Caring Campus Toolkit – To support the continuous improvement of Caring Campus, this document has been created by IEBC and CCRC with tools you can use to monitor and assess the implementation and impact of Caring Campus at any stage of implementation.
When students drop out or stop out, everybody loses – the students, the college, and the community. Working differently to support the students they serve and championship of this work by college leadership changes this. How? Read it here.
San Diego, Calif. Ascendium Education Group, one of the nation’s leading higher education philanthropies, has awarded a one million dollar grant to the Institute for Evidence-Based Change (IEBC) for the Caring Campus Initiative. The objective of this program is to increase student retention and success in community colleges by creating and cultivating Caring Campus environments through the intentional inclusion of all staff in student success efforts. Under the two-year grant, IEBC will work with 20 colleges from around the United States to participate in the Caring Campus Initiative, which is a coaching-based approach to connect all staff to students, ensuring that all staff play a role in removing barriers and enabling students to achieve success. Research has documented students leaving college because they do not feel connected to the institution (Tinto, Leaving College, 1993). Caring Campus recognizes and leverages the value of...
A commentary in EdSource by IEBC Senior Director of IT and Analytics John Watson sheds light on an interrupted pathway. Minding the small and ordinary can make an extraordinary difference for students. California’s public university systems — the University of California and the California State University — have identified high school course requirements (known as A-G) for admission to their universities. The A-G course list is designed to ensure students learn and can apply specific knowledge and experiences needed for more advanced post-secondary study. But between high school and college systems, simple errors can block the desired seamless highway. An estimated 10 percent of the students who graduate having completed California’s A-G course requirements can be denied admission when a course they (and their school) thought met A-G requirements does not. This means that each year 15,000 to 20,000 graduates are potentially affected; and that number has increased each year for the...
IEBC’s Brad Phillips and Jordan Horowitz continued IEBC data use and academic planning support services as part of its contract with the Hawaii Department of Education to introduce its data use model, provide workshops followed by coaching over two-years. The workshops and coaching were designed to ensure the required academic plans had measurable leading indicators, providing progress markers for the big goals of high school graduation and college and career readiness.
IEBC President Brad Phillips and Vice President Jordan Horowitz were panelist/presenters on College Retention, Persistence, and Completion: Powerful Practices for College Success and in the Promise Program Evaluation Lab.
There is no question that racial, gender and income inequities in the United States hurt our nation economically, socially and morally. Higher education can be a great equalizer, lifting the prospects of the poor, near poor and working class – but only if we hold the entire higher education sector and its cadre of reform advocates to dramatically higher standards. We’ve been too satisfied, even self-congratulatory with small-scale programs that only serve a fraction of the student population and perpetuate a culture where helping all students succeed is someone else’s job. It’s not good enough. If the demographic of the near future (and in many cases present) is majority minority, why are we satisfied with efforts that not only fail to move the college completion needle in reducing inequities but create a terribly inefficient, fractured cottage industry of niche programs, whose return on investment can be questionable? Consider the very popular $14 million developmental education...
Ensuring college degrees are worth the time, money and effort is a challenge this nation must solve. Simply put: more degrees of value mean a more prosperous, equitable future. The college attainment enterprise is certainly working hard and using considerable resources to make college more affordable and beneficial, but it is missing an important solution right under our noses. The “big reveal” came during a recent meeting with higher education hall of famers: Stanford University Registrar Thomas Black, Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce director Anthony Carnevale, and manager of strategic partnerships for IEBC’s Tuning USA John Yopp. The discussion focused on how higher education can be more in tune with employers to ensure that what is taught and learned in colleges prepares students for current jobs and emerging careers. The group lamented that surveys of CEOs and human resource directors don’t work, because CEOs are often not in touch with frontline...
Another way to do and measure philanthropy to produce direct measurable results. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster and the founding president of Facebook, called on the philanthropy community to do what he and his fellow digital pioneers did to create today’s tech giants: “‘Hack’ complex problems using elegant technological and social solutions, and an almost religious belief in the power of data to aid in solving those problems.” “While philanthropists like to talk about impact, they seldom have the tools to measure it,” Parker wrote. “This has led to a world in which the primary currency of exchange is recognition and reputation, not effectiveness. These incentives lead most philanthropists to favor ‘safe’ gifts to well-established institutions, resulting in a never-ending competition to name buildings at major universities, medical centers, performing arts centers and other such public places.” “How to” — selecting the right tools for...
Sometimes the most obvious education solutions are the hardest to get attention for, much less implement. That’s the way it is with advocating for K-12 and higher education working together to improve college completion. The simple act of K-12 and higher education faculty and administrators together reviewing student performance data and observations about student needs delivers huge benefits. Student learning is made more relevant. The transition from K-12 to higher education is made smoother. Faculty understand more about what students need to succeed. More students earn degrees. But this solution is a bit like the Hans Christian Andersen “Princess and the Pea” tale with the pea that signals ‘happy ever after,’ stuck amidst layers and layers of separate K-12 and higher education cultures and control agencies. We’re still waiting for the most discerning would-be princess policymaker or philanthropist to discover this magical pea. Like the prince, we’re stuck grumbling about the...