What’s Up with DEI: Housatonic Community College

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. This morning, we introduced Connecticut and their state policy team; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, CT.

Housatonic Community College (HCC) serves more than 6000 students in its 11-town service area in southwestern Connecticut. Housatonic chose to expand an Achieving the Dream (ATD) pilot of a self-paced math course as part of their DEI work. We’ve selected some highlights from their last year of DEI work in three main categories: scaling, institutional policy change, and academic and supportive service innovations.

Scaling

• The college’s Open Entry/Open Exit (OE/OE) math courses now cover 40 percent of sections offered in three developmental math courses. OE/OE English has been added to the curriculum and comprises 63 percent of lower-level developmental English courses and 19 percent of the upper-level developmental English courses. HCC has adopted the name “self-paced” to reduce confusion about the course format!

Institutional Policy Change

• Supportive institutional policies are an integral part of sustaining promising DEI innovations, at all levels of the institution. As part of ATD, the college developed specific strategic plan objectives and outcomes that directly relate to student success goals. College policies related to developmental students, such as mandatory developmental course placement students who score below college-level in English, math, or reading have continued through ATD and DEI.

 Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• Housatonic is focused on improving student engagement in the self-paced courses, since the model has proven most successful for those students that fully participate. Case managers have been added to sections of self-paced math courses to encourage course attendance and homework completion.

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.