SUCCESS

By James P. Geraghty

Student's educational success grows retention and is contagious. We need to focus existing resources to attain institution wide programs that address the support needs of all our students.

Student's educational success grows retention and is contagious. We need to focus existing resources to attain institution wide programs that address the support needs of all our students.

Straightening the pipeline: helping students move more efficiently and effectively through the College of Marin academic and services landscape should be an important and vital component of our Educational Master Plan. This work can lead to dramatically increased retention rates, expand our understanding of critical needs within our multicultural student body and connect our college's distributed disciplines and programs into a collective vision and mission that guides our students through the academia maze, which is a new and complex world for a majority of our students.

Incorporating the entire college into programs engineered to serve the diverse needs of students should become the main focus of student services. Student services cannot work in a vacuum, and must coordinate with faculty, staff and students to identify successful strategies and best practices. Our diverse student population creates cohorts of students with specific needs at many levels. Identification of those needs and strategies to meet those needs are vital components of retention and student success.

It is not good enough to deliver one student success workshop and expect students to be able to navigate and identify what services they need and when to access them. We need to expand learning communities and mentor services to our students.

Math Instructor, Anthony Monteith, was adamant during the development of our Transfer initiative and draft Educational Master Plan blueprint that a student service pipeline designed to identify key strategies and proactive intervention at critical points during a semester and during the students tenure at COM is a critical development in serving the student needs and a vital component to student success. These ideas must be developed further if we are to truly serve students.

The Extended Opportunities Services and Programs (EOPS) is an excellent examples of a cohort driven service designed to increase student retention and success, and straighten out the academia/services "pipeline." The EOPS learning community which is tied closely to our excellent tutoring program should serve as a model to build upon. Required counseling, achievement requirements, opportunities for bookgrants and inside track to information to institutional and scholarship deadlines and processes are wonderful incentives for students to participate. This program demonstrates a sincere desire of the EOPS staff to serve student needs through dissemination of information and on-time delivery of critical service and intervention measures.

Our diverse cohorts: student/athlete, international students, transfer track students, re-entry students, disabled students, ESL and vocational or workforce students would benefit from the development of learning communities, such as EOPS, that are designed to serve specific needs. Within these larger cohorts smaller mini-groups with even more specific needs could form to create self supporting services and teams to facilitate the ongoing work.Creating the "straightened pipeline" programs is a key to enhancing student success. Intervention strategies co-developed with faculty and staff will allow the entire college to work together to educate our students.

We must also pay close attention to cultural behaviors of our diverse student population. This can help us identify needs and sensitivity to cultural patterns that might undermine differnet groups from fully accessing our services.