Community colleges use data to drive improvement
Community College Times, Feb. 2, 2007
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A recent survey of students enrolled in the Houston Community College System (HCCS) in Texas indicates that getting academic counseling is critical to the higher education experience.
Nearly 85 percent of polled students said good academic counseling was important. However, the survey shows that the students aren’t entirely pleased with the level of counseling they are getting: only 62 percent of the students who indicated that academic counseling was important said they were satisfied with the level of service provided at HCCS institutions.
Those two sets of figures raised eyebrows across the campuses of the system, prompting school officials to address a problem they didn’t know they had, said Charles Cook, the system’s vice chancellor for instruction.
“Clearly they were telling us that we had to do something to improve our treatment, particularly when it came to entering students,” Cook said.
To meet that need, HCCS created a course called College and Career Planning, which is the first of its kind in Texas for which community college students receive credits.
A follow-up student survey indicates the program is hitting its mark. Of the 85 percent of students who indicated academic advising is important, 88 percent of them are satisfied with the colleges’ advising services.
“Because of this kind of data, we have been able to move away from just speculating and instead have hard numbers that we can base decisions on. That’s how important this survey has become to us, Cook said.
The survey that HCCS uses to cull the data is the national Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), which is conducted annually by the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin. It is regarded as one of the most comprehensive surveys of its kind documenting the student experience.
More than 249,000 students from more than 550 individual colleges participated in the most recent CCSSE survey, giving educators a treasure trove of information that increasingly helps in shaping policies.
“This was the whole idea from the very beginning—not just to do a survey, but for people to be able to use the results we compile in a way that could improve outcomes for students, depending upon what issues seemed to be the most important,” said Kay McClenney, the director of the survey.
Speaking during a focus session at the 2007 Achieving the Dream: Community College Counts Strategy Institute last week, Cook and McClenney talked about the CCSSE as a document that gives college leaders and administrators a unique insight into their own institutions. They were joined by Jackie Claunch, the president of Northwest Vista Community College (NVCC) in Texas, which is a part of the Alamo Community College District, and Paul Brown, the president of Zane State College (Ohio).
“The CCSSE data helped us to find out things like the fact that over 70 percent of our students are first generation, and that they like both a lot of one-on-one contact as well as studying in groups,” Brown said. “So what that meant for us was that we needed to institutionalize a personal-touch philosophy where we would give the students more one-on-one help as well as talking to them about issues both in and out of the classroom.”
The survey showed to Zane State officials that commuting to class was a barrier: students said that they felt they were spending too much time on the road.
“We decided to offer duplicate courses at the Willett-Pratt Training Center, which is about 25 miles from our main campus. And since we’ve been doing that, the number of students taking classes at that particular facility has been growing by about 20 percent term to term in the last year and a half, Brown said.
Although many educators and leaders value the survey for indicating areas to expand or create, the survey also often justifies current programs.
“When we looked over the results of the CCSSE survey, the numbers in that area were indeed significantly above the means they established. This was good news,” Claunch said.
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