GRCC aims to improve student success through Achieving the Dream program

Sharon Hanks

To help its students succeed, Grand Rapids Community College has joined a nationwide initiative that helps pinpoint barriers hindering student achievement and offers proven solutions to overcome those problems.

GRCC will begin participating in a program called Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, an initiative that recognizes community colleges as being in the national forefront of the college completion movement. Through a two-year grant from the Kresge Foundation, GRCC will obtain assistance from Achieving the Dream with the expansion of its data collection and analysis, identification of barriers to student retention and graduation, and the selection and implementation of strategies that help students achieve success.

Mark Champion, information analyst at GRCC's Institutional Research and Planning Department, says the college already measures student progress, such as retention and graduates rates. But Achieving the Dream program will help it to begin this fall tracking the progress of students in a wider variety of "cohorts" or groups of students, including such variables as race, ethnicity, age, gender and socio-economic level. It will also introduce focus groups to determine why some students succeed, while others fall behind.

Once barriers have been identified, GRCC's second year in the program will examine proven solutions to problems, such as outside tutoring, peer tutoring, remedial classes, a "First-Year Experience" class, or help with child care or transportation.

"It allows us to look at strategies that have been developed over the last five years and use what works for that specific group," he says, adding that the process is driven by a "culture of evidence. You don't jump to a solution to a problem you think exists. This is a lifelong process for a college."

Champion says the traditional student -- those young people right out of high school -- is not the norm at GRCC. In fact, only 36 percent of incoming students in the fall of 2004 were first-time college students. Out of that group, only 15 percent of students graduated within three years. Why didn't more graduate?

GRCC hopes to find some answers and gain a better understanding of its retention rate. Only 58 percent of GRCC students return after one year of school. "So what happened to the other 42 percent?" Champion asks. "If we track them as a cohort, we'll know if they dropped out, went to a different college . . . . there are multiple things that could have happened."

GRCC is among 27 community colleges nationwide that will have joined Achieving the Dream this year, an initiative that now includes 130 institutions in 24 states and the District of Columbia, reaching more than one million students.

Source: Mark Champion, Grand Rapids Community College information analyst in the Institutional Research and Planning Department

Sharon Hanks is innovations and jobs news editor at Rapid Growth Media. Please send story ideas and comments for the column to Sharon at [email protected]. She also is owner of The Write Words in Grand Rapids.