Times are
changing – and so must community colleges.
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“If we
keep on doing what we’ve always done, we are going to keep on
getting what we’ve always gotten,” said Cindy Hess, president of
the Forest Park campus of St. Louis Community
College.
Hess
assumed her position as president in June 2010, and she recognizes
Forest Park must rise to the task of maintaining high expectations
of students while providing supportive resources that are often
expensive. In an interview with the St. Louis American
newspaper, Hess discusses her views on challenges in urban
education.
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“font-family: Verdana;”>St. Louis American: What are the challenges in the current environment of urban education? “font-family: Verdana;”>
“font-family: Verdana;”>Cindy Hess: A critical mass of students who come to us do not understand college education. They are the first generation of students who have attended college so they don’t have necessarily a peer group or a family group who can provide them the support that they need to be successful. Because engaging in higher education means saying ‘yes’ to lots of things and ‘no’ to other things.
On a daily
basis, our students are confronted with those
choices.
You have
multiple competing survival-type issues that other population
groups don’t necessarily have. You first have to have your survival
needs met before you can think about the other parts of development
in your life. Learning makes you uncomfortable. It does require
that you stretch. And in order to effectively learn you have to
have some stability in other parts of your life. That’s what the
literature says and that’s what I’m experiencing
here.
When you
think about an urban campus and you have a large population who has
all of these at-risk factors, you have to provide additional types
of support in the student experience. That’s a challenge when
higher education has grown up as it has in terms of serving
populations who have always gone to college.
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“font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: normal;”> St. Louis American:
you respond to that challenge?
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“font-family: Verdana;”>Cindy Hess: In terms of leadership, presidents come and go. But the challenge of leadership today is looking at things differently and challenging people to look at things differently. You hear so many people say they’d like to go back to the old days when things were more stable. Well that’s not going to happen. The best leaders learn to dance with the uncertainty and changing demography. “font-family: Verdana;”>
Old habits
die hard. Our college and this campus in particular has lots of
employees who have been here for years, which is a double-edge
sword. It’s really a great thing because that institutional history
is very important. But we get stuck in our ruts. Part of my
challenge is helping people to see things differently. The
community college’s niche is this population who tend not to be
college ready. It’s a really critical niche. In order for this
region to be successful, we have to have as many people who are
skilled and able to contribute to rather than take from
society.
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“font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: normal;”> St. Louis American:
community-college students often spend a lot of their financial aid
on the development courses and then it runs out midway through
their education. Do you see this at Forest
Park?
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“font-family: Verdana;”>Cindy Hess: If you look at the students we receive, many of them test into developmental classes because they’ve been away for some time. Others come to us having graduated from high school and they are still not ready for college in terms of their skill set. A common model involving students in development education is to just give them more, longer and longer. But then that burns out their financial aid, and it delays their entry into that content set of information. We’re doing a bit of a trial at the Harrison Center through the Caring for Missourians grant. We are packaging developmental studies classes with the content area people are interested in. The Caring for Missourians grant is about increasing the number of graduates in health care. They are incorporating all the medical terminology into the development writing, reading and the math. They are taking it all at the same time.
Forest
Park is also
participating in the “Achieving the dream” initiative with 130
colleges nationally, where we look at key issues that cause our
students not to progress. We know what works, but what works is
expensive and it requires people to change the way they’ve been
doing things.
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“font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: normal;”> St. Louis American:
Forest Park campus?
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“font-family: Verdana;”>Cindy Hess: This campus is focusing on reinventing developmental education. We had a series of conversations about what this campus’ strategic plan would be, and almost all of the small groups of our employees said that was the thing that we really needed to focus on. “font-family: Verdana;”>
One of the
mantras in Achieving the Dream is that our colleges in terms of
high education and community colleges are perfectly designed to
achieve the outcomes we are currently getting.
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One of the
things that is really clear is that we offer lots of opportunities
for students to be successful but as our students will tell us, if
it’s optional, they are going to chose not to go. We design
orientation programs, those are optional. When it’s optional, you
tend not to do it especially when you are stressed in other areas.
Now, some community colleges are making these things
mandatory.
You can’t
do drive-by education when you have lots of learning gaps. A
student who is working 40 hours a week and does not have a stable
home environment, they cannot go to school full time. It’s not the
right time for them. But what we continue to do is to allow
students to come to us with some false expectation that all they
have to do is go to class. The 15 hours a week in class is the bare
minimum, particularly when there are lots of learning
gaps.
The
American-African Male Initiative is a great initiative but how much
does it cost? $1.2 million annually. The challenge is to make those
kinds of efforts sustainable. What that means is that we learn from
this effort and apply it to our existing staff in the way they do
their business.
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“font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: normal;”> St. Louis American:
members to read literature, and can you require
that?
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“font-family: Verdana;”>Cindy Hess: You can, but I think the better way to go about it is to do book groups. Right now we have a good group of employees who volunteer on Achieving the Dream campus team. Andrea Nichols, one of our sociology faculty members, is the campus lead for the team and she is bringing issues of race and gender to the forefront. She talks about how we have created on some level an enabling culture and that is suddenly racist on some level. I believe in a culture of high expectations because that is the only way you can produce graduates with a degree of integrity. We want our transferring institutions and our employers to value Forest Park and the standards we uphold. We have that tension going on. Then you have the other tension of a lot of people who believe that they are doing well by students by giving them a break. What that communicates on a level that I don’t even think faculty members recognize is that “You can’t do it.” Apart from people’s backgrounds, I believe people can be successful. And you do that by giving people breaks. “font-family: Verdana;”>
It’s about
creating independent, self-sufficient people who contribute to
society, and that’s why I believe what we do here is so important,
far more important that what a Harvard does. These people are a
critical juncture when they come to us and we can make or break
them.
