SCT

Success College Team

Update

October 25, 2002

I'd like to report the results so far of our process for coming up with Brookhaven's Success Directions-in effect to mirror back to the college our preliminary findings from the process that began at our last all-college meeting on September 20.

Since then we've received well over 300 ideas (and they are still coming in) from all across the college community-professional support staff, administrators, faculty, students, full and part-time, day and night. I'm impressed by the seriousness with which so many of you took on this task of thinking about the directions Brookhaven might take to help our students and ourselves be more successful.

We are now in the process of taking your suggestions and trying to aggregate and generalize them into a set of possible success directions, but I'd like right now to tell you some of what you have been telling us, and then to tell you about how the rest of the process will go.

Though the success ideas ranged about as widely as you could imagine, from parking lots to helping students become more ethical citizens, several themes have emerged. Among the strongest is the need for better communication. Many of us commented on the need for clearer communications with students and on the need for clearer communications among ourselves-so that we can then communicate better with students. Among the many specific suggestions made, let me read a few:

From a professional support staff member: "I have noticed that BHC doesn't always work together so that a student gets the best help needed. I believe that the main problem is lack of communication. The way BHC can mend this problem is by having a meeting or social with different departments so people can meet one another and therefore work more effectively in the future. I honestly believe that if people could form working relationships…this would only help our students in the long run."

From an administrator: "Provide employees and students a venue to express concerns, ask questions year round-in an anonymous, 'safe' method" like locked suggestion boxes.

From a student: "Better inform us of services available and where these services are located on and off campus."

From a full-time faculty member: "Consolidate vital information, such as academic calendar, withdrawal policy, available resources in one pocket-sized booklet. Currently, this information is scattered between the course schedule and the student handbook. Many students use the course schedule only once, then throw it away-unaware that it contains facts which will be useful throughout the semester."

And one part-time faculty member said: "I hope you take the time and effort to look at these suggestions, walk the walk, don't just talk it!"
Another cluster of responses came around Student Services. Many of the students who talked to us asked for better, more personal advising, more information about financial aid and more efficient registration. None of this is anything we haven't been working on, but I think it is instructive to know how thoroughly students agree with us about the need to keep improving. One student asked that we "offer better financial aid and advising to students." That way "students will stick around and continue to further their education because they'll be able to pay for it and have a better direction." A number of our colleagues agreed with the students: "From an advising standpoint it would be nice to have more full-time advisors to meet the needs of our growing enrollment. This could help advisors spend more 'quality time' with students and be able to have a more personal touch."

A full-time faculty member asked for "increased student support for non-traditional student schedules" and cited difficulties for students not in regular long terms with bookstore, financial aid, food service etc.

At many points the two themes of communication and student services overlapped with calls for better communication about student services.

Other "hot spots" in terms of suggestions for success initiatives included facilities (especially as they relate to technology and responding to growth), instruction, and diversities of all kinds: non-traditional students, students with special needs, international students, online students, continuing education students.

The next task for the Success College Team will be to resolve all these strong suggestions into a manageable number of possible Success Directions-that is, general statements that can serve as umbrellas for the suggestions we received. Our target is to have a list to the campus by November 1. Then we will have approximately a month of discussion of the possible directions followed by a vote early in December. The month of discussion will include e-mail discussions, visits by team members to work groups at your invitation, discussions at PSSA and Faculty Association meetings, and an all-college meeting on Friday, November 15.

I have one more last announcement, and then I will quite talking the talk: as part of our report to the consultant team that is coming in April, we will be detailing what the Success College Team has been doing in the various threads of our project, but we would also like to be able to make the case-which I know to be true-that Brookhaven is involved in a whole variety of success initiatives at every level, as we have been for years. So I will be asking everyone to send me accounts of what individuals and work groups have been doing for the past 2 or 3 years to help students be more successful. I'd like to overwhelm our consultants with evidence of the good work we've been doing over and above anything the Success College Team might have done. I will be sending out an e-mail next week soliciting this information, but I wanted to alert you that the e-mail is coming. Don't worry that you'll be seen as "tooting your own horn"; we'll all be tooting our collective horn.

I'm gratified by the level of the discussion that has been generated by this Success Directions process. From every corner of the college community have come thoughtful, professional responses which tell me that we really are becoming the Success College.

- Ed Garcia