CSN Subject Matter: Complete College America
Air date: Sunday, December 22


Meghin: Welcome to this week's edition of CSN Subject Matter, the College of Southern Nevada’s weekly radio program in conjunction with KNPR. I'm your host Meghin Delaney, from CSN Communications office. CSN is Nevada's largest and most diverse higher education institution, so, naturally, we have plenty of great stories to share. 


Today we’re talking about the new areas of study at CSN and how those areas of study work into the mission of Complete College America, one of our national partners. We’re also talking about how we’re changing the advising model at CSN to better help our students succeed within these new areas of study, which we also sometimes call meta-majors. That's a lot of big stuff to talk about so I have some great guests with me today. We have James McCoy, CSN’s associate vice president of Academic Affairs, we also have Dr. Dhanfu Elsto, Complete College America’s vice president of strategy, he's on the line with us, and at the end of the show will be joined by Marlon Anderson, CSN’s new-ish director of academic advising.


As always you can learn more about CSN by visiting CSN.edu, we look forward to helping you succeed.


Meghin: Hi James,


James: Hey, how are you? 


Meghin: Good, thank you for being here with me today. I was hoping you could start by giving our audience just a brief introduction of who you are and what you do for CSN?


James: You bet, and Meghin thanks for having us, this is going to be a dynamic conversation, I just know it, and appreciate both Marlon and Dhanfu joining us as well. I get to play in the sandbox at CSN around academic affairs and student success, I’ve had the opportunity a privilege to work at CSN of the last 17 years, first as a faculty member in communication and radio journalism, and in the latter part of the 17 years in a leadership role, where I get to play in curriculum and scheduling and assessment and accreditation and student support and online campus leadership and our library and those sorts of things, but the conversation today will be around something that’s near and dear to my heart also and that's our Student Success work. 


In the capacity that I serve at CSN and also as a national fellow for the Complete College America family, I get to keep my ear to the ground around national best practices associated with increasing post-secondary attainment and decreasing achievement gaps for our students in higher education, particularly at CSN and in the state of Nevada. I still got a lot of cool projects in that space I know we’re going to have a conversation around that today.


Meghin: Can you set the stage for us a little bit more for us about that work and what we’ve been doing at CSN?


James: You betcha. So if you think back to the hundred years ago, right, when community colleges were becoming “a thing,” we were centered and focused around this idea that we needed to open the door to higher education by providing an access point. So if you had a beating heart and a high school diploma or GED or equivalent and you had a desire to become college-educated, the community college was your home for that. And we've held onto that access mission for a little over a hundred years and it hasn't gone away today either, but what has sort of transitioned over the last 10 to 12 years has been not just a center point on access but also student success.


So it's got to be more than just swinging open our doors and counting students as they fill in our seats, but we've got to meet our students where they are, and support them in ways that are much more profound, much more targeted, much more strategic, to ensure their ultimate success in crossing the finish line.


So now as one of the 1,100 community colleges in this country, CSN has been primed in this work over the last 10 years or so, we were taking a much more focus on ensuring that students who walk in our door on day one are walking at our door with some sort of credential of value. And why is that important? It’s important because our economy depends on it, right? It’s important because our families depend on it, upward mobility from a socioeconomic standpoint is dependent on it for our students. 


And so what we've done is we've partnered with all sorts of faculty and staff across our institution at CSN, partnered with staff and colleagues across the state of Nevada, and we partnered with national partners like Complete College America, who have come in and supported our efforts in this Student Success space. They’ve helped us ask the really tough questions, helped us pore over our data to discern why some of our students aren't successful and helping us understand national best practice to get more students across the finish line, not by reducing rigor and certainly keeping quality at a high-level but being more strategic in the way in which we reach students where they are in their educational journey.


Meghin: Yeah, and I know it’s always great to look at what other people are doing and how we make that work for CSN. Dhanfu, we’re sorry to have you join us by phone and that you can’t be here with us  in warm, sunny Las Vegas Nevada, but we're glad to have you here, nevertheless. So I was hoping, can you give our audience sort of a brief introduction of who you are and then also a quick explanation of the mission of Complete College America?


