Pathways to Success: First & Second Semester Experiences

The BSI Committee feels the time has come at Solano College for “paradigm shifts in the thinking of campus administrators, faculty, and staff” (Basic Skills 7). Data collected, analyzed, and distributed by Institutional Researcher Rob Simas makes the current lack of student success at our college quite clear. In the Fall 2007 cohort, 79.1% of new high school graduates admitted to Solano were assessed into developmental English courses; 82.1% of the same cohort were assessed into developmental Math. 85% were assessed into developmental Reading. The impact of these student needs show in the more than 5000 Ws issued in Spring 2008—and that number does not reflect the true hidden metric: the many more thousands of drops taking place in all areas of our campus. This data is revealing not just for English, Math, and Reading courses, for there are a number of others that the Basic Skills Committee has identified as the most “at-risk” on our campus, based on SCC intranet grade distribution reports from 2005 onwards: Anthropology 1; Business 5; Business 181; CIS 1; Criminal Justice 1; Economics 1; English 370, 1, 2; ESL 330; Geography 1, Human? Education 2,3; History 17, 18; Math 304, 102, 104, 107; Nutrition 10, Political Science 1; Psychology 1; Sociology 1. These curricular “trouble spots” (Malnarich 55) are where the Basic Skills Committee is proposing the campus as a whole place a large degree of re-design effort, and in doing so the primary strategy is a broad implementation of Pathways to Success as a new model of how Solano College goes about its job of providing universal access to education.

Here is the Pathways to Success Proposal, written by Josh Stein, Coordinator of Basic Skills; Brad Paschal, Coordinator of Learning Communities; and Erin Vines, Dean of Counseling. The Pathways proposal is going to the Enrollment Management/Retention Taskforce for vetting at the end of April 2009.