Community College Innovation

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo. I'll be joined by my co host Michael Horn in a few minutes on today's episode. Marcia Ballinger will be joining us. She's the president of Lorain County Community College in Ohio. When I ask folks about some of the most innovative colleges and universities in the country, Lorraine is often mentioned. So we wanted to talk with Marcia about what she's been able to achieve at this community college southwest of Cleveland. Marcia, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks so much, Jeff. I'm happy to be here to share the Lorain County Community College story.

So, as you know, there's a lot of community colleges out there, but I've identified you as probably one of the most innovative community colleges. And just tell us a little bit about your journey the last couple of years. Where was Lorain County Community College? You were previously provost there, I think. And where has it come from since that time, your president?

Well, and we appreciate your identifying us. Innovation has been at the heart of Lorain County Community College since we began back in 1963 as Ohio's first community college. So that sense of innovation and continuing to not only be responsive to community needs, but to help really drive the creation of the vibrant community for all. And so at at LCCC, we have been laser focused on our transformation from 2011 through today in terms of going from what I have described as having a theme of students needing to be college ready to our college now being student ready. In other words, how can we assure that every student's dream matters and that they can earn their degree and credential regardless of their background, income, socioeconomics, that we truly are their launchpad. So back in 2011, we had the great opportunity to become part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's completion by design. Ohio was one of the three states to be part of that cadre, and LCCC was one of the three institutions and at the same time become part of achieving the dream. And so those two networks were really catalytic in helping us to become much more data informed and deliberate about redesigning with the end in mind, and the end in mind being getting students to credentials and degrees and transfer or directly into jobs with meaningful wages. And so redesigning our institution through a variety of what I believe have been very innovative approaches with regard to education, services and partnerships to create greater and more equitable outcomes for all students.

So you mentioned obviously the importance of these networks. What was different about being part of these networks than not being part of these networks. Right. So so many institutions, institutions are getting ideas from other institutions, they're going to conferences, they're trying to copy those ideas on their own institutions. What was different about being part of a network than instead of just, you know, going and seeing examples of what other institutions were doing and copying them on your own campus?

We believe that the network opportunities through both achieving the dream and completion by design as well as our statewide network in Ohio through our student success center has been catalyst for us because it not only unites around common themes and purposes, but we are continually learning from our colleagues and the resources that and opportunities that are made available. And coaching has been integral to all of this for us and having those individuals to call upon and to really help to challenge and to have that outside lens. And the networks have really helped to expose us, I believe, to some of the innovations that are occurring at other institutions. And so through an Internet worked matrix, if you will, I think we're all rising together. And when it's a one off and a college is just trying to, I think, do professional development around conferences, you might have a small team that goes and they have some takeaways. But when you're part of a networked experience, it's part of the culture change which I think really needs to occur. When you're trying to transform the type of results that we have been focused on at Lorain.

In terms of your results, can you talk a little bit about some of the transformations that you've done? Obviously a lot of them have been surrounding student success. Could you give us an example of one or two that you have been able to accomplish as part of this process?

Sure. So we have created, we've done a lot of pilots when we've had funding to demonstrate the effectiveness of it and if it works, then we scale it. And so we're organized around guided pathways for one. So we moved from a cafeteria model where there were over 120 different choices down to guided pathways that provide for essentially nine meta majors and very structured around that. On the scaling what works in our evidence based approach to student success. One example of that that has been wildly successful is we replicated the CUNY ASAP model here and we did that working back with what is now Ascendium, previously Great Lakes foundation and mdr. And we were able to move our graduation rates for students who participated in our version of asep. So essentially the students are Pell eligible. They had to attend at least 12 or have at least 12 credit hours per Semester had to guarantee that they would go to tutoring for math if they placed in developmental math and also that they had to meet with their advisor once a month. And in return for that they received incentives such as gift card for food and gas as well as free books. We were able to demonstrate the same type of results that CUNY ASAP has had for the past decade. And we moved the needle to a 41% graduation rate with that. So we are now scaling that and have taken in the past two years our own cohort of over 220 students per year to do that. And we're creating a part time version of that model with the same types of incentives. So I think that's one example if you can find a program and redesign around it where you can move that needle. When we started in 2011, our IPEDS graduation rate was 8%. It is now 28%. The cohort that we, because we did a research sample with the MDRC project on the CUNY ASAP replication, those who were not in it, their graduation rate was about 20%. So very, very significant.

