Student Success Task Force Draft Recommendations
CSSO Feedback
Board of Governors
December 1, 2011
First and foremost, on behalf of the system’s CSSOs, our thanks to
Chancellor Scott, Dr. MacDougall and the members of the Task Force
for all the thinking and debating and reflection this process has
entailed on behalf of the system and its students.
There are a number of the Task Force recommendations that the
CSSOs support, either fully or with some questions and reservations,
and others that we do not – in particular, Recommendation 3.2 that
would require even incoming BOG-eligible students to declare a
degree, certificate or transfer goal for BOG eligibility. But in the
interest of the very short time allotted to me, I will not attempt to
address all 23 recommendations and will instead focus on four
overarching issues that temper the CSSOs’ support for even the
recommendations we see as having great potential to benefit students.
1. Funding. We recognize that the recommendations are built
around policy directions, and are not intended to identify all the
related funding or implementation issues that would eventually
turn policy into reality. Nevertheless, calling for major changes –
including major increases in workload at the college level,
especially in Student Services – without indentifying realistic,
additional funding sources leads to understandable doubts as the
extent to which the recommendations can ever really be carried
out. By not addressing the 50% Law and the limits it places on
colleges’ ability to strengthen the student support services
identified throughout the task force’s report as being necessary
for increased student success, the CSSOs are – to put it kindly –
skeptical.
2. Technology. CSSOs and Student Services staff members are very
big fans of technologies that help students and staff themselves
work more efficiently. But we’re also coldly realistic, from years
of experience, about the extent to which technology will do the
many ambitious things outlined in the Task Force report, or will
fully serve as many of our students as the report seems to
assume. Also, technologies are, in many ways, as expensive to
implement and maintain as some of the staff time and staff costs
they’re intended to replace or supplement. Technological
improvements will not be the big savings-generator we often
assume they will be.
3. Matching requirements with opportunities. The Task Force report
is replete, as it should be, with recommendations that reinforce
each other. From a student services perspective, the most
important ones are the proposed requirement of all new students
being assessed and developing an education plan to which they
must adhere closely, with the requirement that colleges offer the
courses and services students need, in line with their assessed
skills and their education plans. Our concern as CSSOs, very
frankly, is that as a system we will take the easier path of
requiring students to do certain things but then fail to take the far
harder path of requiring ourselves as colleges to match our
resources – curriculum and support services in particular -- to
make those student requirements meaningful.
4. Student success in the classroom. The Task Force report is not
balanced in its relatively heavy emphasis on what needs to
happen for students outside the classroom and its relatively light
hand when it comes to addressing what needs to happen inside
the classroom, where success, ultimately, plays out for students.
Additional professional development with no tie to research
outcomes or student performance will not generate the kind of
student academic success we all seek.