Dhanfu: Sure, absolutely, I am so honored and excited to be here with my friend and colleague James McCoy and to be able to talk about the exciting work that’s happening at the College of Southern Nevada and how it's been aligned with Complete College America. 


You know, I serve as the vice president of strategy at Complete College America and in that work is critical, it’s important, but it's very much rooted in my own experiences and the experiences of so many students across the country. You know, I grew up on the west coast of California, in Southern California, and I transferred between multiple institutions and by the time I finally found a college home, I wasn't quite sure what I want to do. And I was very fortunate that I had individuals that guided me on a particular path and it showed me that college was not just a place to come and survive, but with the right structures in place where students can thrive and flourish, and so, you know, when I think about this work, it's not just as an employee of Complete College America. I think about it as a father of a college-aged daughter and two young children, as a person who cares about our communities, as an educator, and I still believe this higher education is transformative toward closing opportunity gaps, for making sure that most students have the ability to achieve the American Dream and that's really what Complete College America is about as an organization.


Our mission, we’re celebrating our tenth year in 2019, and so we were established as a bold national advocate to dramatically increase college completion rates and to close those equity gaps and we do that by working with states and systems and institutions and partners to scale highly effective structural reforms and promote policies. So it’s a little bit of a combination of things for us. It’s that big perspective, using policy levers when appropriate, but most importantly highlighting and elevating great practices that are taking place around the country, and I think the work that's happening at CSN is very much aligned with CCA strategy and our game changer structures that are sweeping across the nation.


Meghin: Well great, and I know that our partnership between CSN and CCA goes back quite a few years and you just mentioned it there, about highlighting the best practices and sharing and so I know part of the reason why I have you guys here today is that our new areas of study at CSN are going to be highlighted by CCA on a national stage. So, James, can you explain to folks what are new areas of study are and how they came to be?


James: You bet, so earlier we were talking about doing some significant research to understand what the barriers are too successful college completion for our students and to also understand why some student groups are performing at different levels versus others, right, and so as we pored through this research, especially with the last eight or nine years, what we discerned is our students are walking in the door without a whole lot of understanding about who they are and where they want to go.


What does the finish line look like for them, they know that college is important, perhaps they had a friend or neighbor a parent or guardian, aunt and uncle, tio or tia, who said hey you ought to go to school and then fill in the blank, being a nurse, go to business, you don't know what you want to do, go to education, but there hasn't been a lot of focus at the front door, particularly in community colleges, for giving students an opportunity not just to spend wastless time and energy and money exploring by taking a lot of different kinds of classes, although that might be appropriate for some, but it's really about providing a structure for students as they walk in the door, as they are admitted into college, to really ask those provocative questions, about what is your finish line. 


And by that we mean what does your career look like, what are your end goals here, and if we can discern at the front door what the finish line looks like, then we can develop an academic pathway with purpose. And so our friends at Complete College America have coined this game changer “Purpose First” right and so this is getting at things like OK you've completed your admissions application, congratulations, you're admitted into CSN and you know what we've always done? We've always asked our students to tell us what their name is, the birth date, their social security number or some alternative ID, veteran status, perhaps, and then we asked him this magic question, what's your major going to be? 


Now this is at home, while they’re filling out a college admission application at 2 in the morning, you know, watching late-night television and no interaction with an advisor or career coach, no assessment opportunities to discern what there might be good at, and we’re asking them to lock in their major. And guess what our research showed? Well our research showed that students are accumulating a whole heck of a lot of extra credits because they're changing their major not once, not twice, but on average at CSN, for a traditional 2-year degree, or four times.


So when you read in the national headlines, in the local headlines, colleges are expensive, students are walking out with excessive debt, students are walking out with more credits than they need, and why? Perhaps because they didn't have purpose first at the front door. So if can get a student on a pathway. with intentionality, with aptitude, align to the academic pathway that might be align to an actual career with real jobs waiting at the other end in our region, and we can provide context for what those jobs look like, what that next step in education beyond at you or four-year degree might look like for a student, and if we can support them in a way that provides high-touch, high-case management experiences in that first year and beyond, we think we're onto something. 


