The technological and societal changes impacting our students have accelerated these changes. Less than 10 years ago, most community colleges wouldn’t have considered having mental health professionals on staff — we created two positions nine years ago. Five years ago, most colleges would have thought having a food pantry on campus was going too far and compromising our mission — we created our pantry three years ago, and last year New York State mandated that all college campuses have one. The intense pressures many of our students feel outside of class often dwarf the pressures they feel inside of class. Learning often becomes secondary and fades into the deafening din of poverty, food and housing insecurity, childcare, transportation, domestic violence, gender identity, unseen disabilities, health concerns — and the list goes on ad infinitum.
Our collective work with Guided Pathways has prompted us to reconsider the entire student experience and account for this broad spectrum of needs by reimagining how students enter our college, and the support they receive while they’re here and even after they leave. We’ve had nine different workgroups examine our programs and services in light of nationally researched evidence-based practices and make 280 recommendations, several of which involve creating a more holistic approach to our student support services. And these recommendations came from just five of the workgroups — four have yet to finish and three new groups were recently charged.
It’s abundantly clear to those closest to the work, and even those of us at a distance, that Guided Pathways is not a fad, not an initiative, and not a short-term thing. Guided Pathways is a multi-year, ongoing commitment that uses an evidence-based framework to guide thoughtful analysis of how and why we do things for students, and how to demystify the centuries-old myths created by higher education that amount to professional malpractice under a modern lens.
The holistic approach we’re taking through our Guided Pathways work is timely and critical. Seeing our students as individuals with complex lives — individuals with challenges in their student life and pressures and obstacles in their private life, which can limit their success as students — will only become more critical as society advances and the options to learn and gain skills increase.
To provide effective and meaningful support for students with this depth and breadth of life complexity can be a significant challenge when we add the rigors of an academic schedule into their environment. A tenuous existence can quickly turn to chaos without someone to help a student make sense of the experience and to adapt to the new environment. A focus group done by the Paige Group showed us that the most successful MVCC students are the ones who make a meaningful connection with a member of our faculty or staff. Without this support, students often are left to consult with friends or classmates on critical decisions that may result in a more challenging outcome. The importance of a student having a strong connection to our staff and faculty is often echoed in anecdotes shared by many colleagues over the years, and this connection is too important to leave to chance.
While much work remains to be done, the changes that have been made thus far are bringing the best of the emerging practices from around the country and here at MVCC to scale in an effort to make a significant difference for the future success of our students. It’s hard to imagine, but this is just the beginning.
If you have any questions, comments, or insights, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.
