The Real Story of Student Success

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future you. I'm Michael Horne joined by Jeff Salingo. And we're really thrilled to have our guest today on the show, Joe May, who is the chancellor of the Dallas Community College District. Thanks so much for being with us.

Well, hi Michael. Jeff, thanks for having me here. And it's really appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about what's going on in Dallas.

Well, and that would be the perfect jumping off point, which is we love to ask our guests who come on the show how they get into higher ed. But I think for you the interesting question might be tell us a little bit about the community college system in Dallas itself. And you came in in 2014, so your pathway to there and what you

saw when you got there. I did. You know it. It's kind of interesting. I actually started out in the Dallas district as an adjunct faculty member 41 years ago. So for me it's full circle. Getting to come back as chancellor after having been president of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System and prior to that was president of Colorado Community College System and previously was president at Pueblo Community College. So long career in higher ed in Dallas where a lot of unique things happening in Dallas. Clearly one of the top economies in the country right now. They've grown by over a million people since 2011. And just look at between 2017 and 18, 132,000 people moved to the North Texas area. That's 362 people a day. So a booming economy. And that's the good news. The bad news is that about 395 people a day are moving in or to take the jobs that are available in Dallas. As we look at that on almost a daily basis, as we see these jobs opening up and leaving many of the people that were born and raised in Dallas behind. In fact, we've seen since that same 2000, roughly 2010, 2011, about a 15% decline in median family income, meaning that some people are benefiting and some people are not, which is what we refer to as increased income disparity in the community. We have about 15 campuses in Dallas. We serve this year 155,000 students, about 80,000 on the credit side and about the rest with our workforce and apprenticeship programs.

So you're no stranger to the community college system than nationwide. Having had several posts when you came into Dallas, what was the big challenge that you saw that you wanted to tackle and sort of where you wanted

to make your imprint?

But I think we had a great opportunity there to align our programs with the needs of the economy and the workforce. I really saw that we had two basic responsibilities that we needed to really help our community be successful. And by that I mean economic success. Because there's really only two ways to grow gdp. Either you increase the size of the workforce or the productivity of the workforce. So we need to be in alignment on those two. And second is we really needed to help business prosper because if they're not prospering, they're not adding jobs, and we want greater opportunity for our students through greater job availability.

So we talked about student success and you put it in an interesting way, because higher education now is very interested in student success. And you talked about the accreditors in particular.

Right.

When they measure student success, they look at the academic factors of student success. But you found in your experience, particularly in recent years, that in Dallas, that all the barriers to student success sometimes don't have anything to do with the academic side of things. Could you explain that?

Yeah, sure. In fact, Jeff, I'm pretty well convinced that the academic barriers often are the smallest piece of the challenge that they face. Because I can point to you. Many academically gifted young men and women coming out of high school but don't see college as an option because they've been raised in the lowest socioeconomic quartile. Their parents have told them all their lives that they can't afford to send them to college. And yet, despite that, these are bright young people that surely would have a future, but they believe that college is not for them. And part of that is when we talk about higher education, we tend to talk about brand and lifestyle as what we tend to sell, when in reality that's expensive and that sounds expensive. And so they often aren't aware that there are lower cost options. They're often not aware that in fact they can have almost a free route to an education.

So you have partnered with outside organizations, but also technology companies to try to figure out, okay, what are the barriers to student success for your students and how can we fix it? Can you talk a little bit about what you've done around, like transportation and emergency aid and housing, all these things you're trying to tackle?

Well, we did, we really helped stand up the Dallas county promise first, which was designed to manage the transition from high school to college.

And what is that?

It's a last hour scholarship that all a student has to do is to commit to start and finish college, complete their fafsa, and let me pause on the FAFSA Just a moment. Because if you're coming from the lowest socioeconomic quartile, there's only one thing that correlates with whether or not you go to college. And it's not grades, it's not ranking class, it's not school, it's whether or not you complete the fafsa. So we have been relentless in trying to get students, particularly from our poorest performing high school, to complete that fafsa. And it's really paid off as we've done that. But that's really the purpose of the promise and then go ahead and apply to college. But then once there we were, we engaged in what we called a student experience study, looking at what the barriers that our students face. And within days we discovered transportation was huge. In fact, it was so daunting for our students, we began to realize what an impact it was having on their ability to simply complete a class. So persuaded our board to provide now free public, public transportation passes to up to 123,000 of our students each year. And we have about 35,000 taking advantage of that. And we believe that's made a difference. We also noticed that our students were missing meals. So we've now put food pantries at every campus as well as train people to administer SNAP so that we could really help them take advantage of the benefits that they had already earned and make it more convenient for them. We're also in the process of rolling out an emergency aid program to meet those needs. So if their car breaks down, we can quickly get dollars to them to help solve that problem or the electricity get turns off whatever might happen to them in life to take care of that support mental health services. But you mentioned housing. That's one that now when we look at the data that we collect on our students, housing related items are now the top three. Now that transportation has bumped down, now that food has bumped down. And so we're looking at partnering with the Dallas Housing Authority to look at how we can work collaboratively to help solve that problem for University.

