This can save you money.

Today’s post is our fourth installment of “SCALERS: Round 2.” Originally created by Paul Bloom at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: staffing, communicating, alliance-building, lobbying, earnings generation, replicating impact, and stimulating market forces. (You can read an introduction to each driver in our first SCALERS series.)

Now, we’re asking DEI colleges about how particular SCALERS drivers have contributed to their scaling efforts. So far, we’ve covered staffing, communicating, and alliance-building. Below, Ginger Miller of Guilford Technical Community College shares what GTCC has learned about lobbying--or demonstrating impact, as we like to call it.


With a headcount enrollment of about 15,100 students, Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) is the third largest community college in North Carolina. Its developmental education program serves 4,780 students on three campuses. As with any developmental education program, the primary goal at GTCC is for students to take the fewest number of developmental education courses necessary and complete them as quickly as possible. Our focus here is to describe how COMPASS testing supports this goal. Reviewing and re-testing the COMPASS test can save you time and money. That is the message we emphasize to incoming students. As an example, if a student places out of two developmental classes in English, that translates into tuition savings for the credit hours as well as two semesters—a full academic year—of their time.

As part of the application process, students complete the COMPASS placement test. Among the biggest obstacles to accomplishing proper placement in development education classes is student misconception about the test itself. Students may confuse COMPASS as an entrance test, rather than a placement test. Since they know they are accepted by a community college, they may not do their best to score well. To address this, we emphasize during registration the importance of taking the review workshop and re-testing, depending on their score. They must complete a review workshop before they are permitted to re-test. This workshop, available online or face-to-face, reviews the question format and the content for the math, English, and reading sections of the test.

As a result of completing a review workshop, followed by a re-test, 1,288 students have tested out of one or more developmental classes from fall 2010 through fall 2011. This represents a total estimated tuition savings of about $370,600 during the past three semesters. The largest percentage of students to test out of developmental education coursework appears in English and reading.  For three semesters between fall 2010 and fall 2011, an average of about 61 percent placed out of at least one developmental course in English. About 59 percent placed out of reading courses. In math, the results are lower, at about 33, 39, and 29 percent, for fall 2010, Spring 2011, and fall 2011.





 
At GTCC, the numbers of students to use these workshop reviews have increased from 981 students in fall 2010 to 1,241 students in fall 2011. The greatest increase has appeared in the online reviews, as compared to face-to-face workshops. For example, in fall 2011, 73 students attended the face-to-face reviews, compared to 1,168, who worked online. We also continue to reach out to local high schools, explaining the importance of the placement test; we have arranged for graduating seniors to take the test, the review workshop, and re-test again.

Green Light, Red Light

We discussed the February 8 DEI Pre-Conference Convening on the blog last week, but we wanted to lift up some reflections from the meeting participants. At the end of an intense day of problem solving, sharing, and collaboration, David Dodson, president of MDC, led the group through a red, yellow, and green light exercise. He asked participants to talk about:

• what they learned that they’d like to immediately proceed with-- green light!
• what things they’d like to examine with some caution--yellow light!
• and anything they’d like to stop and reexamine--red light!

Participants gave the green light observations to creating more incentives for faculty to innovate in developmental education; high-stakes testing got a yellow light, and one-stop, non-systemic faculty development that is not part of long-term staff development got the red light signal for reexamination.

But let’s back the car up a bit. As the group was pulling up to the yellow light, one significant note of uncertainty arose: the absence of a working theory of what works for students at the lowest level of development. One meeting participant said, “we have opinions, biases, but not a working theory, and until then we’re shooting in the dark.”  The glaring caution here: an emphasis on scaling can provide an unintended disincentive to help students at the lowest levels, and focusing on students that have a shorter road to successful completion. 

This same issue got a red light of reexamination in today’s Inside Higher Ed. Arizona’s Pima Community College Chancellor, Roy Flores, discusses one response to this conundrum: his college is changing admissions policies. Students that test into the lowest level of developmental education will not be allowed to enroll, but will instead be referred to other adult education services in the college and community. Though budget constraints are part of the impetus, Chancellor Flores is chiefly concerned by data that show that “students testing into the lowest levels of developmental education have virtually no chance of ever moving beyond remedial work and achieving their educational goals.” 

Here again is the tension between the access mission and the student-success mission of community colleges. What do we need to learn and where do we need to innovate in order to build pathways to valuable credentials that meet the varied needs of individuals on that path?



Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.