Planning

I feel like we’re evolving in our use of data and becoming more refined. What I heard recently was sort of a TMI situation with data. So we have too much information. Maybe it’s TMD, too much data. People didn’t know what to — they were feeling kind of submerged in data, didn’t know how to parse that, what to make of it. So we’ve really made an effort, led by our president Sonya Christian, to focus on five specific momentum points that are guided pathways related. And we’re going to be communicating those relentlessly. And the five momentum points are: completing transfer-level math and English within the first year; completing 15 units within the first term; completing 30 units within the first year; completing nine pathways units within the first year, so specific to the particular program pathway they’re on; and then completing transfer completion or degree or certificate within three years.

Several years ago we got on board with the 2020 focus of doubling graduation rates. We did a deep dive into the data to find out what would that mean in terms of our college annually? What would we have to accomplish to end up in 2020 with a doubled graduation rate? And that also, that’s a lagging indicator. So to get to completion you first of all, you’ve got to back up. Students have to be successful in their classes. Then they’ve got to persist term to term. Then they’ve got to persist fall to fall. And so there’s a lot of things, a lot of room in there to intervene and to act in order to have that ultimate lagging indicator be what you are trying to accomplish.

So we backed up, and we set goals around all of that. We even set goals around withdrawal rates. I mean, if a student doesn’t stay in a class, if they’re withdrawing at a rate that’s, you know, if students in plural are withdrawing from classes, well that’s not a good indicator. So by looking at the data in a more micro level in the class with withdrawals, incompletes, course success rates, and then persistence — so fall to spring, spring to summer or spring to fall, and then certainly fall to fall, that’s a big one with our retention rates. So that’s how we set baseline goals so that we knew, and it was by looking at the trend data to see where we were when we committed to this 2020 completion goal. What it would take in order for us to ultimately double graduation rates by 2020.