fall-to-fall retention rate for Hispanic students is 59 percent, an 8 percent boost over the year before. Overall completion rates in developmental courses are up, and Hispanic students achieve at the same rates in those courses as white students. In addition, Hispanic students now outperform white students in college-level English classes.
At Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania, research showed that students were struggling to complete the second of three developmental math courses. Instructors were using different approaches. The data showed students did best with a project-based approach, so that was made the standard. Course completion improved by 7 percent over three years.
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