So one final question, Marcia. So in some ways it sounds like, okay, there are pathways to do this for institutions like yours. When you talk to other presidents who are thinking about going under an institutional transformation like you have, perhaps they have access to networks, perhaps they have great data warehouses so they know what you know, they know who their students are and what they need. Perhaps they could redesign some of these pathways for students. What else do you tell them is an absolutely necessary ingredient? In other words, in some ways it sounds like if you could follow a formula, it's somewhat easy. But what has been the most difficult part or what do you tell your call your counterparts in other parts of the country has been the most difficult.

It might sound easy, but for for those who are doing it, it's a heavy lift and it's an all in commitment. It's not a boutique program right, where it's a one off and you just do that. It is that commitment and belief and the culture that students dreams matter and that there are risks that need to be taken and there are hard decisions that have to be made as a result of this transformation because systems produce what they're designed to produce. And so if you're producing graduation rates less than 10% or less than 20%, then the system needs to be redesigned. And that is tedious. It's long, it's hard. And change doesn't happen overnight. We are into our eighth year of it and we're really seeing the results now accelerating and we're seeing the closing of the gaps. But you know, the conversations that my colleagues and I have is that it's not a one and done. It's a long commitment and it takes leadership at all levels within the organization to make that happen.

Marcia I appreciate your time today and we'll be right back on Future youe.

Thank you so much. Jeff.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

Welcome back to Future you. I have my co host Michael Horn joining me from Skype today. Welcome, Michael.

Michael, thanks so much. Excited to join you even remotely.

Jeff, thanks. We just got done talking with Marcia Ballinger, who's the president of Lorain County Community College just outside of Cleveland in Ohio. And Michael, one of the things that she talked about a lot was about copying ideas that are working at other institutions, including the CUNY ASAP model, Guided Pathways. In particular, she talked a lot about how they used to have this kind of cafeteria model there, which gave students in some ways too many choices, thus had issues with college retention both and completion. You've thought, I know a lot. You thought a lot about Guided Pathways. Given your work on your new book Choosing College. Does that work for everybody?

Yeah. My takeaway let me actually step back a little bit, which is, you know, Clay Christiansen and I, when we wrote Disrupting College with Luis Soares when he was at the center for American Progress, we concluded that Guided Pathways were incredibly important to have this just straight, narrow path for a student. They get on. They don't get confused by all the different courses they could take, accumulate credits but not toward any major, and then don't graduate on time and all the cost that that contributes and so forth. And that many students, when they're coming, they're looking for the most direct path right to completion and to lose that complexity. And so I think that logic behind Guided Pathways makes a ton of sense in a lot of cases. It also reduces administrative overhead, costs for the institution to coordinate people going back and forth between pathways, which is important in today's day and age, with college costs being what they are. I think the conclusion that. The surprising conclusion, I guess I would say I took away from choosing college when we did the research was that if you're in the help me step it up job, say in our language, right, you're trying to. You look around, you're saying, this isn't who I am. I'm ready to step it up, and I know what I want to move toward. And so you have a very clear idea of what that future is. A guided pathway makes a ton of sense. And I think it's one of the reasons why guided pathways has seen such a jump in outcomes from just implementing that almost alone relative to the cafeteria model. The challenge becomes, though, if you're a student who's running away from something, say, or doing what's expected of them, two of the other jobs that we found that clearly community colleges get hired for all the time, a guided pathway isn't really going to fit with you because you don't really know what you want. And even a mega major, or opting into a certain sort of broad pathway and then having a couple lectures and a couple conversations with companies or something like that about what a job might entail and then getting on the pathway, it's actually not enough information or context for you to make that decision in a way that you're actually convinced by. And so a huge takeaway, I think, from the research we did was guided pathway, definitely better than what's there before, but it doesn't fit every single circumstance. And we have to recognize when the student is coming in without that clear direction and almost shape that first semester or first year to be about. Let's expose you not just in a lecture format, but in a series of experiential learning opportunities, deeply into a variety of these different pathways to figure out what actually sticks, what actually matches your strengths and what gets you excited and then put you on the guided pathway to the career. And it was interesting. I got to be in Washington state about a year ago or so with their community colleges. And I was presenting this research before the book came out, and there was presidents and counselors at this audience. It was an interesting mix of group. And every single counselor came up to me afterwards and said, oh my goodness, thank you for saying this. My president is just pushing guided pathways right now. And I can see it's leaving out these other students. And we have to figure out a different way to serve them. And so I just, I thought it was really interesting and the nuance and I guess it goes to something else that I'm curious. Your take. I'm super impressed that Marcia listens so well to other people and actually brings in practices from other parts of higher ed. But then you also, I think, have to have the ability to step back and say, best practices might not be the right practice for me in this particular situation or this particular student. So it's almost like, let's learn from higher ed, but not replicate it wholesale without asking, is our context the same, such that we can expect the same result? Does that resonate?

