ACHIEVING THE DREAM INITIATIVE AT WAYNE COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT—2008-09 ACHIEVEMENTS

The Wayne County Community College District (Detroit, Michigan) is currently completing its first implementation year as a participant in the national Achieving the Dream (AtD) initiative.  WCCCD serves 32 communities and townships in Wayne County, Michigan with a total population of nearly 2 million citizens. WCCCD is one of the largest community colleges in Michigan and serves a very diverse student body.  WCCCD operates five campuses of which two are in suburban areas (Western Campus and Downriver Campus) and three are in urban areas (Downtown Campus, Eastern Campus, and Northwest Campus). 

During 2008-09, The WCCCD Achieving the Dream initiative has focused on four pilot intervention areas: (1) improving the student advisement system, (2) increasing student achievement in English developmental education, (3) increasing student retention, and (4) increasing the college’s institutional research capacity.  The AtD initiative has become the leading edge of the redefinition, promotion, and implementation of WCCCD’s student success agenda.  AtD has launched the district on a long-term journey of transformation in the way in which student success is defined, pursued, and achieved.

A summary of 2008-09 AtD activities is as follows:

Priority Area One: Improve the student advisement process:
Improve the early alert system and increase in faculty participation; create professional development programs for faculty members and student advisors; conduct research on student COMPASS testing, advisement, and course placement practices; create a faculty/staff task force to align COMPASS cut-off scores to developmental education course objectives; and training of registration staff on COMPASS protocols.

Priority Area Two: Improve academic performance of developmental English students:
Implement new approaches in communication with faculty members on needs of the AtD student cohort; increase in faculty referral of students to the learning center; develop toolkits of teaching techniques specific to the needs of the AtD student cohort; improve the assessment of student learning outcomes and feedback for teaching and learning improvement.

Priority Area Three: Increase the student retention rate for first-time degree-seeking students:
Establish baseline and benchmark data on student retention; conduct faculty and advisor dialogue sessions to discuss student retention issues and solutions; design and implement formative and summative assessment processes; complete first phase of implementation of effective interventions to increase student retention.

Priority Area Four: Expand Institutional Effectiveness capacity:
The most visible and tangible AtD achievement at WCCCD during 2008-09 has been the major expansion of the college’s institutional research capacity in support of AtD data requirements.  Three persons were added to the Institutional Effectiveness staff, and a wing of the Central Administration Building was redesigned and renovated to accommodate the expanded institutional research functions.  The need for tracking the progress of the AtD student cohort was one of the primary driving forces for the expansion of WCCCD’s institutional research capacity and the strengthening of the overall institutional effectiveness function.  Other related improvements include a number of upgrades of the information technology capacity and the installation of TracDat, a data management tool to manage AtD data collection, analysis, and reporting.