Community College Journal - April 2016/May 2016

My childhood in Chicago accustomed me to the sight of old buildings under renovation: lumbering hulks of brick and metal were often draped with scaffolding, planks and walk ways connecting the sections under construction. As the president of a community college, I have come to see such edifices with new eyes: a metaphor for the growth of today’s community colleges, evolving quickly to serve the complex needs of academic achievement. As student needs grow more multifaceted, I am more convinced that internal collaborations have become the joists that hold together the wider college structure, allowing the strengths of the new sections to fuse successfully with the older ones. Such dynamics are fundamental to large-scale student success.

Montgomery College (MC) in
Maryland serves 35,000 credit students
annually, with 72 percent of them non-
white, 30 percent receiving Pell grants
and 25 percent of them being the first
in their family to attend college. With
postsecondary education a prerequisite
for skilled employment, our college—
like many others—finds itself serving
more students who fall, for one reason
or another, into “achievement gap”
territory. At MC, 59 percent of students
do not complete a degree or certificate
or transfer to a four-year college within
three years of starting, evidence of how
the gap effectively cripples students’
future progress and earnings.
This is where the scaffolding comes
in: as we craft new programs and initia-
tives to support different student needs,
we have to work even more diligently
to stay connected to other parts of the
institution, aware of their continuing
structural needs and constantly building
those little bridges that allow foot traffic
to flow between areas of “renovation.”
Higher education has long struggled
with administrative silos. A new par-
adigm is overdue and the “renovation
model” (replete with extensive scaf-
folding) addresses the two most critical
demands facing community colleges
today: academic achievement and the
widening scope of student needs that
impact academic success—housing,
transportation, immigration, and finan-
cial aid, among others.
COLLABORATION AMONG DIVISIONS
At MC, we are meeting these needs
successfully at the intersection of
administrative divisions—student
affairs and community engagement;
academic affairs and work force devel-
opment; academic affairs and student
affairs. This last one is a good example
of how MC has found itself focusing
more on common goals and less on
distinctions among divisions.
When 80 faculty and staff from
student affairs and academic affairs
worked together for a year to produce a
report on closing the achievement gap,
bridges between individuals, depart-
ments and programs grew up more
organically than they would have under
any presidential mandate to tear down
administrative silos. When the report
helped us secure $600,000 in funding to
enact the recommendations, the imple-
mentation became a joint effort between
student affairs and academic affairs.
The resulting program design spoke
to needs from both divisions: 35 part-time
associates were hired to serve as academic
coaches to students in demographics
where completion has been lower than
average. The coaches are trained to com-
municate regularly with faculty about
student challenges, and to listen carefully
to feedback about whether support refer-
rals improved academic performance in
the classroom. This kind of wrap-around
service approach would not have been
possible without the insights of student
affairs faculty and the willingness of
instructional faculty to collaborate.

IMPROVING COMMUNICATION

Recruitment efforts at MC have also taken on a collaborative quality.

Improved communication allowed student affairs representatives to realize that outreach efforts at high school events could be richer if they worked collaboratively with academic affairs people who knew the ins and outs of specific degree programs. The result was better information being relayed to prospective students, who were then more equipped to make thoughtful decisions about enrollment and academic planning.