Salish Kootenai College

Best Practices

Learnings

• When we first began our work, we began to realize that what we were doing was generated and driven by faculty and staff and did not take into consideration the student perspective. What may work well for us does not necessarily work well for students, nor is it necessarily the best path for the students. This was our Achilles heel. We learned that we were neither asking the right questions, involving the right people, nor collecting the right data, all of which are keys to progress and planning. As a result, our decisions were not data-informed. Decisions were historically reactive, instead of proactive, grounded in anecdotal information, hearsay, and responsive to the loudest voice in the room.

Decision making processes have moved to purposeful inclusion of relevant voices and careful formulation of questions. Data collection and analysis is also becoming more purposeful as a result.

Data/Evidence

• When we started working to remodel our website, students were brought into the meetings to give us feedback. We realized that our website was not user-friendly from the student and the public’s perspectives. There were issues with navigation and incomplete or missing information that we had not thought to include. As a result of this work, we are on the verge of launching a new website that not only is user-friendly and provides students with functional information for college success, but also functions as a strong recruitment strategy. 

Learnings

• The academic and non-academic programs and departments create annual plans each year that include goals, a plan of action for each goal, and identified means of identifying whether goals are met. While the annual plans are aligned with the general mission and vision of SKC, they often reflect individual interpretation of these, but they do not necessarily align with the SEM plan, which delineates the campus wide plan of action to succeed in meeting SKC’s mission and vision. The SEM plan can become lost or neglected as individualized goals and efforts become siloed.

By purposefully incorporating the SEM plan into department annual plans, the shared plan remains a focal point of the goals, strategies, and measures of each department, while also allowing for individual department work to be included.

Data/Evidence

• The current iteration of the SEM plan includes goals, strategies, and identified measurements in the areas of recruitment, onboarding, and retention. The plan also identifies which departments “own” the goals, strategies, and measures. This is the first year that we are requiring departments to include the SEM plan in their annual reports, so we will not have data to measure the alignment of individual department work in meeting the goals of the SEM plan until departments provide the yearly reports reflecting on their annual plan results. However, we have observed, that departments are finding the SEM plan to be user friendly and useful in creating their annual plans. Departments are more aware of their role in achieving the work set out in the SEM plan, and the plan provides them with guidance with respect to what they need to accomplish. This allows them to focus on developing and implementing actions that move the college forward in a unified way.

Learnings

• It often seems easy to try to make new ideas work within an old system. However, that is not always the best way to grow and achieve success. The old system may feel comfortable, and there can be resistance to change. It often takes the pain of getting out of one’s comfort zone to achieve true growth. While creating our SEM plan, we recognized areas that needed more focused attention, such as enrollment services, student services, recruitment, dual and concurrent enrollment, and first-year student retention.
• As a result, new positions were created. These included the Vice President of Enrollment Management and Student Affairs (VP EMSA); the Director of Early College Outreach and Recruitment; the Assistant Director of Academic Success; and the Retention Coordinator. Of course, this was not without trial and error. For example, the Retention Coordinator was originally the Director of First-Year Retention and in its own department. However, in this case, it was recognized that there was duplicative effort going on with the Department of Academic Success and the first-year retention work was siloed in a one-person department that made program development and implementation difficult to achieve. Reimagining the position within the context of a larger department allowed first year retention to integrate as a focus within the student success system, allowing for better collaboration of efforts and streamlined hand-offs between the first and second year of a student’s college experience.

Reimagining positions, reorganizing, and aligning positions to better meet our SEM plan needs has allowed for significant change and growth to occur through increased attention and focus.

