By Michael Carley
Back when I had a weekly newspaper column, one of the first ones I wrote, and still a favorite, was entitled “The Power of Humility.” It was a topic I would return to at least seven times, around once a year. I’ve even thought of expanding it into a book someday.
The concept would serve me, and my colleagues, well as we engaged in our student success work.
We’d been involved in a number of student success projects for a couple of years already, but in 2013, when PC and KCCD joined the Achieving the Dream network of community colleges, we were asked to form a Data Team. At first, none of us were sure what our role would be, so we started from scratch and made it up as we went along.
The Data Team ended up being a brainstorming group, a diverse team of faculty and staff from several areas of campus who came together to take a deep dive into any and all data available, both quantitative and qualitative. It could be anything from demographics to student and employee survey data, to focus groups, to success rates from every part of the student journey. I chaired the team, but anyone could ask that we review whatever data they cared about. Some were reports I already had prepared or that we used districtwide, while others were things that had no precedent, so we had to create them ourselves. We were a subcommittee of our Success and Equity Committee (itself a subcommittee of College Council), a group that has now been reconstituted as our Guided Pathways Committee.
As we began our work, the hope was that we would look at data objectively and suggest changes to existing processes and procedures, especially those that might be unintentionally creating barriers to student success. We learned that early when reviewing student cohort data, a districtwide initiative that would later become our 1st time student cohort dashboard. We went through the report in detail and one of the things that stood out was how important it was for students to take 15 units in a term. We had long known that full-time enrollment mattered, but the difference in completion rates between those who enrolled in 12 to 14 units and those who enrolled in 15 or more, even in just the first term, was striking.
In colleges across the country, the concept of 12 units as full-time had become so much the norm that both faculty and students thought of it as a maximum rather than the minimum for certain types of financial aid. We were doing a disservice to students by suggesting 12 units as the expectation.
That didn’t mean everyone would immediately embrace the idea. Some, especially some of our counselors, worried that too many units would lead to worse outcomes. Anecdotally, they had reports of students who found the workload cumbersome. We reviewed other data and found that even course success rates were higher among students who took 15 or more units. We found this to be true of almost every type of student, even those on probation who are often restricted in the number of units they’re allowed to take.
Counselors knew however, that many students have other responsibilities, jobs, families, etc. We couldn’t embrace 15 units for everyone. At one point, I pointed out that only about 10% of our students enrolled in 15 or more units in their first terms. “What if we increased that to 30%? It would be a game changer.” It was. By fall 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, 29% of our students were enrolling in 15 or more units.
Student services staff recognized that the data showed the need for change, but we also knew that their concerns about workload and distractions were valid. The focus isn’t just on 15 units in the first term. We also encourage 30 units in the first year, with multiple approaches to how to get there. It could be 15 in the fall and spring, or 12, 12, and another 6 units in the summer. And students who cannot enroll in the recommended number of units are informed of the effect on their educational journey and financial aid implications.
Our “15 to Finish” campaign had fits and starts, with leadership and staff changes along the way. But it was culture change that made it happen. In our most recent Strategic Plan, the objective became to get at least 35% of students enrolled in 15 or more units in their first terms, and 30% enrolled in at least 30 units in their first years.
There were other examples. We found data that led us to encourage enrollment in English and math early in the student journey, preferably in the first term, to push the steps of matriculation, especially completion of education plans, and make changes to how we approach students on probation.
Perhaps the biggest change was our approach to remedial education. There, Data Team had a relatively minor role. Even before the Team’s implementation, the college was experimenting with changes to our approach. We were involved in the Multiple Measures Assessment Project and the California Acceleration Project, among other initiatives, and we tried stacking courses, combining multiple courses, and several other approaches, anything that reduced the sequence of remedial education that kept so many of our students from succeeding. By the time AB705 was passed, we were already working on the very reforms that would be implemented through most of the state, corequisite courses. As a result, Porterville College was one of only a handful of colleges statewide that implemented fully in fall 2019.
