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| CNN photo |
I recently saw a video on Twitter showing a surfer setting the world record for riding the largest wave (82 feet tall) and I retweeted the first thing that came to my mind: "I don't know why, but I can't help but think that this is a metaphor for public higher education leaders in the next 5-10 years...#anticipate."
Upon further reflection, I think the metaphor came to mind because higher education is quietly being disrupted. The ripples are small right now, but the tide is definitely going out, and those who fail to see it will be overcome by a tsunami of change in the coming years. Fortunately, MVCC is one of more than 250 of America’s 1,100 community colleges engaged in Guided Pathways reform in some way. MVCC is one of the 13 community colleges in the American Association of Community Colleges Guided Pathways 2.0 cohort and is fortunate to simultaneously participate in the New York State Success Center Guided Pathways cohort funded by Jobs For the Future (JFF). With funding from our Oneida County sponsor, we are able to send teams of faculty and staff to institutes to receive technical assistance and coaching that expose us to national best practices and a framework for fundamentally reimagining the student experience. We are also fortunate to have financial support from our County to be members of the Achieving the Dream (ATD) National Reform Network since 2014. The culture shift that we’ve experienced through this network served as a critical pre-cursor to our Guided Pathways work.
My early experience at the Guided Pathways institutes gave me the impression that this reform was about two things — organizing academic program curricula into clear career pathways for students; and rethinking student onboarding and support systems. Simple and clear, I thought. The deeper our teams got into Guided Pathways, it became abundantly clear that there was more to this reform, and it was anything but simple. To truly apply the Guided Pathways framework and reimagine the student experience, we are in the process of:
1. Remapping our entire curriculum across all programs.
2. Rethinking our student onboarding process from admissions to the first day of class.
3. Overhauling our student advising system to consider more intentional and personalized models at scale.
4. Frontloading career services to support students in making better choices at the beginning of their academic experience — as a two-year college, our students don’t have time to drift around and “find themselves.”
5. Transforming our approaches to developmental education by embracing national research and evidence-based practices that have demonstrated more effective models to address student learning needs.
6. Disaggregating our data to understand the impact of our systems on low-income and minority students to put equity front and center in our collective work.
7. Infusing data into our regular decision-making processes.
8. Providing inescapable wrap-around supports to address students’ non-cognitive needs associated with everyday living, like housing and food insecurities, transportation, and other priorities that can compromise student success.
9. Evaluating all of our technologies that have grown in number and complexity in an effort to leverage everything we have toward increasing student success.
10. Finding new ways of working together as we do all of this simultaneously, when in the past any one of these efforts alone would have taken two years or more.
Guided Pathways is not a fad or a project, but rather a comprehensive, evidence-based framework that requires a long-term, ongoing institutional commitment that will continue to evolve as we fundamentally re-examine our approaches to student success. As dramatic and disruptive as the pending changes from this work will be, I believe it is only a precursor to even more disruptive changes that lie ahead for postsecondary education — changes that will likely unbundle, accelerate, and once again re-imagine learning and student success at our colleges. Organizational success in the future will require us to challenge our assumptions, question much of what we believe to be true, and accelerate our own learning to embrace changes and models of learning that were impossible to even conceive of let alone consider in the past.
During my time at MVCC, I have seen the College community face various challenges, and in each instance the College has shown a unique ability to synthesize the best of these ideas and national research, and at its own pace, make these ideas our own. We embrace the need for change, and we find a way to make it fit our unique culture. This tempered and considered approach to incorporating best practices has proven to be a hallmark of MVCC’s resilience. We are guided by our values, and we make change our own.
For my first five years at MVCC, I wrote a blog post most every week during the fall and spring semester. It was a way for me to make sense of the College and the community that were so new to me, as well as share my thoughts on what I was learning. For the past seven years, I have written far fewer blog posts, as we’ve gotten into the thick of a great deal of organizational change — and I rechanneled my writing energies into a book titled Competing on Culture: Driving Change in Community Colleges. I am immensely fortunate to have a supportive and visionary Board of Trustees and amazingly talented staff who provide me with the opportunity and mental bandwidth to deeply consider what’s happening in the world around us and clarify a path forward through some great unknowns.
I think I have the beginnings of that path and am once again compelled to post weekly. For the next several weeks, I intend to describe how this wave of disruption is coming together, why organizational culture is the way through and out of the wave for community colleges, and how the culture at MVCC provides insight on the building blocks to create a culture of connection and anticipation that I’m betting will see us through to shore, poised to ride even bigger waves in the future.
Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu.