Data/Evidence

• Creating new positions and adjusting the organizational chart has resulted in the ability to provide increased focus on student enrollment services and student supports across campus. These were previously housed under the Vice President of Academic Affairs (VPAA) position, meaning one person was overseeing all academics, enrollment, and student affairs and supports. As a result of the growing workload due to campus expansion over the years, it was realized that areas were not getting the attention they needed to keep up with the changing needs of our students. Splitting the position has resulted in the ability of the college to increase focus on academics through the VPAA, while also increasing focus on enrollment and student affairs and supports under the VP EMSA. As a result, much needed reorganizing, refreshing of processes and procedures, and the creation of new processes and procedures under the VP EMSA has allowed for improved experiences and services in relation to recruitment, enrollment, retention, and completion.
• The formation of the Director of Early College Outreach and Recruitment has aligned early college and dual enrollment programming with recruitment efforts. The creation of an Assistant Director of Academic Success position has freed up the Director to focus on academic programming (High School Equivalency, Developmental Studies, Academic Success, Campus Tutoring Services) that supports student academic growth, as the Assistant Director oversees the Success Coaches, Retention Coordinator, and early alert system, and coordinates with the Center for Prevention and Wellness (CPW) to address behavioral and wellbeing issues. In addition, the Assistant Director oversees data collection and reporting, which has increased data collection, analysis, and utilization with respect to onboarding and retention efforts. Finally, the Retention Coordinator position has expanded direct interaction with students, with a particular focus on first year students, to increase retention. The Retention Coordinator also collects data, increasing data analysis and utilization in programming. The Assistant Director and Retention Coordinator work closely with other departments, such as CPW, Disability Services, Enrollment Services, in ways that were not happening before the creation of these positions, creating a more holistic system and approach to student retention. Each of the new positions aligns with the goals and work within the scope of our SEM plan – recruitment, onboarding, and retention.

Learnings

• Institutions collect a lot of data, which takes time and energy from other processes and work. Data can be a powerful tool, and when data collection, analysis, and application is effective and purposeful, the resulting actions can have significant impacts. However, if data collection is not purposeful or efficiently managed, it can take the focus away from meaningful work. It is important to think about and identify what you want to know and why you want to know it before deciding what data to collect and how to collect it. Data lacking a purpose often goes unanalyzed because there is no focus or purpose to guide the analysis. This data also often is not collected or formatted in a way that can be analyzed due to the lack of purpose.

Data/Evidence

• Within the scope of our grant work, we identified the need to collect and analyze data related to why students were dropping courses or totally withdrawing from school. We started collecting information from students. However, this did not become efficient until we identified some purposes for collecting the data. Upon reflection, we decided that we wanted to know if the reasons were or were not controllable by the institution. We also wanted to hear from students what they needed – what, if anything, could have prevented the need to drop classes and/or withdraw? The purpose of collecting and analyzing the data was to improve our ability to identify student needs and be proactive in having appropriate student supports in place. This led to the development of a google form that students complete as a part of the drop process, identification of who administers the form, who collects the data, and who processes and analyzes the data to make sure the key players are brought into the conversation. One area that we identified as a student need is preparedness before arriving on campus, including transportation, daycare, housing, etc. As a result, a detailed process has been put in place to ensure that there is a purposeful handoff of incoming students from admissions to the success team prior to students arriving on campus. The success team connects with students to identify areas of potential concern and address them prior to students arriving on campus. Success coach positions were changed from 10-month to 12-month positions to accommodate the extra pre-intervention work during the summer in preparation for the fall quarter.

Learnings

• Strong and thoughtful SEM plans are great, but they require accountability to be successfully implemented. Each step of a process or procedure needs to be specifically assigned to a department or individual to make sure that processes and procedures are properly and consistently implemented. This practice also lends itself to strong succession planning.
• In addition, by purposefully assigning ownership of the SEM work, faculty, staff, and administration are all aware of their individual roles, as well as the roles of the collective, in implementing the SEM plan. As such, work is not left hanging because it is assumed that others are completing it. As SKC departments are now asked to include their SEM roles in their annual plans, this helps to focus their work on implementing SEM strategies and meeting SEM goals. The SEM plan also provides measurements for assessing achievement, so departments have a basis for data collection and analysis.

Data/Evidence

• One recent example focuses on degree audits and class coding of students. When students change majors, their earned credits need to be reevaluated within the new degree plan for proper advising and consistent, correct data collection and analysis. Recently, it was realized that academic advisors believe this was happening through the Registrar’s Office. However, the Registrar’s Office views this as an academic advising procedure and believes that advisors are doing the degree plan audits. There was also a question of who is responsible for updating class codes in the academic systems. The work is often done, but is it always happening? Is it getting entered in the system and by who? As a result of analyzing current practices, an updated procedure has been developed that specifically identifies who is responsible for each step. This will ensure timely degree audits that improve academic advising and data accuracy.

This is the first year in which departments have been asked to include specific SEM work in their annual plans. We look forward to seeing if there is a correlation between SEM in annual plans and increased success in implementing SEM work.