State of the College Address Highlights Challenges, Positive Indicators and Next Steps

On April 2, Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY) faculty, students and staff gathered in Theatre 2 at 199 Chambers Street for the State of the College Address delivered by Interim President Karrin E. Wilks.

Wilks updated the audience on the college’s Designing for Success: Strategic Planning Phase I milestones and achievements, and related those efforts to the BMCC mission that places high priority on preparing students for degree completion, successful transfer, career achievement, lifelong learning and civic participation.

“Community colleges are truly engines of upward mobility,” said Wilks, before screening a video featuring Science for Health Professions major Dilainy Iona Reynoso, who grew up in foster care and is thriving at BMCC as she earns her first degree and begins her path to becoming a physician.

“Our highest priority is to improve student success not incrementally, but dramatically,” said Wilks. “It is clear that we can improve outcomes by redesign.”

Those outcomes include doubling the graduation rate, increasing successful transfer and baccalaureate attainment, and expanding career development leading to family-sustaining wages — all the while, achieving equity in these outcomes.

Trends and findings

Working groups comprised of almost 200 BMCC faculty and staff have been formed to address the Designing for Success strategic goals. These committees include Designing Career Paths, Implementing Academic and Career Communities, Redesigning Onboarding, Designing First-Year Success and Designing Pedagogy and Research for Student Success, as well as an Equity and Inclusion Task Force. Members of the committees stood to be recognized in the almost full tiers of the theatre, during the address.

Wilks stressed that underlying these college-wide efforts is a core belief that “all students can learn under the right conditions. It is our responsibility to create those conditions inside and outside the classroom.”

Wilks cited urgent points including the fact that while graduation rates are going up at BMCC, retention rates are going down. Also, she said, the rate of students on academic probation spiked at an all-time high in Fall 2017.

While looking at interventions to prevent students from reaching those points, Wilks said, “We are doing extensive deep analysis, both quantitative and qualitative. We are also trying to create a profile of student success.”

Creating the conditions for student success

Looking at positive indicators, Wilks pointed out that BMCC students enrolled in courses in their major in their first year are more successful than those who are not.

She relayed the high success of BMCC’s co-requisite courses in both mathematics and English (reading and writing), that blend developmental and credit-bearing content, and talked about the success of two intensive developmental programs for entering students at BMCC. “Our Math Start and CUNY Start are the most successful in CUNY,” she said.

One positive new practice at BMCC is the mid-semester progress survey professors are able to send to their students by using the integrated Starfish and Blackboard platforms, Wilks said.

Another strong indicator of student success at BMCC is belonging to a cohort program.

“About a third of our students are in cohort programs, and our challenge is to take that to scale,” she said.

The data show that visits to the BMCC Learning Resource Center are another factor in student success, as well as engaging in faculty-led research projects. Wilks pointed out that BMCC was one of two community colleges in the CUNY system to receive recent National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) funding, as well as receiving other awards.

Strengthening pipelines to success

Wilks screened a second video highlighting Nico Tyndale, one of two BMCC students selected for the prestigious Vanguard award, and who was inspired by his professors to overcome the barriers he faced, seeking an education and career.

She highlighted the efforts of more than 225 faculty to develop BMCC’s Open Education Resources (OER) and zero-textbook-cost courses, saving approximately 50,000 students an estimated $6 million in textbook costs since the program began in 2015. An internal survey at BMCC showed that the main thing students would spend their savings on was food, Wilks said, and pointed to the efforts of the Office of Student Affairs and Single Stop that provide legal services, parenting supporting, nutritional services, tax preparation and more.

Other points of focus during the address were the Manhattan Educational Opportunity Center (MEOC), which is administered by BMCC and has created a 50 percent increase in students’ high school equivalency pass rate over the last year.

Wilks also highlighted the BMCC Manhattan Early College for Advertising (MECA) — a partnership between BMCC, the NYC Department of Education and industry partners — which held its first graduation in Spring 2018. Ninety-eight percent of those graduates were exempt from remediation, and left high school with up to 30 college credits.

Ending on a high note, Wilks cited recent CUNYAC championships of the BMCC men’s and women’s basketball teams, as well as the triumph of the BMCC cheer squad, a runner up in the recent CUNYAC competition. She mentioned BMCC’s new Society of Leadership and Success, the BMCC Finance and Banking Club’s first place win in the final round of the Maiden Lane division of the College Fed Challenge Competition and more.

Phase II of the Designing for Success efforts will be “taking what works, to scale,” she said. “We are driven by our collective belief in the transformative power of education.”