The course covers time management, note-taking and study strategies, along with the development of a career portfolio, said Betty Fortune, dean of academic development at the college. Students map out what courses they’ll need to take to reach their goal and learn about tutoring and other resources available on campus.

 

The course started as a pilot program on two campuses in 2005 when HCC joined the Achieving the Dream initiative. It has since expanded to all six colleges in HCC’s system.

 

Sometimes the freshman course is linked to other basic courses, such as English or math, so students take the courses together in a learning community. Students taking notes in an English course, for example, can bring their class notes to the freshman success course to see whether they have done them correctly, Fortune said.

 

 

Cabrillo College in California has found the personal attention offered students in learning communities improves their engagement with the college and helps them stay motivated. 

 

The Academy for College Excellence (ACE) learning community program has seven cohorts, with 29 students in each group, who take five or six classes together. The college received $3.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2010 to expand the ACE program.

 

Another learning community program for first-year students, called STARS (Students Transitioning to Academics: Reaching Success), was recently established at Cabrillo with a $2.8 million federal Title V Developing Hispanic-serving Institutions grant.

 

The college provides “a tremendous amount of support” to students in learning communities, said Victoria Banales, ACE basic skills coordinator. 

“We try to pick the best faculty possible for ACE and provide training for them," she said. "The faculty members meet once a week and provide a lot of one-on-one support when they see students are struggling.”

 

For example, when students are constantly late for class, instructors are encouraged to ask them what is going on in their lives and help them find assistance with transportation or other resources.

 

“You know everybody [in a learning community] so you operate as a family. It’s very comfortable,” Banale said. “Students are way more engaged.”

 

Cabrillo College has several other learning communities. The REAL (Reading and English Academic Learning) program links courses aimed at improving students’ writing and critical-thinking skills by exploring a theme. For example, English and reading instructors created a curriculum around the theme of vampires—students read the popular Twilight novels—as a springboard to explore issues such as as social justice and discrimination.

 
The college plans a longitudinal study to track students several years after graduation. Meanwhile, Banale pointed to a study by the Teachers College at Columbia University that shows students who took part in learning communities had much higher success rates—they were more likely to pass their classes, had higher grade-point averages and took more course units. Students also had high persistence rates, which means those who didn’t do well in a class were less likely to drop out.

 

 

The Connecticut Community Colleges (CCC) system has improved its student success rates by having financial aid counselors at each of the state’s 12 community colleges show students how much more they could receive if they enroll as full-time students.

 

CCC has been able to do this because it handles the back-end administration, policy and research functions associated with financial aid, which “frees up the staff at the individual community colleges to work one-on-one with students,” said Matthew Sanchez, CCC’s director of financial aid services.

 

Since that program was implemented 10 years ago,  the two-year college system has seen a 164 percent increase in the number of financial aid applications and a 181 percent increase in Pell Grant recipients. During the same period, the number of full-time students more than doubled. And that makes a difference because full-time students do better academically and are more likely to graduate, according to system officials.

 

Sanchez has fielded calls from other state community college systems interested in adopting a similar model. The concept is getting more attention across the country, he noted, because colleges spend a lot of time and resources on their financial aid systems, and colleges struggling with budget deficits are cutting back on their financial aid offices.

 

 

South Texas College (STC) adopted several strategies as part of the Achieving the Dream initiative to eliminate bureaucratic barriers to graduation. Students don’t have to submit an application or pay a fee to graduate, for instance. 

 

STC also no longer permits students to register after classes have begun. In the past, STC found, students who registered late often were not ready for college and were more likely to drop out, said Shirley Reed, the college's president.

 

Students who miss the registration cut-off can still take condensed courses during the college’s “mini-mester,” Reed said. Those courses start a month later but meet more frequently and offer the same number of credits as regular courses.

 

STC has set a goal to double its graduation rate in five years. It hopes to do this by concentrating on the 2,000 students in the cohort used to report graduation data in the U.S. Education Department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System​ (IPEDS).

 

Reed said IPEDS is flawed because it only counts students who are attending a college for the first time, enroll in the fall and graduate three years later. Nevertheless, Reed said she is focusing on students in the IPEDS cohort because “their performance is the basis by which the public judges South Texas College.”

 

“We give them special attention and closely monitor their progress,” she said. “We’re putting a bright star on all their files,” so administrators, financial aid counselors, guidance counselors, and faculty know they should receive special support.

 

In addition, STC has set graduation targets for each of its 110 programs and developed strategic plans for achieving them.

“We need faculty to buy in​ to the idea that students need to earn a college degree," Reed said.

 

“Students often say they don’t need a degree because they’re planning to transfer to a university,” she said. But they need to understand that students who have an associate degree tend to do better in a university than those who come directly from high school, she noted.