It does. And you know, one of the things she talked about was her which what they've learned through the networks, that they've been part of achieving the dream and completion by design. I just finished working on a paper with Ithaca SNR that was funded by the Lumina foundation called Unlocking the Power of Collaboration. And we really looked at this idea of collaborative networks in and around higher education. And are they working and kind of what are the models of success? And what we found, after more than a year of research, we did a ton of interviews. We had a convening in D.C. we found out that really there are three situations in which the network approach might be advisable when the problem is complex and important to the community from which the potential network will be drawn. So if you think about the University Innovation alliance, for example, or Achieving the Dream, or these other types of networks, they're really focused on these big problems that are facing multiple institutions that are hard for one institution to follow or to solve when the knowledge, expertise, and access to target populations and other components of solutions are distributed across different organizations. So again, the network approach helps bring together organizations and when the problem has no readily apparent solutions. So it really requires kind of iterative discovery and development of solutions, which, again, is very difficult for a single organization to follow. And so the thing that I was really impressed with what Lorraine Community College was able to do is that through these networks, not only people in higher education go to conferences, they learn. They're able to develop things on their own campuses from learning from other institutions, but they brought these other institutions on campus. They have coaching from these other institutions that are part of their network. So it's a much more deep and ingrained type of learning community that develops. That I think is actually going to be necessary, and we found this in this paper, is actually going to be necessary, I think, to solve many of the intractable problems that we're seeing in higher education. I think it's going to be really difficult for institutions to go at this alone. Michael, I think you're seeing some of the same stuff, same results in some of your work as well. In terms of this power of networking. Again, may not be for everybody, but I think that this idea of institutions going alone is just not going to work in the next decade.

Yeah. And frankly, it's a breath of fresh air to see a leader like her take be such an active participant in a network and like you described, actually have them on campus and iterating with them deeply and not worrying about whether the idea was hers or not for political reasons, so to speak, and being able to take from others. I think so much of education is often, well, we do it this way, they do it that way for an individual leader. And so I think that's incredibly refreshing to have that sharing and network. I also think, frankly, the conclusions from your paper are incredibly important to say these are the circumstances in which it works. And when we're trying to achieve something different, maybe it's not the most appropriate way to go about it. The only other thing I would add is you've been talking about this for several years now that, yes, there's mergers and acquisitions and all sorts of things that may happen in higher ed, but actually, before we even get to that point, we just need to be better collaborators and develop better networks and develop better consortia and formal ways of working with each other. And this seems like a really important step in that direction.

Right. And I think that's absolutely critical is that I think we've been focused a lot on mergers and acquisitions, and that's probably going to be the pathway for a lot of institutions that don't have really kind of anything to sell or anything to cooperate on. But I think that this is a pathway for other institutions. The other thing that Marcia talked a little bit about was their visioning process that really involved the community. And this goes back to an earlier episode that we had with Joe May in Dallas. Again, the connections to the local economy and their visioning process. Ohio's economy is struggling, obviously heavily dependent on manufacturing. Manufacturing in many parts of the state. When they started their visioning process, first of all, they did it very quickly, but they included a lot more community members than I think most colleges do in their own visioning process, because they really wanted to know what is the threat of automation, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality going to have on our programs and on our future jobs? What is the future going to look like, they had this visioning committee that brought together all these various stakeholders. They had 120 people on this group. Again, many people from off campus as they were trying to develop the system. But again, bringing the community in who know what's happening in the local economy was absolutely critical to them. And again, it really just points out, I think, that community colleges, given the variety of their mission, compared to, for example, a traditional residential college that, you know, could develop, it might take them a year or two to develop a program, and their students go through four years, and then they eventually get out and hopefully get a job. I think community colleges just have to be much more adaptable, much more flexible because of who they serve and particularly because of their, you know, their. Their position in the local. In their local community.

Yeah. And that. That sense of vision, though, is so important, and clarifying it through that grassroots process and then having a leader who's super clear about it and can bring people back to it every single time when they make action, I think that's a great takeaway and a great way to leave this episode of Future youe and hopefully continues to give our listeners a vision for what the future of higher education will look like. So, as always, Jeff, thank you. And thanks so much to our listeners for joining us. We'll see you next time.

Hey, folks, Michael Horn here.

Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future you. And just a reminder to please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you like the podcast, rate us so that others can find us and find out about the good conversations that we're having here. As always, thanks so much for listening.