What are LaGuardia,
Sinclair and
1) The college has a 92% within-semester retention rate and
80% semester-to-semester rate for 2002-2003.
2) For 2001-2002, the fall-to-fall semester retention rate
was 65 percent.
First year programs thus
concentrate on two major goals:
a) fostering academic success among developmental and ESL
students, and
b) creating a sense of community and connectedness to the College
among a highly diverse group of commuting students.
The “New Student House” model (learning community) serves students with who need skills work in more than one
area by linking two developmental courses with a discipline-area course.
New Student Seminar. The College requires new students to take a freshman
orientation course, the New Student Seminar, designed to provide students with
the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in college. New Student
Seminar is also incorporated in to freshman learning communities, including New
Student House.
Quick Start and other Intensives. The College offers an array of “pre-freshman”
intensive courses in its Quick Start summer program designed to accelerate
students through the basic skills course sequences.
1) These
skills courses include a “Strategies for Success” counseling component as well.
2)“Second Chance,”
a one-week course for students who “nearly pass” a basic skills course,
designed to assist them in passing
without having to retake the course for an entire semester.
Common
Mentoring. This past year the College instituted a program to
create a cadre of mentors for first-year students consisting of advanced
students, faculty/staff, and alumni. Mentors are asked to assist students in
finding their way through the system and are trained on how to connect students
with support services on campus.
THE RETENTION CALENDAR http://www.sinclair.edu/stservices/cnsl/Retention/index.cfm
The Counseling Services’
professional counselors have become increasingly aware that there are specific
times during the academic year when students seem most apt to face particular
challenges and difficulties.
The Retention Calendar can act as a framework for faculty and staff about these
cycles of need. Our counseling student intakes and assessments showed that
several areas had continual recurrence for our students such as
1) career exploration and planning;
2) self-esteem problems;
3) issues related to the expectations (real or perceived) by
self and by others; and
4) social and familial adjustments.
The calendar serves as a guideline
for workshop topics (e.g., midterm burnout) and can be widely used throughout
the college, with emphasis on the academic terms and their particular
stressors.
Focus on Student Success:
focus our energies on making students successful from the first day of class
onward and let retention take care of itself. If the college helped students be
successful in clarifying their goals and objectives and helped them get off to
a great first- and second-term start, we believed that improved retention would
just be a natural result. After one pilot year and one full year of
concentrating on success instead of retention, we have found that indeed we are
on the right track to make students more successful.
Reviews:
1) review of standards of academic progress,
2) new student and distance learning course
enrollment policies, and
3) earlier deadlines for financial aid.
Individual
Learning Plan (ILP) as part of a holistic
counseling and intervention system. Through counseling and web-based support
systems, students who are at greatest risk of failing in college are
1) identified,
2) supported, and
3) monitored.
Student Success Services administrators and counselors
developed and piloted a practical, comprehensive approach designed to ensure
that at-risk students were
1) clear about their goals, were
2) integrated into the social and academic communities of the
college, and were
3) guided and supported in their learning.
First-time degree- or certificate-seeking students are
screened immediately after placement testing based on institutionally verified
risk criteria and assigned to a Student Success Services counselor.
Continuing At-Risk: Currently enrolled, continuing at-risk students,
may also be referred by academic counselors and faculty or be self-referred for
various causes, including through the Developmental Studies Early Alert
Project, to a similar program called the Counseling Action Plan (CAP). These
students are offered the same holistic counseling and intervention services of
the Student Success Plan, including standardized assessments, action planning,
referral to appropriate internal and external resources, and assistance with
educational, personal, or career development issues.
Eliminating Late Registration after classes start:
Distance Learning:
Sinclair
revamped college policy to
1) reduce the sizes of distance
classes,
2) restricted distance-course
access to students who demonstrated sufficient preparation and
3) discontinued late entry into
distance courses.
Advisement.
1) social
and academic integration,
2) develop
career and educational plans, and
3) acquire study and life
skills.
“LifeMap” provides a
five-stage student progression model that encompasses a student’s plan of action
for using
1) achieve
career and
2) educational
goals,
3) a
guide to help students determine
where they are going and
4) identify
easy step-by-step
directions for getting there, and
5) a
planning process through which students define and achieve their educational
goals.
Rather than asking new students “What courses do you want
to take?”
following questions:
1) “Who am I?
2) Where am I going?
3) How am I going to get there?”
Professional Development Programs.
By providing a sustained program of professional
development opportunities that have focused on
1) underprepared students,
2) diverse
students,
3) learning
theory,
4) learning
communities,
5) learning
technologies, and
6) developmental
advising.
“Start Right” Strategies. Valencia’s
strategic goal of ensuring extraordinary success in the first 15 credit hours
has resulted in changes in procedures, processes, and student/staff
interactions during the enrollment process, including:
1) setting
the application deadline two weeks prior to the start of a term;
2) requiring
degree-seeking students to enroll in college preparatory [developmental]
courses in an established
sequence from their first enrolled term until all college prep courses
are completed;
3) revising
add/drop procedures so that students cannot add a class once it has met;
4) implementing
an automated prerequisite checking system that blocks students from enrolling
in classes for which they do not have the correct prerequisites;
5) required
first day attendance; and
6) frontload
first-semester courses with full-time faculty
Student Success Course. Valencia’s three-credit Student Success course helps more
than 4,200 students annually develop career goals and educational plans,
identify learning styles, build academic skills, and connect with college
resources. The course is designed and delivered by faculty and student services
teams. It has resulted in significant improvement in retention. The percentage
of