Background

Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) has three campuses in metropolitan Cleveland in Northeastern Ohio. With nearly one-third of its residents living in poverty, Cleveland was the nation’s poorest big city in 2004 and 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Tri-C is Ohio’s oldest and largest community college. With more than 34,000 credit students annually, and another 25,000 non-credit students each semester, the college estimates than one in five Cuyahoga County residents has attended classes at the college. Forty percent of Tri-C’s students are from minority groups; 66 percent are women.

Achieving the Dream Goals

Tri-C has identified student retention, satisfaction, and success as key priorities, and outcomes assessment as critical to its planning process. Its goals include

Increasing the number of students who graduate with associate degrees;
Improving the college’s retention rate;
Raising persistence rates;
Improving the college’s performance on the student satisfaction and student engagement surveys.

In 2005, the college plans to identify best practices to help it achieve these goals. It would also like to develop instruments to assess service gaps and design appropriate student interventions and ancillary services to respond to gaps. The college recently invested in technology that will track student outcomes, assess student success interventions and provide predictive models to prescribe academic pathways. The college made orientation mandatory for new students beginning in Fall 2005. It has also expanded its academic advising and tutoring services. Financial aid and career services were reorganized to meet students’ needs more effectively.

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