Humility was key to this process. Faculty set aside their egos, and many of their worries, to work together to find what worked. Math, English, and ESL faculty learned from each other. Our administrative leadership allowed faculty to take the lead and signed off on various experiments, negotiating where necessary and allowing certain initiatives to fail so that we could learn from them.
Humility requires trust and we needed to build that, not only within Data Team, but with anyone we worked with. At one point, we found that our DSPS students were struggling to achieve their outcomes. We shared data with the office leadership and invited them in to meet with us, not to chastise or criticize, but to listen and learn. DSPS counselors and staff shared with us some of the new things they were working on, which were encouraging, and also some suggestions which led us to recommend minor changes to training for our student tutors.
I had to learn humility as well (a lifelong lesson). Our recommendations were shared with the Success & Equity Committee, then sent to the appropriate person or group. Not all were implemented. As we found from our Student Satisfaction survey that students were less happy with their textbooks than they had been in the past, one concern was cost. We suggested that Academic Senate form a group to look into textbook cost and consider alternatives. Senate didn’t see the need.
But I had to admit that the survey didn’t directly point to cost, just that textbooks weren’t as well-received as before. We didn’t know the reason(s). So the next recommendation came to my office. We needed focus groups to examine the issue of textbooks (and a few other topics). The groups, luckily conducted right before the pandemic, resulted in a nuanced discussion in which students pointed to several issues with textbooks and our use of them which were much more actionable on the part of faculty than attempting to address cost alone. They also cited positive ways in which some faculty use textbooks and related educational resources that others might emulate.
Humility with trust allows for experimentation, in the interest of the greater good, in this case, student success. You have to trust that you won’t always know the result of your efforts or even whether you will be successful. In examining data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), we found a lot that was encouraging, but made suggestions that we hoped would improve the college’s performance on two of the five CCSSE benchmarks, with a specific focus on two questions that had been persistently among our lowest. The results from our 2022 iteration of the survey were mostly encouraging. We surpassed our goals for the two benchmarks. Can we point to a specific recommendation as the one that did the trick? Not really. It could be the result of other things we changed. And, of those two specific CCSSE questions, one showed improvement, but the other, one quite dear to my heart, declined even further. We will have to renew or change our efforts.
We had to have faith that what we were doing was going to work, even if it took time to see it in the data. We could see students making their way through English and math more quickly, taking more units, and other reforms that seemed like success, but completion takes time. Measured via cohorts and tracked over three years, we had to assume that our other reforms would eventually result in better completion rates.
And, they did. At first, there seemed to be little change, then with the 2016 entering cohort, the percentage of students completing a degree, certificate, or transferring within three years jumped from 18.4% to 26.3%. It was no fluke; the 2017 and 2018 cohorts showed additional incremental improvement, with the latter completing at a rate of 28.9%. Though the pandemic and its challenges may result in a pause, we expect our improvement to continue.
Improving the success of our students required trust, patience, and collaboration, for each of which, humility was key. We all had to set aside our egos, departmental or personal self-interest, and preconceived ideas of what would and wouldn’t work. We followed the data with the needs of students at the forefront at every step.
The need for humility continues as we transition to the next stage. The Success and Equity Committee has transformed into our Guided Pathways Committee. Data Team remains, and is now larger, but rather than being primarily a brainstorming group, we are working to provide each of the Guided Pathways workgroups with the tools they need to generate their plans and serve their students. There have already been bumps along the way as we adjust to the new structure, but with each of us focused on the needs of students, rather than our own desires, we expect continued success.
Michael Carley is the Director of Institutional Research at Porterville College. Before joining Porterville College in 2000, he worked as a Research Associate for Sociometrics Corporation, a small social science research company in Silicon Valley. Michael holds a B.A. in Sociology from CSU Fresno, an M.A., also in Sociology from Stanford, and a certificate in program evaluation from CSU Fresno. In his free time, he enjoys hiking in the mountains, spending time with his son, and writing, having published a novel, novella, and most recently, a memoir.
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