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Education Dive
How one institution plans to become the best community college in New England
Natalie Schwartz
Sept. 19, 2019
The Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) is a microcosm of some of the biggest challenges shaping higher education.
For one, the 55-year-old institution is in New England, an area experts
predict will be hit hard by looming enrollment declines. And on top of
that, the state of Rhode Island has not returned its support for higher
education to pre-recession levels.
Even so, CCRI graduated its largest class ever and brought its two-year
graduation rate for first-time, full-time students up to 18% in the
2018-19 academic year after it historically hovered around 4%,
officials told Education Dive. Moreover, the college saw a big jump in
the two-year graduation rate of students of color, from around 2%
historically to 12% this year.
Officials credit those achievements to several large initiatives underway.
Among them is the Rhode Island Promise program, which allows high
school graduates to receive free community college tuition if they
enroll full time. Another is a partnership with technology firm
Infosys, which launched a design and innovation center near one of
CCRI's campuses to help prepare students for careers in technology
fields.
Since 2016, Meghan Hughes has been at the helm of CCRI, helping to push
forward a new vision for the college. "I predict we will deliver on a
commitment I made when interviewing for the job," she said, "which was
within five years of my arrival we would not simply be the largest
community college in New England, we would be the best."
Education Dive sat down with Hughes earlier this summer to discuss how
she plans to achieve that goal, and how she's measured her progress
nearly four years into the job.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
HUGHES: We were not pioneers in the community college reform movement
in this country. When I arrived three and a half years ago, we brought
real urgency to that work and had the great benefit of casting our gaze
across the U.S. and studying community colleges that are years ahead of
us to borrow what they've done, adapt it for our own purposes and take
it quickly to scale.
We implemented a master schedule, which resolved hundreds of scheduling
conflicts and allows students to get their classes at the times they
need. We brought multi-measures into our college. We brought
co-requisite remediation into the English department and took that to
scale. And with math, we suspended a delivery model that had been
running for nearly 50 years and brought a new form of delivery, called
the Math Emporium.
We've begun to implement guided pathways. That's a longer play; that
will be 10 years to be fully baked in. And the Rhode Island Promise has
come to CCRI.
The Rhode Island Promise was rolled out in 2017. What have been the results at your institution so far?
We've seen a little bit more than a doubling in our overall enrollment
of that cohort, which is first-time, full-time students straight from
high school. We've also seen 143% growth with our low-income students
and 164% growth with our students of color.
The program is last-dollar, covering tuition only after all other
grants and aid have been applied. How do you remain accessible to
students who may have trouble affording textbooks, transportation and
other costs?
In the program's inaugural year, we secured the largest private gift in
the college's history — $650,000 from the Hassenfeld Family Foundation.
It's a philanthropic family that launched Hasbro and believes in Rhode
Island and community colleges. That investment allowed us to provide
additional financial support for our Pell-eligible students to ensure
they could have the essentials they need to learn and graduate.
We are also going to need to dramatically grow our endowment to
continue our rate of performance improvement, so we have launched a
six-year campaign in which we're going to raise $25 million by 2025.
When we do that, we will have at least $1 million to spend on our
students for the essentials that you named.
A legislative effort to expand the program to adults recently failed. What do you hope happens next?
Well, I'm a college president, so I'm going to want free college to be
available to every single Rhode Islander who wants a shot at it.
What I'll say is this: it's brand new nationally. We were fourth in the
country to bring Rhode Island Promise to our full-time,
straight-out-of-high-school students. I am hopeful that when we deliver
our report next summer about the first three years of the promise
program that we're able to demonstrate with data and stories just how
impactful it has been.
Some parts of the country, including New England, are facing
demographic declines that are expected to accelerate in the coming
years. How are you preparing for that?
We recently graduated the largest class in the history of the college,
and we didn't do that with record enrollment. Those days passed about
nine years ago, at the height of the Great Recession.
So what are we doing? We are focused on remaining intensely affordable
by keeping our tuition within Pell Grant limits and working with that
as our absolute outer bound. We are committed to being very responsive
to where Rhode Island's economy is now and where it's going. We're also
committed to being deeply and profoundly student-centric.
How do you prioritize efforts and avoid initiative fatigue?
This is not work for the faint of heart. It demands a frank recognition
and acknowledgment that we have an equity imperative and have not
nearly begun to deliver on it. Our work requires relentless energy and
real urgency. Our students don't have time to wait for us to figure
this out.
We have had to be highly focused and deliberate on what we do. The
pioneers — the folks who were first trying to move from an access
initiative to an access and completion mission — were really
experimenting and trying and failing. While I am certain we will have
plenty of our own failures, one of the things we didn't have to do was
guess at what the fundamentals were. We know what the fundamentals are
because there are institutions that have been at this for the better
part of 20 years.
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