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Policy Framework
Reflecting the growing importance of a postsecondary credential in the labor market, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are increasingly concerned with improving poor rates of college completion, particularly among low-income and traditionally underserved students enrolled in community colleges. Research suggests that high-quality student support services may make a difference.
MDRC and others have found that integrating traditional academic instruction with such student support services as academic and nonacademic counseling, course preparation assistance, and career guidance may help students achieve better academic performance, increased persistence, and higher rates of degree-completion. Moreover, such integration may better prepare students for college-level work, encourage them to become involved in the social and academic life of the college, and help them manage the competing demands of school, work, and family.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
Since 2005, MDRC and the James Irvine Foundation have been working together to design and launch the SSPIRE Initiative: Student Support Partnership Integrating Resources and Education. In 2006, nine California community colleges were selected to receive grants of up to $250,000 each over three years to implement a broad range of innovative and promising new approaches to the integration of student services and academic instruction. The greater goal of the grants is to raise academic achievement, rates of persistence, and degree-completion among primarily young, low-income, underprepared, and traditionally underserved students.
As manager of the SSPIRE Initiative, MDRC’s role includes providing technical assistance to the participating colleges to help them successfully implement and improve their approaches; organizing state conferences and other meetings in which the colleges can learn from one another as well as from national experts; and conducting an evaluation to document the colleges’ accomplishments, challenges, and lessons.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The SSPIRE Initiative includes the following nine community colleges from California:
- American River College (Sacramento County)
- College of Alameda (Alameda County)
- De Anza College (Santa Clara County)
- Merced College (Merced County)
- Mt. San Antonio College (Los Angeles County)
- Pasadena City College (Los Angeles County)
- Santa Ana College (Orange County)
- Taft College (Kern County)
- Victor Valley College (San Bernardino County)
These nine colleges have created a variety of different and innovative methods for integrating academics and student services (often in complementary combinations), such as providing more personalized, targeted counseling and tutoring services; revising curricula and training faculty to increase student engagement; providing students with book vouchers and other incentives to help them succeed and persist in their classes; offering summer bridge courses to give new students an introduction to college life; and creating a single place where students can come to study, meet with peers and student leaders, and approach faculty in an informal setting. In five of the colleges, these approaches are associated with or embedded in “learning communities” — cohorts of students who take several linked courses together.
As part of the evaluation of SSPIRE, MDRC conducted annual visits to each of the colleges to interview administrators, faculty, staff, and students, and to observe classrooms and other campus activities. The qualitative data gathered during these field visits supplemented outcome data (such as enrollment rates, grades, and rates of certificate or degree completion) that the colleges each collect and report to Cal-PASS, a student data-sharing system used by K-16 institutions across California. The nine SSPIRE colleges are also participating in the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) and a faculty survey in order to better understand college practices and student behaviors and experiences and to compare faculty perceptions with those of students. (The CCSSE is administered at many community colleges nationwide to assess student learning experiences.)
What's Next
In 2009, MDRC released a final report describing lessons from the SSPIRE initiative.
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