Redefining Student Success

Thirteen years ago, AACC issued a report that had a profound impact on the community college landscape.

At the time, community colleges were all about providing access to learning opportunities by making higher education more attainable and affordable for a greater number of people.

But once they’d entered the doors, too many students were dropping out and failing to complete a degree or certificate.

"Reclaiming the American Dream," released at the 2012 AACC Annual Convention in Orlando, helped reframe the conversation around student completion and success.

As a result, many more students are earning credentials today – and colleges are meeting the needs of their communities more effectively.

The report, and the work that went into producing it, had a "catalytic impact" on the field, says John J. Sygielski, president of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College. It seeded major initiatives such as guided pathways and set a tone that "incremental change wasn’t enough."

As community colleges face new challenges in the postpandemic world, this "bold change" mindset is still as necessary as ever.

If the 2012 report gave the community college field its North Star, then now is the moment "to recommit and update the map for a much more complex landscape" moving forward, Sygielski says.

When Walter G. Bumphus became president and CEO of AACC in 2011, he wanted to do something that would make a broad impact on the field.

"I thought: What could we do to make AACC a visionary organization by addressing real problems with visionary solutions?" he recalls.

Bumphus launched the 21st-Century Initiative with the goal of ensuring that an additional five million students would earn higher-education credentials by 2020. He invited 38 leaders from community colleges, four-year institutions, K-12 school systems and higher education associations to serve on a 21st-Century Commission that he chaired.

"This was the first time as a sector that we started to look inward and ask: What can we do better?"

- Walter G. Bumphus, Ph.D., AACC President & CEO Emeritus

Phase one of the initiative involved a listening tour that focused on gathering information from a diverse group of stakeholders.

Throughout 2011, Bumphus and his senior staff met with leaders at community colleges nationwide to get their thoughts about how AACC could better support student success, help overcome budget constraints, and lead community colleges into the next decade and beyond.

This variety of perspectives "provided great value to the conversation," says Jane Karas, president of Flathead Valley Community College in Montana.

Based on this feedback, the 21st-Century Commission published the "Reclaiming the American Dream" report, which called for a new vision of community colleges grounded in the "Three Rs": (1) redesign students’ educational experiences, (2) reinvent institutional roles, and (3) reset the system to promote student success more effectively.

The report made seven key recommendations to drive this transformation:

Although community colleges have fallen short of the ambitious goal to increase student graduation rates by 50%, shifting the focus from access to success has, indeed, boosted completion.

According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the percentage of students who started their education at a community college in 2007 and earned a degree or certificate within six years was 36.3%. For students who began their education at a community college in 2018, the six-year completion rate was seven percentage points higher, 43.4%.

What’s more, completion rates for community college students from the lowest-income neighborhoods have increased by 11 percentage points since 2010, from 28.1% to 39%. Students – and colleges – are experiencing more success in other ways, too.

For instance, community colleges have been focused on providing workforce training for decades, but there was sometimes a disconnect between the training that students received and the needs of employers. The 21st-Century Commission report spurred colleges to partner with local employers to ensure the relevance of their training programs by forming workforce advisory groups and inviting employers to help with curriculum development.

One unique aspect of the 21st-Century Commission’s work is that it included not just a laundry list of suggestions, but a practical roadmap for effecting change.

AACC convened nine separate implementation teams to identify strategies and resources that colleges could use as they worked to adopt the report’s seven recommendations. This advice was distilled into a companion guide called "Empowering Community Colleges to Build the Nation’s Future."

"The companion piece was equally important," Bumphus notes. "We wanted an actionable document, not just something that would sit on a shelf."

Ken Atwater, president of Hillsborough College in Florida, cochaired the implementation team focused on "Community College/K-12 Collaboration for College Readiness." He describes the 21st-Century Commission’s work as "monumental."

"It changed the culture" at many community colleges, Atwater asserts.

Atwater’s team conceived a number of strategies to help colleges partner with K-12 school systems more effectively to ensure the readiness of students to attend college. These included aligning expectations and curricula, providing early counseling on college options, and expanding opportunities for students to earn college credit while still in high school.

In the wake of this guidance, many more students nationwide are now earning college credit while in high school through dual credit courses. In fact, according to U.S. Department of Education data, nearly 1.8 million high school students were enrolled in courses for community college credit during the 2022-23 school year.

Daniel J. Phelan, president of Jackson College in Michigan, credits the commission’s work with opening his eyes to the value of these dual enrollment programs.

"I was not a fan in the beginning," he acknowledges. "It felt like we were eating our own seed corn, and we weren’t going to have anything to harvest later."

