Leading the Way in Arkansas

Aligning state and institutional policies with student success goals is key to the changes DEI and ATD institutions are making.  Arkansas provides a great example of this approach. In January, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, reported on Arkansas’s higher education policies and their effectiveness in Increasing the Competitiveness of the Arkansas Workforce for a Knowledge-Based Economy: How Do Current Higher Education Policies Help or Get in the Way?.

NCHEMS analyzed data on Arkansas’s educational attainment, economy, and higher education performance and observed:

• Arkansas ranks 46th in the nation in the percentage of adults, ages 25 to 64, with an associate degree and 49th in the percentage with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• In order to reach competitive levels of educational attainment, more Arkansas adults must complete postsecondary education—at least to the level of a certificate necessary to make a living wage.  Necessary gains can’t be made only by educating recent high school graduates.
• Arkansas must make dramatic improvements in college participation, retention, and completion across the system to be able to double the number of degrees and certificates produced annually by 2025.

NCHMS also reviewed existing statutes and policies and found:

• Arkansas has a number of promising initiatives intended to improve college and career readiness and student success leading to a certificate or degree, but the state faces major challenges in moving from isolated good practices to a system-wide implementation and sustainability. 
• State policies regarding alignment of K-12 and higher education standards and assessments and developmental education must be fundamentally redesigned.
• Arkansas needs a targeted strategy to serve adults who have serious deficits in the basic skills needed to further education leading to a living wage job.

I think you’ll agree these all sound pretty familiar. The report was not news for Ouachita Technical College and National Park Community College (NPCC), either.  These Arkansas Achieving the Dream institutions have been working to increase retention and completion on their campuses using innovative programs to meet the needs of their students, and they are seeing results.

In NPCC’s Math Cascade program students progress through three, five-week math modules; students are allowed to repeat modules if they are unsuccessful. With Math Cascade, students are able to fast-track their learning and master math skills, which has resulted in a 62 percent student success rate in pre- and beginning-Algebra courses. “When students are more comfortable with math, they’re more successful at it,” says Dana Murphy of NPCC.

To increase retention and educational attainment, Ouachita Tech is implementing the College and Career Access Program (CCAP), in partnership with the Arkansas Department of Career Education, Adult Education Section. CCAP will offer free reading, writing, and math courses to students desiring to enter college but whose assessment scores fall below the enrollment threshold.  The goal of CCAP is to use adult education instructors and classrooms on a college campus to provide certifiable job skills by focusing on specifically-diagnosed deficiencies. Donna Hill of Ouachita Tech says, “We are excited to provide something that may give [students] the skills they need to move into college level work and be successful.”

Breanna Detwiler is MDC's Autry Fellow.