Achieving the Dream rewrites students’ futures

There was a student at the College of Southern Nevada, let’s call him John for the sake of anonymity, who gave up a lucrative career as a night club bouncer on the Las Vegas Strip to pursue a criminal justice degree. In his mid-30s, he wanted to become a police officer.

In his third semester at CSN, he began to tackle math, which is required for his degree. The subject matter was Greek to him. He felt lost. He missed one class, fell further behind, got discouraged and eventually dropped out. He told his instructors his hiatus would be temporary, until he was really ready to come back to school.

John’s story is old hat at community colleges across the country. He hit a major hurdle that he could not find his way over or around and he is unlikely to return to college.

At CSN, with the help of Achieving the Dream, the nation’s premier college reform network, we’re writing a new ending for John. We’ve spent the past year collecting data on the obstacles that prevent students like him from successfully completing courses and why.

As we have collected this information, we also have begun to make significant changes in the way we operate that should better connect students with support services and help cue the right decisions that will lead to course and degree completion.

Achieving the Dream is helping CSN uncover the underlying reasons why students don’t pass their classes or graduate, identify solutions, using best practices from across the nation, evaluate and scale programs to be most effective and do so with support from our faculty and staff.           

For years, community colleges spent energy on access to make sure no student would be turned away. In the wake of President Barack Obama’s call to increase the number of community college graduates by 5 million by 2020, two-year schools are working to do more to make sure the students who come through their doors can effectively learn new skills and leave, ready to take on the world.

Achieving the Dream helps colleges do this by providing them with a structure, coaching, research methods and relationships that help them effectively reform themselves. Over the next year, CSN will work to implement and evaluate several pilot projects to determine if and how to scale them to fit the entire target population at the college.

CSN offers unlimited free tutoring and is opening math centers on our campuses for students such as John who haven’t used more than basic arithmetic in the past decade. In addition, this spring CSN began offering affordable short-term intensive boot camps that can take John in eight weeks through several semesters of developmental math to college-level math.

We’ve been working to add staff to Student Services to provide more tutors and financial aid staff, and we are restructuring the way we advise and counsel to put advisers in each of CSN’s six academic schools and make them more accessible to students.

We’re introducing policies that will help students develop healthy, proactive habits. For instance, research shows that students who register after the start of the semester are far less likely to pass the class. In spring 2014, CSN is eliminating late registration and has begun to prepare students for this behavior shift, urging them to plan ahead.    

So where does this leave John, who is unlikely to make his way back to college without some form of intervention? CSN is making an effort to reach out to students with significant credits under their belts to get them the services they need to come back and succeed.

If we can reach John, provide him with a plan to obtain his degree, a success coach or adviser to help him make that map, math tutoring and financial aid support so he can concentrate on school, he can see his way over this hurdle. If we give him the keys to tackle his challenges, he can do the work to get his degree and achieve his dream.