By Dale Stowell
Linn-Benton Community College was a major step in achieving my dream. Now LBCC is part of a program that can measure if the things that contributed to my success can also help others through a national initiative called Achieving the Dream.
Achieving the Dream isn’t another project to add to our workloads. It’s a method that lets us measure whether ideas to increase student success or completion work here – and if they do work, who they work for. It also enables us to adjust to increase that success and broaden its reach for all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds.
The ability to do that is meaningful to me for many reasons. My own experience is one of them.
My success as a college student was far from assured. I didn’t even make the internal commitment to be a college student until two months after my high school graduation, and during my senior year, because of a lack of sophistication and knowledge, I hadn’t done even something as basic as taking the SAT to prepare for college entry. It’s fair to say that I wasn’t focused.
But that didn’t matter to the people at LBCC. I remembered that the journalism advisor at the time, Jenny Spiker, had visited my high school newspaper class in Philomath, and for that reason more than any other, I became a journalism major here.
I had a connection, and that connection deepened because I saw Jenny either in class or at the Commuter office every day. I developed a relationship with her and my teammates on the newspaper staff. Some terms I was a great student, and during terms when my life got in the way, I was a not-so-great student, but I was never anonymous or alone at LBCC.
Even when I didn’t believe in myself, people believed in me. The responsibility and accountability I felt in relationship to others kept me coming back every day whether I was tired or rested, struggling or excelling, or cheerful or depressed.
There’s research that suggests that this is a kind of experience that supports student success. When I look at Destination Graduation (DG), I can see LBCC actively trying to ensure this experience happens to more students, regardless of who they are or what program they choose.
In fact, DG looks similar to a program initiated and measured at the Achieving the Dream college I worked at before coming to LBCC. That initiative helped increase fall-to-fall retention by 10 percent.
Achieving the Dream will give us the tools to figure out if things like DG are working, and in what ways we can make them better. It can help validate – or help to refine – work that’s already been done through Foundations of Excellence, outcomes, the completion agenda, and others. We not only have two coaches from Achieving the Dream helping us, we have the experience of 160 Achieving the Dream schools from which to draw ideas and experience for what has and hasn’t worked.
Achieving the Dream is just getting started here. A data team is collecting three years of data so we can better understand the places we lose students. We are putting the pieces in place so we can begin to measure things, and pick out the key initiatives we want to measure in the next year.
If you want more information about Achieving the Dream, check out the New Directions page at http://www.linnbenton.edu/about-lbcc/new-directions. You’ll find an Achieving the Dream link and other information about the ongoing efforts to increase student success at LBCC.
You can find a list membership in the Core Team and the Data Team. Chances are you know someone, so feel free to ask them questions and learn more about this new support for student success at LBCC.
(Dale Stowell is executive director of Institutional Advancement, a member of LBCC ATD Core Team, and LBCC Alum.)
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