It was the 21st-Century Commission report that "helped me get past my own bias," he notes – and with 1,400 Jackson County high school students taking dual enrollment classes at the college this fall, Jackson College is now the largest high school in the county.

The 21st-Century Commission report also has informed much of the work at Hillsborough College under Atwater’s tenure. "We did the small things to remove barriers that were stumbling blocks for many students," he says.

For instance, Hillsborough has removed student graduation fees, provided more counseling and technical support services, expanded its vocational education programs tenfold, and developed career pathways that students can clearly understand, complete with educational plans that guide students toward completion.

As a result of these efforts, the college now graduates about 8,000 students per year, up from 3,000 in 2010. Its workforce training programs have a $1.2 billion impact on the local economy, nearly double that of 2010. And student satisfaction with programs such as financial aid administration stands at 95%, up from 65% 15 years ago.

"Our support systems have improved dramatically," Atwater says.

Another practice the 21st-Century Commission elevated was using data to improve planning and decision making.

Before the report came out, community colleges were using data largely to report on compliance. Now, they’re using advanced analytics to identify and close learning gaps and better understand the student experience.

Flathead Valley has created data dashboards that its leaders share with board and community members. "We can see the impact of the changes we’re making," Karas says, "and if there’s a gap, we can talk about what we need to do to address that."

Phelan served on the implementation team focused on redefining institutional roles and functions. He says his college has "quadrupled down" on using data to drive student outcomes in the wake of the commission’s work.

Jackson College has set what Phelan calls a "90-80-70 goal": 90% of students persisting from fall to spring, 80% persisting from fall to fall, and 70% completing a degree or certificate. Phelan’s leadership team has compiled a balanced scorecard with key performance indicators for measuring progress toward these goals, and they review where the college stands on a weekly basis.

"We haven’t reached our goal yet, but we’re pushing really hard," he says.

Inspired by the commission’s recommendations, Jackson College also has bolstered its support for faculty. For instance, every faculty member gets an allowance of $2,000 per year to advance their professional knowledge, and the college is exploring ways to reduce their course loads so they can spend more time helping students who need it.

As Phelan explains: "The people who have the biggest impact on our students every day are our faculty."

While the 21st-Century Commission report led to a host of positive changes, many challenges remain.

Some of these hurdles are the same ones identified more than a decade ago. Others are brand new and didn’t exist when the report came out, such as the explosion of automation and AI.

"We’ve got to figure out how to address AI to enhance learning and prepare our students for the future," Atwater says.

The work of the 21st-Century Commission was "very much needed," Sygielski says, because many colleges were not systematically tracking or addressing equity gaps. Although colleges have made tremendous progress in this area, "completion and equity remain unfinished business," he notes - especially for low-income, minority, and first-generation students.

Looking ahead, community colleges must treat equity gaps "as an existential threat, not a side project," Sygielski says. Campus leaders also must make the student experience "radically simple" from enrollment through completion, especially in light of what he calls "the Amazon effect."

Phelan points to the changes that campus leaders have seen since the pandemic as another key area of focus.

"We need to have an honest conversation about the sociological impact of Covid," he says, noting that the pandemic exacerbated problems that were already emerging – like a rise in stress and a decline in social skills as students spend more time on their cell phones and social media.

To address these problems, Phelan’s institution has stepped up its mental health counseling and support. Jackson College now has three full-time counselors on its staff to support the needs of 8,000 students.

Community colleges can also do a better job of granting credit based on the skills and competencies that students demonstrate, Phelan says, and not just the time they spend in the classroom. Toward this end, Phelan is working to convert his entire institution to a competency-based education model within eighteen months.

"These are huge challenges," he notes, "but I think we’re up for it."

Community college leaders will never be fully satisfied, because there is always more work to be done. But "I feel like we hit the ball pretty well" with the 21st-Century Commission’s work, Bumphus says.

Community colleges were often seen as peripheral to higher education, Karas observes, even though they serve more students than four-year institutions. The 21st-Century Commission’s work "helped bring the role of community colleges to the forefront in the United States," she asserts.

Perhaps the commission’s biggest legacy is that it kick-started a process of introspection and self-improvement among the nation’s community colleges that continues to this day.

"This was the first time as a sector that we started to look inward and ask: What can we do better?" Bumphus says.

He concludes: "I think we did good work."

And, he is correct. The good work can be seen in the data that shows a marked improvement in completion rates. But, more importantly, it shifted the narrative on the definition of student success and spotlighted the need for investing in support and wraparound services that are critical to removing barriers for students. That shift has empowered community college leaders to broaden their impact and implement multiple success strategies, improve how metrics are defined, and use that data to tell a richer story of the community college student and the sector itself.