Both community colleges and bachelor’s degree-granting institutions across the country are responding to a chorus of calls for dramatic improvements in student success and college completion, while maintaining and improving the quality of students’ educational experiences. A companion challenge is to close persistent and troubling attainment gaps across a diverse population of students. Because Latinos are the largest under-served population and the numbers will continue to increase, achieving these goals requires consideration of how these students experience higher education and what institutions can do to better serve them.
Even more, given that community colleges are the predominant postsecondary option for Latinos — and that among students who enroll with the intention to transfer, only 14 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree or were still enrolled within six years — it is incumbent upon all institutions to fix the Latino transfer pipeline to increase college completion.
From their inception, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) have collaborated to bring a strong focus on educational quality, equity and high-impact practices to higher education institutions and the national discourse. With support from The Kresge Foundation and the Greater Texas Foundation, NSSE and CCCSE joined with Excelencia in Education in a project focused on helping institutions strengthen Latino student engagement, transfer and college completion.
The project paired 24 institutions — 12 community colleges with 12 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions from urban locations in California, Florida, Michigan and Texas — to work in partnership on Latino student success. Among other commitments, the institutional pairs brought teams of five leaders from each institution to an intensive two-and-a-half-day institute focused on strengthening the engagement, transfer and college completion of their Latino students.
Substantial data work, including the examination of student engagement data and student cohort transfer results, as well as a review and discussion of effective practices prior to the institute, prepared the teams to develop a collaborative action plan to be implemented on their campuses.
In addition, five institutional pairs participated in focus groups in an effort to elicit student, faculty and staff voices on transfer. The comprehensive review of student engagement results alongside cohort data tracking transfer and completion helped partner institutions identify salient student engagement and transfer patterns for collaborative analysis and discussion. Ten months after the institute, we asked teams to tell us what they had done to improve the engagement and transfer process for Latino students. Several themes surfaced.
The most common strategy put in place was recurring meetings.
