The New Community College
The National Picture Since the development of the concept paper and the subsequent moves to implantation, national analyses have ratified the concepts in the planning documents. Key amongst them is the completion agenda articulated by President Obama and joined by many national leaders. This is what The New Community College at CUNY has been attempting to do from the start. The use of peer mentors as partners with faculty and staff in serving students is not an “add on” or supplement to the work but rather an effort to change the dynamic of the learning environment. The approach to recruitment, application and admissions—with its emphases on treating all students with respect and providing them as much information as possible, so that they may make an informed decision in choosing the community college that is the “right fit” for them – is also about establishing a relationship with the students from initial contact that treats them as individuals worthy of attention, with individual circumstances and needs that are well known. Fully engaging the peer mentors with faculty and staff in the group and individual information sessions with prospective students sends a powerful message and creates and validates a participatory culture from the earliest contact. Peer mentors will also be active in the Summer Bridge Program and in the development and delivery of curricular and co-curricular components of the student experience. The college will not get different results with student outcomes if the work is not conducted differently. The New Community College is consistent with the following themes coming out of the Complete College America – October 2011: Summit and Academy: • Remediation is not working: put students in gateway courses with enhanced support. • Limit the options—provide pathways. Structured, prescribed pathways. Instructional pathways with well-defined learning goals. • Support for students where the students are – in time and place. • Build the curriculum around what students need to take. • Protocols to support students in pathways. • Start with statistics (the calculus sequence should not be the default). What math for what program. • Get students to certificates or associate or baccalaureate degrees in timely fashion (a credential with economic value). • Block-schedule classes. • What are the skills students need for employment – attend to them. The New Community College, in concept and in implementation, incorporates all these features. Finally, the design for the college is consistent with other recent analyses of large scale research projects such as the statement from CCSSE that “options do not work with first generation students.” The Achieving the Dream interim report calls on the importance of taking programs to scale. The report states that “Additionally, while most colleges had expanded at least one strategy, the majority of strategies at these schools remained small in scale, leaving large proportions of students relatively untouched by the colleges’ Achieving the Dream work.” Taking programs to scale is key in making differences in student outcomes.
In Summary At the New Community College, all students will be participating in the full range of programs from information sessions through Bridge to learning communities and experiential education contexts in the City. The college has been created to serve students in Manhattan as the second community college in the Borough, but it is also building on
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