And so in partnership with Complete College America, the College of Southern Nevada, along with our friends with in the NSHE system, our UNLV sister and our brother at Nevada State College, were selected as one of three Metro Momentum Pathways institutions or systems. And we're very lucky and blessed to have been given that opportunity by Complete College America. We partnered with with CCN with this work and what that provided to us was a lot of technical assistance to help us take this vision and strategy for purpose first and this momentum at the front door to action what that has brought us to is as beautiful place called areas of study.


So now gone are the days where students are filling out an admissions application and they're selecting from one of a 100 different or 180, in our case, different majors at the front door at admissions time. Now we asked our students to self select, with some research on their own that we provide the tools for, at the time of admissions into one of 11 what we call areas of study. So think about education, business, health sciences, humanities. We're not getting into the nitty gritty of criminal justice or deaf and hard of hearing interpreting, right, those are majors that haven’t gone away but we want our students to self select into an area of student first, then they come in and experience more career advisement,more career exploration, proactive academic advising and they have a real solid sense and opportunity to connect with a human being on campus before they even think about taking their first class.


So if their area of study was matched appropriately at the time of the missions, great. Our advising staff can get that student on a pathway that makes sense for that that avenue and they can declare their major in their specific niche field, but if they need another need, a first semester to kind of feel it out, yeah, I know I'm interested in Health Sciences but I don't know if that’s Health Information Technology or nursing or surgical tech, well students can take that first year and the first set of courses in that first semester to really experience and be given an opportunity to see an overview of all the options in Health Sciences and then with the help of a counselor or advisor they can make a deliberate decision on their actual major. And what we're finding is students therefore are not debilitated by choice on an admissions application, we have much more proactive human interaction with our campus experts, our college experts and students therefore are not racking up a ton of extra excess credit and they’re not wracking up a lot of debt as a result. I’m very excited about this work, we just launched in March and I’m very excited to showcase this work nationally when we go to the Complete College America convening coming up. 


Meghin: I definitely think 11 choices is probably a lot easier for most folks to handle than 180 but it seems super logical too, when you explain it like that, but Dhanfu you talk a little bit about why what we've done at CSN has gained some of this national attention, what is it about what we've done that you all at complete College America wanted us to showcase to the rest of the folks that you work with?


Dhanfu: What he’s saying is that purpose matters and what we know is that uninformed decisions about purpose, they have huge implications. I mean, you know, there’s too many major options and sometimes students don’t align their interests and their values to the thing that they want to do for the rest of their lives and there's oftentimes little understanding of those career implications, so you see major switching and excess credits and extra cost to the time to degree. 
All of those things I think are problematic but you know when you look at some of the national data one thing that really sort of hit me is that 36 percent of college graduates said that if they could do it all over again, they’d choose a different major and what that tells me is that it’s not an individual student problem, that’s an institutional, structural issue because that means we’re not doing a great job of aligning  what that process should look like, we’re not baking it into the cake to allow students to learn and grow and explore but also align those majors with an interest area within their careers.


And I’ll also just share that almost, in the fastest growing, highest-paying occupations, whether that’s STEM, health, business, or what have you, African Americans and Latino students are the most underrepresented and so this is an issue about equitable outcomes, it’s about social justice, but it’s also about changing our communities. So when we talk about purpose first, for us, it’s aligning those structures that have started to take place and take hold in a number of institutions. There’s been this larger guided pathways movement. James talked about, you know, areas of study and some institutions are calling them meta-majors and academic focus areas and how do you align them with maps and how do you associate them with career options, those things are important and critical experiences that all students should have. 


