What’s Up with DEI: South Texas 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. Earlier this week, we introduced Texas’s state policy work; now it’s time to learn a bit more about South Texas College in McAllen, Texas.

South Texas College (STC) serves nearly 30,000 students in Hidalgo and Starr Counties. 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

• South Texas has now integrated 40 percent of the developmental English and reading curriculum. They are focusing their work on increasing the depth of this initiative by creating additional developmental English essay prompts, to maintain faculty interest and enthusiasm about the approach. In general, this effort has resulted in more collaboration among the sociology, history, developmental English, developmental reading, and developmental math departments.
• During the first year of the grant activity, all fall 2009 full-time FTIC developmental English and reading students participated in the case management initiative, an expansion of an effort begun as part of STC’s Achieving the Dream work. This expansion resulted in case loads for the two DEI Student Success Specialists (SSS) at the South Texas College Pecan Campus that were too large (over 600 students for each SSS). The college has revised eligibility criteria to ensure that those that participate can benefit from the program. The new criteria resulted in case loads below 180 students. Under this approach, the pass rate for fall 2010 developmental reading students who received face to face contact was 74 percent, compared to 66 percent pass rate for the fall 2009 developmental reading students who received face-to-face contact—an increase of 8 percent. Similarly, the pass rate for fall 2010 developmental English students who received face-to-face contact was 80 percent, as compared to 68 percent pass rate for the fall 2009 developmental English students who received face-to-face contact—an increase of 12 percent.

Institutional Policy

• The integrated contextualized curriculum initiative supports one of STC’s Strategic Directions: “South Texas College proudly provides opportunities to all students with high expectations for their success.” Developmental studies students regularly enroll in non-developmental courses while they are completing their developmental coursework. Many instructors for these academic courses require students to write research papers. The additional emphasis on academic writing for developmental writing students through the implementation of the STC DEI Integrative Contextualized Curriculum  is an example of the instructors’ efforts to prepare students  for academic writing demands in non-developmental studies courses, even before these students have had the opportunity to take a college-level composition course.

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• Modifications to the case management case loads were made, partially in response to feedback from a case management survey of the fall 2009 DEI cohort. After reducing case loads, survey responses for the fall 2010 showed greater awareness of the program.