Notes from Dr Sandy Shugart, Valencia County Community College President

Dr Shugart spoke recently at our professional development day at St Louis Community College. Valencia county community college is in Florida and is one of the largest in the country. They have multiple campuses all of which report to President Shugart. What I have here is a reconstruction of the ideas from notes I took during his presentation. I found the presentation to be very enlightening. I hope you do as well.

The college system has been influenced by 5 models at different times in history.

The monastic model was done to preserve culture and students were apprentice scholars. This model dates back to the 1200’s and the first college or university in Italy. The model was to have students come and do nothing but learn. Time was totally controlled, a professor talked to the class and the class took notes. Classes were small, like less than 20 students normally. The eventual goal for the students was to become scholars themselves and then to teach somewhere. The Ivy League schools are still patterned on this model for the most part.

In the mid 1800’s there was a real need for agricultural understanding in the United States of America. The Agricultural model came into being. The students were there to learn the practical skills for farming and the colleges and universities often had out reach or remote branches. These were mostly rural type campuses. There was no intent for the students to become professors themselves. Schools such as KSU, Missou, Texas A&M and others were based off these models.

In the late 1800’s in Europe a different model appeared. Places like Germany, Austria, and Denmark developed the Polytechnic model. The students were there to do science and lead the world in technological research. The students were cheap labor for the research projects of the professors. These are the institutions that hatched Einstein and others. Some of the schools which followed this model were Stanford, Carnige Mellon, University of Chicago and MIT.

Following WW II one of the provisions in a bill for the returning troops included the GI bill. In the USA thousands of men returned home to no jobs. The admission took what they knew best at the time and the “factory” model was developed. Students were raw material to be manufactured and assembled or became scrap. The faculty were essentially line workers each adding their part to the final product or culling scrap. The goal was productivity and large lectures were born. The number of colleges and universities expanded significantly.

In the 1980’s, commercialism and advertising combined to sell higher education to people that did not know they even wanted it. The idea of enrollment management or targeted recruiting began to develop. When these new tools combined with commercialism we got the “retail” model of a college. Students are the customer and the goal of the institution is profit. The faculty in this model become customer service reps.

In each model there is a critical central concept missing. The universities function is never centered on STUDENT LEARNING. The current models are all based on a 30-50% failure rate for incoming students so a paradigm shift is needed. If an institution really wants to be centered on student learning than anything which gets in the way needs to be changed. This change is deep and invasive to almost everything our current system does.

Valencia started with retention rates from fall to spring of like 66% and fall to fall of 40%. These numbers may not be exact as I did not write them down at the time. This rate measures how many students return in each period. These numbers are also typical of national averages. Following a decision to become an institution of student learning Valencia imposed a single big idea on everything the college did. The idea was “Anyone can learn anything under the right conditions.” In the 10 years the college has been reshaping, they have changed almost everything. The term retention was one of the starting points. Why do you retain students like you retain water? The term persistence rate implies an act of will from the student to return. The college’s current persistence rate from fall to spring is 87% and fall to fall is about 70%. These are clear signs the changes have worked particularly when you consider the pure number of students coming to the college the first time is also growing.

So based on what research has shown, what makes for good conditions for learning? There are 5 key elements to adult learning.

1. Time. Numerous studies have shown that the more time you spend doing something the better you get at it. People get tired of doing something and failing over and over, however, when that moment of success comes its all the sweeter for having struggled for it. Time is not always controllable by an institution since students are not living on campus in cloistered cells. There are things which can be done to control the time spent in learning in the classroom however.

One example of things that can be done is to not allow adds to a class after it has started. If you really believe time is a critical element to student learning then by allowing students to come in late you violate your first principle. The first day of class in many classes is known as syllabus day. Faculty handout the syllabus, go over it, and send people home. The current educational model’s make this use of time logical. The college gets extra money for every student who is in class up to the first 10 days. Regularly colleges will allow adds until that point. The students are not sure they are going to stay in class, the teacher is not sure which students are still going to be there the next class or how many new people will be added to the class. Furthermore, students will not buy books until they have been to class once to see if they like it. Valencia decided to try and make better use of this first day and one of the things they did was to offer a 25% discount on textbooks during the 1^st week of registration only. Over 80% of the students now come to class with their textbook that 1^st day compared to 40% or so 15 years ago. It cost the school 800,000 dollars the 1^st year but the results of the student learning have been significant.

2. Engagement Most students will set their impression of a teacher in the first 15 minutes of class. There are three questions which need answers quickly in that time. What qualifies you to teach me? Do you care about what you are teaching? Do you care about me as a student? Without good answers to these questions, students turn off and decide not to be involved in class. The better engaged or involved in the topic, the more likely the student is to learn. There is ample evidence of the difference between classes students want to take and ones they feel they have to take.

