NIC retools to help students succeed

COEUR d’ALENE — North Idaho College is rolling out a plan to help students avoid unnecessary costs and to reach their postsecondary educational aspirations.

According to the higher education nonprofit Complete College America, only 5 percent of full-time community college students achieve their associate’s degree in two years. The numbers are barely better for one-to two-year certificate students, 12 percent of whom graduate on time. At four-year institutions, only 19 percent of full-time students earn their bachelor’s degrees on time.

On Thursday, NIC hosted Nina Bennett from the Education Advisory Board company in Washington, D.C., to talk with staff and faculty about how Kootenai County’s students could break these trends with the Guided Pathways program.

For years, colleges and universities have offered a cafeteria-style smorgasbord of options to students, said Bennett. That is convenient for applicants, but unhelpful to students once they hit bumps along the pathway toward program completion, she said.

Guided Pathways works like a GPS system that helps students “get to wherever they want to go,” Bennett added. The program establishes guardrails to keep them from swerving off a cliff into needless debt, or failing to achieve the certification needed to succeed in their field of choice.

NIC is implementing the Guided Pathways program this semester by clustering related majors into focus fields to put incoming students on the right track from the start, explained Bennett. Curriculum maps are also part of the program. They are designed to allow incoming students to explore without accumulating credits irrelevant to their degrees.

Bennett said higher education institutions need to change their approach from the way things used to be done.

“What will help students complete in a timely fashion?” needs to be the guiding question, she said.

Guided Pathways gives students a timeline and a plan for degree completion while allowing for abrupt changes such as switching majors or shifting from one career focus to another, she said.

Giving students that focus and flexibility is especially important given the $1 trillion in student debt in America today, Bennett added.

“We have to find a way to address that challenge.”

Student debt is the one kind of debt that never goes away, not even in bankruptcies, Bennett said.

Students will see more engagement from advisors, said NIC dean of general studies Larry Briggs. Students need to know before they arrive at the classroom what they need to do to achieve their goals. Once in classes, they need faculty and staff to be intentional about keeping them on track with their goals, said Briggs.

Briggs also said the college will unveil a Guided Pathways online catalog in coming weeks with program maps, focus fields, and other resources.

“We’re really excited with how the campus is engaged in making a big change ... Folks get how important this is,” he said.

NIC vice president for instruction Lita Burns agreed, explaining that the national research bears out the theory.

She expects NIC students to experience the same degree of improvements that students at other institutions have experienced through the Guided Pathways initiative, she said.

“This will be a really significant game changer,” she said.

Bennett pointed to successes that students at Georgia State University have experienced by participating in a summer program prior to their freshman year. The students in question come from underrepresented groups, rely on federal financial aid, or are first-generation college students, she said. By earning credits in courses relevant to their degree programs and seeing that they can succeed alongside their peers from other backgrounds, Bennett said these students develop the grit needed to complete their degree programs on time, and with equal or higher grade-point averages than their peers.

Briggs said NIC looks like the national profile in its proportion of first-generation college students and students who struggle to make ends meet.

“The vast majority come to get a credential, not just take a class,” he said.

However, the three-year completion rate at NIC is 25 percent, said Briggs.

Burns said NIC will begin tabulating data to be later used to measure the program’s effectiveness. She said school officials will also evaluate how class schedules need to be adjusted, so that students can take all of their necessary courses in a timely fashion. She hopes the schedule gets better with each semester.

“We are very intentionally taking these concepts and seeing how they apply to our situation in our context,” said Briggs.