Joe, how are you keep saying you're finding all this information? How are you collecting all this data? And more importantly for our listeners, I think how are you analyzing it? So how do you know all this about your students?

There's really about three things that we're doing. One, we did train about 40 of our employees to shadow students on a six month basis so we could really see what they were dealing with and that formed the basis. The second, we've partnered with Sarah Goldrick Rabb out of Temple University with the Hope center survey to really take a look at. And we're doing that again this year. We also partnered with the Trellis foundation out of Texas, out of Austin, that is also looking at similar needs for students. And we partnered with a tech company called Aunt Bertha. Funny name, but Aunt Bertha. We were the first to work with them in higher ed. But what they do, they have a cloud based site that allows any individual to search for needs that are free and low cost, so that if they're in an abusive relationship and they need shelter, they can go to the site and see what's available nearby, or if hungry, or if they need other special needs. So we white label that. And the beauty of bringing that into our website is that I get to see what our students are searching for, so I can tell. I get a detailed monthly report that lays out, here are the needs, here's what they're looking for. So it helps us decide where we need to be investing and how we can best help our students.

Just a great example of data and using the data to make data based decisions. And in higher ed, which doesn't happen very often.

Yeah. So the other piece I'm interested in that you mentioned is that getting people to fill out the FAFSA form, you've integrated a lot with high schools. What does that work look like? And talk about those relationships you've built with high schools.

Well, getting that relationship built is so important. And one of the big pieces is that we needed a way to communicate with everyone as to simply whether or not an individual had completed the FAFSA. And so thanks to our partnership with Salesforce.com, we have built out that platform that enables us to communicate with the students, their parents, their teachers, their counselors, their principals on a weekly basis so that if a person hasn't completed, we can really focus our energy on helping that individual. And for those that have already completed it, we want to support them, but we don't need to be shotgunning this. We can actually be very targeted and look at who we need to reach. And because we generally have cell numbers for both the students and their parents, we can do that by text and really supporting them in that process.

And how difficult was it to get into those high schools? You know, everybody in higher ed wants like a P through 16 system.

Right.

How does it, how does it actually work?

Well, the great part is it turns out everyone likes free. So prior to that we were really trying to get partnerships and expand them around P tech high schools, early college High schools really work with those underperforming schools. And we started with the worst performing, where only about 11% were going to get a college degree ever. But schools often didn't want to partner around that. And the reason for it, you know, they were always, well, what's in it for us? You know, they assumed that we were getting some kind of financial benefit by providing college courses for students while they were still in high school. So once we added the college promise to that, then suddenly everyone said, okay. And we said, now you've got to reform your school or you can't be part of the promise. And they said, okay, well, we're will. So now we're up to 57 schools, 12 school districts, and we'll add 10 to 12 a year.

That's terrific. So last question, Joe, which is just talk to us about, as you measure impact and success, what do those outcomes look like?

Yeah, a couple of things are very important and I'm quick to say that the data right now is promising but not definitive in terms of what we're looking for. So out of the first cohort, which was last fall, we had 31 partner high schools at that time, 9,300 possible seniors from those 31 high schools. Our enrollment jumped from those schools alone by 35% year over year. Our four year partner, who's in with us, they jumped by 30% year over year. So we know, we took individuals that we called non consumers of higher education and were able to get them in the door. Then we look at another piece of data which is, okay, how many of them finished the first semester and then enrolled in the second semester. We ended up with 82% being in that category, which is 12% higher than we would have seen out of a normal class coming forward. And these were, frankly, were students that were struggling because we also allow students to get the associate's degree while they're in high school. We never see those students again, they move right onto the university. So we tend to get the ones that weren't quite as prepared and weren't able to take advantage of that. So to have a 12 percentage point increase above what we projected is pretty amazing.

Yeah, that's astounding. Thanks so much for sharing the story. It's something we're going to continue to follow and appreciate you joining us today.

You bet. It's great to be here. Thank you, Michael. Jeff.

Yeah. We'll be right back on Future you.

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.

And welcome back to Future you. Michael. That was a great conversation with Joe May from Dallas County Community College System. And one of the things that really struck me in that conversation with him is around student success. We tend to think about it as kind of an academic matter, but he really talked about how everything there around student success was almost everything outside of the classroom that was really preventing students from being retained and eventually graduating.

Yeah, and I think he's right on in terms of that observation. And a couple things struck me, Jeff, listening to him. One was the way he got at that information was not to sort of collect all the data under the sun, although data was really important to him. But it started with collecting individual student stories, identifying causality, and then driving the data to back that up, which I think is important. We often sort of lose the actual stories themselves and sort of these n of 1 experiences, if you will. And so I thought his way that they went about it was incredibly intelligent and really helped them ask the right question. To get beyond academic success is the answer for success or failure? And the other thing it reminded me of is RE UP Education, a company we both know pretty well that RE enrolls dropout students. They did a report over the summer where they looked at the top 10 reasons that students drop out or stop out, as they would say of college. And it was really interesting because academic reasons is near the bottom of that top 10 list. It's far more likely to be a health situation, a family situation, life balance, a financial reason, a whole host of reasons that are not academic, which I thought was, I think, if I recall, was like eighth or ninth on the list. I know you've also thought about this though, Jeff, and concluded that faculty have to be a much bigger part of this effort. How does that play into it and what does that look like?

