Of course, I don’t mean we should stop talking about our students’ successes. I mean, Can we stop talking about “student success”? What do those quotation marks signify?
For a start, students don’t enroll in college to be counted as “successes” by us. We’ve defined “student success” in terms of metrics that matter to us, for a variety of reasons. We care about persistence, right? We care about completion. We care about mastery, surely. But let me propose that we, for our own reasons, have reduced each of these worthy notions to metrics that matter to us — whether those beans we count matter to students or not. And we all know why we count those beans: There are reports to send to the state, there’s marketing and messaging to get out. Behind all these priorities, there’s that issue that often seems to be in the background: educating people.
So, let’s take a moment to stop talking about “student success.” What should we be talking about instead?
Each of our students is a whole human being, with a unique history and individual aspirations. Students come to us motivated by their own goals. Yes, we know about “borrowed goals” and we know students who aren’t clear about why they are here — but we make those assessments from our perspective. Even if a student’s goal is to get their granny off their back about “getting an education,” that is the student’s reality. And when we ignore our students’ reality, we ignore them as whole human beings and reduce them to abstracted learning units that drift through courses collecting tokens they can cash in for a “student success” at the end of our game.
When we (genuinely) turn our attention to student goals, we may find that we need to take a different approach to serving them. I want to draw attention to two issues that I think are central to our mission — meaning, our actual mission, the reason we exist. We are here to educate people.
When students sign up, they are motivated by some goal that is, at least, related to that mission — perhaps not in the way we would prefer, but that is their reality, and that’s where we will start. In terms of that reality, there are two goal challenges for us. First, there’s the goal achievement gap: What stands between each student achieving their goal? If it’s us — and let’s be honest, we all know of situations in which we are the problem — then what can we fix about ourselves to get out of the way?
We can identify a number of institutional patterns that aren’t friendly to student goal achievement. Pathways was supposed to help with some of this, not by mandating students into a rigid structure, but by giving them more guidance along their way. This was why, early in our institution’s pathways journey, I encouraged the term “guiding pathways”: I wanted to draw attention to the fact that guiding pathways are not the Yellow Brick Road to “student success,” let alone student goal achievement. Rather, guiding pathways places even more of the responsibility on us to give students the guidance they need, all along their path.
Anyone who looks at the goal achievement gap while awake can see that there are disparities by race and ethnicity. We must learn to guard against shifting responsibility for the gap onto students. Do we want to embrace an explanation that suggests students chose the lack of access they’ve experienced in their previous education? Instead of blaming them for their lack of preparation, we should be celebrating the fact that they’ve made it to community college at all: They have survived systems that were stacked against them from the first.
One convenient way to approach the goal achievement gap is to reframe what our gateway courses are for. Too often, I hear profs talking about rigor as if it’s hazing — because if you’re on the receiving end, it is. In gateway courses, we don’t teach college students; we make college students. If we embraced that slogan, we’d design courses around principles (like LAG, incidentally) that close the goal achievement gap as a natural consequence.
It may surprise you, but I consider closing the goal-achievement gap as the easy part of teaching in an open-enrollment institution. Do you want a real challenge? Let’s talk about the goal setting gap.
Goal-setting is influenced by many factors in a student’s life: Family and friends play a role, obviously, but so do less obvious factors like what their public schools were like and subtle (and not-so-subtle) influences of teachers and other authority figures. Our challenge in closing the goal-setting gap include helping students come to a deeper understanding of who they are and who they want to be. So, yeah, maybe you’re here to get your granny off your back, but what about you? Where is this path taking you?
The goal-setting gap arises from two main sources. Many students do not have a sufficiently robust understanding of what their options are, and so they choose goals that aren’t sufficiently informed or even aligned with their own aspirations. We can address this gap with better information — as long as that information is coupled with taking the time to understand the student’s own story.
But let’s talk about a more insidious goal-setting gap: We have students who have lowered expectations of themselves because they’ve been taught to lower their expectations. That is one of the burdens of lacking access, and, because lacking access maps so closely onto race in our society, this is a particular challenge for our students of color.
Even we sometimes perpetrate this goal-lowering message. I want to take a moment to make this point with a story. Years ago, I was fortunate to be among the original professors for the Free Minds Project, a local version of the Clemente course concept. The idea is to get a group of students who have been shut out of access to the study of humanities to engage in that very thing. I was absolutely thrilled to see this group of students, most of whom were people of color, reading Shakespeare and Plato and talking about how these texts resonate with their own lives.
As part of my role as an ACC professor, I wanted to connect students more deeply with this institution, so I organized a “recruitment” event. ACC representatives were invited to our FMP class to talk to students about what we have to offer. They turned up with little carts full of brochures on our programs — and to my surprise, they handed out material about our vocational certificates.
Don’t get me wrong: There is nothing wrong with our workforce programs, nor is there anything wrong with promoting them to prospective students. But back up and ask yourself: Why did they not trot out brochures on majoring in philosophy or Russian or history? These were good-intentioned people with the students’ welfare in mind — but I believe that their choices of what to promote sent these student a message, and that message was about goal-setting.
As you look out at your students, draw a direct line between what you are messaging to them and their goal-setting. Are you empowering them to set their goals based on who they are and who they want to be? Or are you telling them to tone down their aspirations to something more “practical”? Let me put this even more starkly: Are you helping students overcome a lack of access, or are you yourself becoming another well-meaning obstacle to access?
Education used to be about transformation, about reorienting the soul toward truth-seeking — as opposed to a collection of résumé-building tokens and tools. If you don’t remember that moment, get reacquainted with Plato’s Republic. And while you’re remembering that moment, ask yourself: When has grounded, informed personal transformation been more urgently needed for our future together? When has it been more important to equip people to think clearly and independently? Do we aspire to educate people for leadership and community or to become workers and consumers?
Are we educating people to flourish, or to make it to Friday?
