Community college leaders brainstorm how to help neediest student

What can community colleges do to give their students a leg-up to success?

That’s what more than 300 leaders from Ohio’s 23 community colleges gathered to find out on Sept. 17-18 during the fall Student Success Leadership Institute.

“Improving student success for Ohio’s thousands of community college students is always top of mind,” said Jack Hershey, president and chief executive officer of the Ohio Association of Community Colleges. “We are doing all we can to help our students grow, succeed and ultimately get their degrees or credentials for a rewarding new career.”

The institute is a grant-funded project aimed at helping community college leaders make transformational change at their institutions to help students from all backgrounds and cultures complete college.

Twice a year, teams of representatives from each Ohio community college meet to listen to speakers, attend workshops and share with each other the initiatives that have worked and those that haven’t. This year, for the first time, the meeting was virtual.

One goal the colleges share, Hershey said, is helping underserved and underrepresented students overcome barriers that hinder their education. That might mean setting up food pantries or providing emergency help for students who have lost their Wi-Fi, explained Laura Rittner, executive director of the Success Center for Ohio Community Colleges.

The institute, started in 2016, is part of the Success Center, which is under the umbrella of the OACC. The center works to align reform efforts so colleges can provide guided pathways for students – clear maps that detail such things as the courses needed to complete each program, the length of study and job possibilities after completion.

“Before, we tried to be everything to everybody, sort of an invitation to choose your own adventure,” Rittner said. “We found we need to lay pathways for students, making them much more clear and having advisors and faculty support students as they work their way through their programs. It’s a shift from piecemeal advising to holistic advising.”

Speakers at the institute included Russell Lowery-Hart, president of Amarillo College in the Texas panhandle. The college has a nationally known Culture of Caring initiative that strives to keep the neediest of students by offering a food pantry, low-cost childcare, emergency funds and many classes that run for half a semester. Two years ago Lowery-Hart gained nationwide attention by spending a weekend as part of a simulation on homelessness, an experience he said he took on to better understand students in poverty.

Representatives from the Community College Research Center, the Ohio Department of Higher Education and Sova, a higher education consulting firm, also spoke.

“We feel like we have come together as a state with our community colleges to better understand our student success rates and to improve them,” Rittner said. “Everyone came to the table to say: ‘We have a problem and need to work on it.’”