Century College
The main goals for student success at Century College focus on the students’ completion of a degree, diploma, certificate, or transfer to another institution. To achieve this, Century College is currently concentrating its efforts on entering student success, as well as on improving connections with prospective high school students and adult learners. The college is investing in promising practices for student achievement based on its own pilot projects, as well as on research from national promising practice community colleges.
College leaders are particularly interested in using Achieving the Dream's guidance to improve the support of academic achievement for disproportionately low-income students, first generation students, and students of color. They also recognize the need to provide information in useful formats that are accessible campus-wide and can be easily used and understood. College leaders are most eager to receive feedback from coaches and other leaders in this area to improve its processes. Committed to improving student success and functioning as a data-informed institution are strong goals for Century College and in terms of Achieving the Dream, persistence and completion and student engagement are two quality measurements that provide an example of data currently being collected and tracked for continuous improvement.
Century College is the first and only college in Minnesota that has been asked to join Achieving the Dream. Century College was selected largely because of its commitment to its “Bridge to Success” initiative, which involves establishing learning communities, mandating a “New Student Seminar” course for developmental reading students, embedding tutors in courses, and assigning faculty to be academic advisors using the GPS LifePlan, a comprehensive planning program for students that links academic effort to career goals.
Century College’s commitment to diversity is evidenced by the growth in its enrolled student’s ethnic diversity (of students who reported ethnicity) from 15% in Fall 2001 to 29% in Fall 2010. To demonstrate the importance of this figure, the state of Minnesota has an ethnic population overall of nearly 16%. Century College has the second highest number of ethnically diverse students of all Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) community, and technical colleges. Similar to previous years, over half of the students were female (55%) in Fall 2010. Nearly 14% of the total 10,515 enrolled students for Fall 2009 were Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, which was larger than African American or Hispanic enrollment.
The Achieving the Dream Model
Achieving the Dream community colleges commit to our Student-Centered Model of Institutional Improvement. Based on four principles, the model frames the overall work of helping more students, particularly low- income students and students of color, stay in school and earn a college certificate or degree.
Each college approaches the work differently, but Achieving the Dream’s five-step process provides practical guidelines for keeping the focus where it belongs and building momentum over time. Throughout the process, Achieving the Dream coaches offer customized support and help each college’s core team implement data-informed programs and policies that build long-term, institution-wide commitment to student success.
