At N.C. college, ATD-based efforts boost persistence
By CC Times, Published February 3, 2010

Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) in North Carolina has received a national award for its leadership in student success from Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count and Lumina Foundation for Education. The award comes with $25,000 that the college can use for student success efforts.

GTCC, the fourth-largest community college in the state with nearly 14,000 students on four campuses, received the second annual Leah Meyer Austin Institutional Student Success Leadership Award during Tuesday’s opening of the annual Achieving the Dream Strategy Institute in Charlotte, N.C. The college was recognized for its unique and effective “front door experience,” which combines intensive first-year student support services with a major physical and functional restructuring of the college’s student services facilities.

“This is truly a lesson in the power of high-level commitment and well-focused, evidence-based decision making,” said William Trueheart, CEO of Achieving the Dream.

Student and faculty input and data gathered and analyzed as part of GTCC’s work with Achieving the Dream were used to change the college’s advisement and student orientation model, along with the student services facilities themselves. GTCC President Donald Cameron credits Achieving the Dream with helping to make changes in the culture of the college.

“The data and feedback that we now collect and analyze has helped identify some major pedagogical and structural inefficiencies in our processes,” he said. “In our 50-year history, there has never been an initiative that has produced more meaningful involvement of the total college community and yielded such beneficial results.”

Conceived in 2004, Achieving the Dream has expanded to more than 100 institutions in 22 states, reaching nearly 1 million students. ATD is focused on creating a “culture of evidence” on community college campuses in which data collection and analysis drive efforts to identify problems that prevent students from succeeding—particularly low-income students and students of color—and develop programs to help them stay in college and receive a certificate or diploma.

GTCC has been involved with the national initiative since 2004. The college’s early conversations and data analysis elevated the need to make dramatic changes in the maze of departments and procedures students had to navigate when they enrolled. As a result, the college committed more than $300,000 in capital funds to renovate facilities and relocated admissions, testing, financial aid, counseling and advising services into a central location.

The college piloted 15 total projects, 11 of which continue today. One of the most productive programs has been GTCC’s reorganized orientation process. The Student Orientation Advisement and Registration (SOAR) initiative has improved the process by changing the original one-hour orientation seminar to a more comprehensive three-hour orientation that now includes advising and registration support. GTCC is also scaling up pre-placement refresher courses, intensive advisement of entering developmental education students and case management services for higher-risk developmental education students.

Findings from its evaluations of the SOAR program showed that new students who participated in the first SOAR demonstration persisted into spring 2006 at a rate of 79 percent, compared to 64 percent for new students who were not in the demonstration. Longitudinal data indicates students who go through SOAR persist at a higher rate in subsequent semesters than those who do not go through the voluntary program.

More than 12,000 students have now gone through SOAR, which GTCC continues to revise based on student feedback, observational data and technological advances.

“What we’ve come to understand is that one size does not fit all,” Cameron said. “We are now committed to an ongoing, constantly evolving process that thrives on a continuous flow of student and faculty input, quantitative analysis and other key success indicators.”

Achieving the Dream also recognized South Texas College for its work in developing a college-going climate in poor, Hispanic communities along the U.S.-Mexican border and Zane State College (Ohio), which serves low-income residents of rural Appalachia. The colleges received $5,000 each to use toward student success efforts.

The Austin Award, sponsored by Lumina and administered by the American Association of Community Colleges, recognizes outstanding institutional achievement in creating excellence and equity through committed leadership, use of evidence to improve policies, programs, and services, broad engagement and systemic institutional improvement.