Shared Responsibility

Responsibility.

Mine,Yours, Ours.

Self-imposed. Taken, given

By default, by decree, by consent, by accident, by design.

For others, for ourselves, for our actions…or inaction.

For our competence…or not

Fix me. Fix you. Fix yourself.

It's not my fault. It’s all your fault or it’s their own fault….

not responsible, non-responsible, irresponsible.

I didn’t realize. I didn’t understand. I never asked for this.

Delegate authority, but never responsibility.

There are relatively few things that a person can do for eight hours a day, every day, day after day.

You can't eat for eight hours a day, you can’t drink for eight hours a day. TV gets boring and no matter what your hobbies are, you can only do so much of that. If you don’t count sleeping, work is about the only thing you can do all day long without getting overly tired, bored, sore, or fat.

I remember my Dad telling me when I was in High School three years ago,  that if I could find a job that I loved, I’d never have to work a day in my life.

Well, when you think about all the other jobs out there that you could be doing, there aren’t very many that are as rewarding or challenging, or just plain better than ours.

We spend so many hours working that I can’t imagine how people that are dissatisfied and miserable at work are able to survive. The way I figure it, during the past 18 years that I’ve spent at a community college, there haven’t been too many days that felt a lot like work.

Speaking of work, I’ve been doing a little with a Project called the Voluntary Framework of Accountability. 

The VFA is working on developing a system designed to measure outcomes and processes that are specific to community colleges so that we can benchmark our student progress and completion data against peers and to provide stakeholders with critical information on the colleges.

Today, nearly all colleges talk about the importance of increasing student retention and many invest significant time and money into programs designed to achieve that end. Some colleges hire consultants who promise a proven formula for successful retention, but for all that time and effort, I haven’t heard many stories of sustained result. Student retention, like so many other competing issues, is one more item to add to the list of issues to be addressed by the institution.

What we end up doing is adopting what Parker Palmer calls the “add a course” strategy. We identify a problem, peruse the data, and design a course whose outcomes are aimed at fixing the problem.  Sometimes we take that one step further and create an “add a program” strategy.

The “add a course” or add a “program strategy” tends to result in student experiences that are increasingly segmented and uncoordinated, subdivided into smaller and smaller pieces until relationships with faculty, staff, and each other become more narrow and specialized and ultimately learning gets partitioned into smaller disconnected segments. It’s hard to prevent this from happening.

But I’m optimistic. I really do believe that we can create our own solutions, by virtue of asking the questions and digging into our on data and past performance.

According to Vincent Tinto, when he was here a few years ago, “most efforts to enhance student retention, though successful to some degree, have had more limited impact than they should or could.”

If we were to take student retention seriously, we would have to stop doing a couple of things:

1. Stop tinkering and 2. Move beyond the provision of add-on services.

We would establish conditions that promote the retention of all, not just some, students.  We have, in fact, shown good progress in affecting the success rates of student enrolling in developmental courses through the activities of the Center for Academic Success.

One might say that the root causes of low retention or a lack of persistence is a problem that is well beyond the sphere of influence in which a college operates -- things like socio-economic status, disenfranchisement, lack of motivation and preparation.

Really, what can we do to impact those things?

In all reality, probably not much, but things like tutoring services, student life, advising and counseling, the writing center, the laboratory, and the classroom -- these are settings that are most definitely within institutional control.

There are places like the conference tables scattered around the M-wing where Math Faculty meet with students during their office hours are likely more effective than the addition of a program or course could be. These are the type of activities we need to consider if we are serious about student retention.

In 1996, a study by John Mohammadi reported an average retention rate for two-year public college students returning the second year as slightly over 50%. The average retention rate for four-year public colleges and universities is 67%.

At Parkland, our overall first-year retention rate during 2008 for full-time students was 68%. For part-time students, the rate was 51%. We sit well above the average found in the study, but still, almost half of students enrolling in credit courses in a given year are not here one year later.

Our overall graduate rate in 2008 was 23%.

Certainly, there’s legitimate reasons behind these numbers, the best of which is that the student’s academic goals have been met. If we look only at first-time, degree seeking students -- presumably students in their first year at Parkland, we lose almost 40% of these students not to graduation or completion of their academic goals.  These students leave for other reasons, like family and job pressures, lack of resources, poor grades, de-motivation, and apathy to name a few. You know the reasons better than I.

More than half of college freshmen in the United States attend community colleges. And, again nearly half of them do not persist past the first year at user-friendly place like a community college.

One of the goals of the working groups I attend is to underscore the importance of these and related issues and to investigate systematic methods we might employ that have a reasonable chance at making an impact, not just another “program” that topically addresses the symptoms.

An emerging issue in the literature is the realization that student enrollment has two major components—initial enrollment and continued enrollment or retention.

The initial enrollment decision is viewed as a discrete process.  A student has to decide to attend college at some point, even if it is three days after classes begin. Once that decision is made, there are a series of large and small ongoing decisions the student has to make: Do I continue to attend college in general, do I stay at this college, do I take 12 or 15 hours, do I choose this program because it has the least amount of Math required, etc.

The student retention decision is continually assessed and updated with the arrival of new information like academic status, grades, and satisfaction with the social life or student peer group, how well he or she gets along with their professors.

These are the factors that the college should be ready to deal with. They are within our sphere of influence. Clearly, all students face the challenges of completing postsecondary education successfully, but most experts in student persistence resist attempts to isolate any one factor as the “leading cause” of attrition among students.

So, after all that,  what’s my point?

Let’s focus on those circumstances affecting retention and success that we have some ability to control and/or affect, including the developmental student, the average student, and the honors student as well.

Presumably, the more comfortable the student feels in a particular social and institutional environment, the greater the degree of loyalty to that institution and hence the more likely the student is to continue at that institution rather than transferring or stopping out.

This “student fit” can be enhanced by the extent to which a student actively participates in student life by joining clubs, and by attendance at athletic events, plays, or lectures, and most important, a connection with an individual or individuals at the college. We call that engagement.

Students who are actively involved in learning, who spend more time on task especially with others, are more likely to learn and, in turn, more likely to stay.

I believe very strongly in the work that is being done by this working group and in the ongoing attention and work at our College toward having a positive impact on the success and retention of our students regardless of their circumstances.

Your efforts, both in the classroom and out, are what make the difference. The truth is that students may or may not remember the material you covered forever, but rest assured they will always remember the way you made them feel.

You are in complete control of that.

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