3. Assessment. Assessment is something I have not understood well. It always seemed to me that a test was assessment. Through time I have learned that assessment is really about understanding if the student understands what you have taught them. For true student learning however assessment has to go one step further. The student has to understand that the student has learned the concept. Most assessment currently is done for statistical reasons to evaluate the college, not truly student learning. A faculty member has to make the expectations clear. The student has to have a complete understanding of what ideas the student needs to learn to be successful in the course. (successful is defined as an A, B, or C) The student also has to know how they will know they have learned those critical ideas. Subjective assessments are bad. There needs to be hard definable results much like a motorcycle running or not running when you have been rebuilding it.

4. Challenge. Students will rise to the level of your expectations. Students will do what is required of them, not what is asked of them. If you have a high expectation which is clearly transmitted to the students they will respond to it. Hard deadlines and consistent standards make for a better learning environment. If everyone understands the rules and what is needed to achieve then the students can focus on succeeding and not on why so and so got to turn in a paper late, or got extra credit.

5. Heart. Students come to us damaged and believing they will fail. Students need someone to believe in them, to encourage them and to show they can succeed.

Some of these conditions are more controllable than others within the college. An interesting example that was mentioned was about the grounds crew having heard this speech at Valencia. The guy who mows all day came up to the president. The mower realized that he should cut the grass away from the classrooms during class time and near it when classes were not running. This is a simple thing which most of us run into at most schools. What can everyone do to improve the conditions of the classroom?

Dr Shugart went on with a series of big ideas which have reshaped Valencia’s culture and operations.

“The college is what the students’ experience”

It is critical to make things as easy and transparent for students to getting to the classes. Registration, admission, financial aid, student services need to be standardized so they are the same on every campus and every time. Students should be able to use their time for studying not paperwork. It is important to see the processes, campus, and classes from the student point of view.

“Every competitor is a potential partner.”

As community colleges, a large percentage of our students transfer to 4 year schools. A whole host of articulation agreements exist to cover the rules of transfer. Not one of these agreements is written to improve student learning. Articulation agreements protect each college’s turf, or revenue streams. Valencia worked with the University of Central Florida, where 80% of their students transfer, to establish a seamless process. Students who declare their majors and intent to transfer in the first semester at Valencia are treated as UCF students. UCF provides academic advisors on campus and there are no surprises 2 years later when the associate’s degree is done.

“Students who have a plan to graduate are more likely to graduate.”

Obviously the transfer students we just discussed are in better shape than most when they get their degree. A large percentage of students have no idea what they want to do when they graduate. Its not until the 4^th semester that the idea of transfer becomes important to them. These students find they do not have the right courses for the programs they want and end up not going or taking a bunch of other classes. In the areas like nursing, the entire student pool knows the plan, has a goal, and regularly achieves over 90% graduation and transfer. These students have a focus.

“Stop doing projects.”

Any project which is not scalable to the whole university is just for some faculty member’s ego. If the project is not done to improve student learning than the resources can be better used elsewhere. This includes long standing committees, paperwork shuffles and other administrative revisions.

“Get rid of advocacy”

If you come to a meeting as an advocate you have a set position you are defending rather than coming in to support something new. You should focus on inquiry not advocacy. Good important questions need to be asked for things to move forward without entrenched positions. Advocates have said the same things over and over and there is no reason to have meetings with them, nothing new will come of it. Committees are a dead form of communication and new forms need to be found and exercised.

Finally he talked about where to focus for the greatest improvement. The greatest correlation to graduation is success in the first five classes, generally 15 hours. So if you look at the 20 courses with the highest enrollment, then you have 45% of the income for the college. Here is where you make your first changes. It is easier to focus on improving these 20 than all of the courses in the college. Why does it matter exactly what word is in a syllabus for a 4^th semester course when the students won’t get there anyway? It is far better to focus at the front door than worry about the back to start with.

You can further refine this by looking at the 10 “hardest”, the ones with the lowest success rate. At Valencia, and most colleges, math courses are 7 of them. Generally all 10 of these gave a strong analytical element. If this is the largest stumbling block in those 15 hours for students, then fix it. Do whatever it takes to get these solved and every other class on campus benefits. Valencia started with 10 Supplemental Instruction (SI) classes in math. It is no longer possible to take a class in math at Valencia that is not an SI section. The college invested every single discretionary dollar in fixing these 10 classes for 5 years. They are no longer the “hardest” and the overall GPA, persistence, and satisfaction at the college has gone up significantly.

It is hard to get across all the information this guy had. I was impressed with him and the way his college was attacking the situation. I stayed for the question and answer session and watched as he refuted or changed the perspective of many people. The changes that Valencia have made would be a benefit throughout our educational system I think.

If nothing else, I hope you all finding something interesting in the reading. I apologize for typos and other grammatical issues.

-Tom McGovern, Assistant Professor of Engineering at St Louis Community College (October 2009)