And what I love about what’s happening at the College of Southern Nevada is that they understand how students learn and how students engage, they get it, you know, it's not putting it in a 300-page catalogue and saying go find your way. It’s breaking it down into very simplistic, easy to understand terminology, providing them with videos that help them kind of see it in a very intentional way and to me that is the way we move from just have a guided pathway to having an intentional and purposeful guided pathway and it’s in the true spirit of purpose first and so we're excited that James and the College of Southern Nevada are going to be featured. A lot of our work is about engaging on the ground with institutions and sourcing new ideas from the field, so these are not some backroom conversations, these are things we’re learning from both individuals and institutions that are out there doing the work and it's exciting to watch it play out.


James: Dhanfu, I'm reminded of the purpose first research guidebook, essentially, that you lead on behalf of Complete College America with some other colleagues. I’ve got to say it's publications like that with sound empirical research that documents the way for us that really makes a difference. And I know that from a Complete College America lense, you have been so good at helping institutions, helping states, and helping higher ed systems moving into this kind of structural change, but you've always said, and I want to make sure I've got this right, you got to be walking into a state or a system or a college who is ready for that change because we're talking about a major, you know, a hundred-year-old change, what has been, in your experience, sort of primed states or institutions who have been able to take this work to full scale, and in what holds some institutions back?


Dhanfu: I think that there are a lot of institutions across the country that are doing different components of this. I think, for us, we realized that you have to build it into a comprehensive package. Initiative fatigue can be real, but it’s a lot easier when you show, this is how all these things are woven together. So, what are the outcomes in your co-curricular experience, student affairs, how do you align your advising and career coaching and career advisement. What does that look like at the onboarding? So bringing all of those players together is an important part of it and in this purpose first projet, we started to identify a number of state and a number of institutions that were doing this work really well.


I think that the New Hampshire Community College system, the University of Hawaii system has done a great job in aligning this work and connecting it to K-12. I think Houston Community College in Texas has done some great work and they’re seeing a significant decrease in numbers of undeclared majors and stability in a major as a result of this work. So it’s really taking hold and it’s still a lot of work to be done, but I mean, I’m excited to hear what those results are going to be from the College of Southern Nevada and many others because we need exemplars to hold up so that we can show other institutions, there is a way, we’ve got the examples to prove it but now so many more students are being served and let's figure out the scale this and replicate it across the country.


Meghin: Well I know it’s certainly an honor for CSN to be considered in that good company and I know that we look forward to James coming back with plenty of new ideas from some of the other colleges you mentioned as we continue to do this work. 


You're listening to CSN Subject Matter, I'm your host Meghon Delaney and today we're chatting about CSN’s new areas of study, our work with Complete College America and we're about to talk to our director of advising about how this big national work changes what our advisors do with our students each and every day.


Marlon, hi, thank you for joining us. I called you newish at the top of the show, but I do think you've been here for a few months now, so can you give us a brief introduction, a little bit of who you are and in your role here at CSN?


Marlon: Sure, well it's my pleasure to have been working here at CSN for the last six months, I came to Nevada from Texas and my role is to work with our advising department, our academic advisors who spend all the time working with students and helping them achieve their academic goals and see their career aspirations come to life and most importantly, to take what has been an aspirational advising model and breathe life into it.


And that's what I've been working on for the last six months and probably will be working on for at least the next six months as we continue on this on this process.


Meghin:Great, thank you, and so you sort of got into it a little bit there, but can you tell us a little bit more about this new approach to advising and how this aligns with the work that James, Dhanfu and I were just talking about?


Marlon: Sure, I think that big piece is that historically what we’ve seen with students is that they would see an advisor when they first came into the college, if they're lucky, a lot of them self advise, some of them had brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, they went to college before and they took their advice and they pick their classes the first semester and then throughout their journey they would make their own decisions about what they were doing really, oh this class sounds good, it may not necessarily have fit in with their academic plan, but it sounded good.


We're trying to change that model, we're trying to change that approach. One of the big important pieces of our model begins with the whole construct of what we’re talking to our about. Academic advisors should be their partners in their academic journey and that means that we want them to look at their academic advisor as their resource, that first person that they contact when they have questions about their courses, when they have questions about the degree plan, when they're considering possibly changing their major, but most importantly, you know, to periodically and regularly come in and see their advisor to talk about where they are in terms of progress and so forth. 