Yeah, you know, Michael, one of the things about student success, you know, the student success movement obviously started back in the 70s. It was really focused on retention and graduation. And now it's more about a Culture at a college or university where it's student first and student centered. You know, we hear those words all the time in higher education. But it's interesting to me, especially over the last decade, when we've thought about student success. You know, we've thought about advising. For example, you know, many colleges and universities have redesigned their advising systems either using technology and, or, you know, people, you know, and centralize their advising systems. But many of those are academic advisors, you know, full time academic advisors, not necessarily using faculty, you know, and all the other student success efforts, the success coaches and so forth, again, non faculty. And what's interesting to me is, you know, when you, when you think about, when you ask graduates about their college experiences and they look back on them, they really talk about people and so, and the people that they come in most contact with over the course of their college life, beyond obviously their classmates, our faculty members. And it seems like in many cases that faculty members throughout this whole student success movement have been somewhat sidelined, in some cases by choice, but you know, in some cases by, you know, technology and staffing that has been developed kind of around them. And I think that to really move the needle, we've obviously done, I think, a really good job in terms of retention and graduation rates. If you look at the numbers over the last couple of years, we've at least stemmed the decline. The numbers are slightly rising within some sectors. But, you know, it's not exactly a huge uptick that we should be seeing. I think that to really get that huge uptick, we really have to get inside the classroom and really think about faculty and the role that they play and especially play as mentors to students because they're spending the most time with these students. And so to me, the next move or the next wave of student success efforts really has to figure out a way to incentivize faculty to be part of the student success efforts, to be really central in that. In that role in the future.

It's so interesting you said that, Jeff, because what I think we've seen in the K12 realm, this is one of these places where Joe's obviously doing a lot to integrate high school with community college. But this is a place where I think higher ed could learn from K12 education a little bit, is there have been so many efforts to do wraparound services or integrated student supports, as they call it, in K12 education to support students in other parts of their lives, like healthcare and so forth. But I think the one conclusion I've drawn from this is that if These efforts are not integrated at the point of the teachers themselves that they sort of fall flat. In other words, you know, I go get my healthcare services, that's a plus now. But it doesn't mean I'm going to start achieving academically or complete high school or things like that unless that's deeply integrated with the teacher and they know how to balance my other needs with academic load and so forth. It sounds like you're pointing to something similar. And then I instantly went to where you ended, which is you got to get the incentives right, I guess, to make that all work. Because faculty historically anyway, haven't necessarily been incentivized even around the teaching and learning aspects of the job. And now we're not only moving that needle, but saying, and that also means you're going to have to think about student success potentially more broadly than just the academics.

Right. And you know, the other thing that really struck me about our conversation about Joe is that first of all, just the amount of different things that community colleges do and the issues that are front and center center to him. I mean, we have a lot of four year college presidents on this, on this program. And it's interesting to me about some of the things they talk about compared to some of the things that Joe talked about. And you just start to really realize not only how diverse our higher education system is, but also the divide between the haves and have nots. But Joe really is, is clear on what his mission is. He talked a lot about the economy in Dallas. Some of the statistics he was pointing out about the number of people moving in to take these jobs in a growing economy, kind of leaving everyone else behind in Dallas and what is the role of the institution to fix that. But really this kind of focus on, yes, we do a number of different jobs, but this is our most important job is the vibrancy of the local economy. And we know what we need to do to do that.

That.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Jeff. And it's interesting if you look at a traditional community college, I'm curious if you would list these same three. But I sort of think of them as having three missions which are all pretty distinct from one another. So one, I would list academic transfer into four year colleges for students. Two would be this vocational or career focus, right? The vibrancy of the economy and getting ready, getting people ready for jobs in the region. And third would be even continuing education and enrichment, frankly, more broadly in the community. And those three things all pull against each other in many ways. And I think it's one of the reasons we've seen a lot of reform efforts over the last 10 years really focus on community colleges. And one of the challenges with that, I think, is that the community colleges and having so many different missions that pull apart from each other, it's very hard for one of these initiatives to sort of gain traction unless the leadership and all the way down starts to say, hey, our mission is the economic vibrancy of our region, say, as Joe has has done. So I think galvanizing around that mission is incredibly important for simplifying operations, for helping people see this is what we define as success and then making sure we're all rowing in the same direction and not pulling apart from each other. Does that resonate with you?

It does. And again, I think that in terms of what local people, from citizens to both policymakers around these community colleges, one of the reasons I think community colleges do so well, particularly around, you know, bond issues and public polling as compared to the rest of higher education, is because of that connection to the local, to the local economy.

Makes a ton of sense and I think it's a good place to leave off for this episode. Great conversation again with Joe. Great to be with you, Jeff, and appreciate all of you tuning in to future you and we're excited to see you next time. Thanks so much.

Hey folks, Michael Horn here.

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