So we’ve done some great things to kind of set ourselves up to be able to achieve that. One of the first things that I noticed when I came to CSN was that we’ve got 36,000 students, it’s a big college and we just really never had the capacity in terms of advisors to really work with those students. At one point, I think when I first got here, the research that I read was we were about one adviser to about 1,100 students. Way too large, way too large, much larger than the national average that is 1 to 350 students and so we started working on that process of hiring new academic advisors, assigning those advisers to areas of study as opposed to having them be responsible for knowing all 180 of our degree plans, we assign them to an area of study where they become the subject matter expert on those degrees and that area of study and from there we are assigning students to an academic advisor.


So if you're coming Meghin now as a new student to CSN, in your first semester, you'll be assigned an academic advisor, that academic advisor is going to reach out to you, you're going to have that individuals name and phone number and all your information, everything that you bring up and know that when you reach out to them, when you need to come in to see them, you can you're going to make an appointment directly with them, you can email directly with them, they're going to know your background, what you did in high school, how your test scores are, they’re going to know what classes you're in and be able to walk with you as you progress toward your degree. 


Those are key elements in terms of what we call a proactive advising model that says, as opposed to us waiting for you to come to see us, we're going to be proactive, we're going to reach out to you, we're going to engage you at different points of where you are. We're going to make sure that if you’re still undecided about major that we help you in that career exploration and that major exploration. If you decided on your major, we're going to kind of walk with you at a different points of your academic journey to make sure that it's still the major that you want to do, the career is what you want to do and that you know, regionally or nationally, depending on where you want to go that there’s opportunities still there, that there is a still a rich job market for this particular field that you're interested in, and this is what you can expect, this is what they're looking for, this is what employers are looking for.


I think the other big piece that I’m most excited about in our model is that it allows our academic advisors to become partners with our faculty colleagues. The folks who teach the classes, the folks who have access to the employers in the region and to be able to make that relationship, it’s really just full circle, you know, the faculty are teaching the classes, the curriculum, and we understand as advisors what that curriculum is and we’re able to work with those folks in the classroom to be able to identify when a student might need a little extra nudge, you know, they’re not making class or you failed the test, what can we do, what resources can we provide for you. Or, even more importantly, identify when a student is doing exceptionally well and be able to refer that student and say hey, you know, you’ve got such great grades, you should be looking at these opportunities in terms of scholarships, you should be looking at this, and I think that is the uniqueness of what we're trying to do here at CSN.


And I think in the end what it's going to provide is not only a better level of service for students, they're going to stay more engaged, but it's also going to provide and what I've seen it do at other institutions that I worked at, is it provides that sense of purpose for the advisor. We all come to work at these institutions because we're interested in students being successful, we probably have our own stories about that advisor, that faculty member, that had that impact on us and we want to be that type of person as well as a professional and so it's an exciting time to be at CSN, I'm really privileged to be here and to be a part of this because I think as we continue to grow this model, we're going to see the true impact it has on our community.


Meghin: Well I think that sounds amazing and the way you describe it, sounds to me, that it’s really that  that advisor becomes almost more of a mentor in that sense of student is going to stick without advisor through their their time and their progression at CSN, they won't see a different advisor every time they come in and I think it really helps solidify when we talk about student engagement and their experience in and putting our students first ,I think you know, when we when we get down to that national ratio and if we even beat it, because I know that's what CSN likes to do, I think it'll really provide you know that that leg up for our students, it's truly an example for us of putting our students first.


So I just want to say thank you so much for joining me James, Dhanfu and Marlon. you've been listening to CSN subject matter of the College of Southern Nevada’s weekly radio program in conjunction with KNPR. I'm Meghin Delaney from CSN Communications office, your host. You can learn more about CSN by visiting csn.edu and you can find us on any of your preferred social media sites. We look forward to helping you succeed and I’ll see you next time.