Campaign For Success

The Campaign for Success at Queens College: Changing the Culture of the Campus

Introduction

Queens College, currently involved in the process of curricular review, assessment of student needs and evaluation of ways students are served, welcomes The Campaign for Success as an opportunity to reach out to the campus community in a collaborative effort to identify our ″islands of success.″ At the heart of this effort is a commitment to enhance what the College is doing well, explore the possibilities of new projects, identify the existing obstacles that prevent students from succeeding and work to create an environment where faculty, staff and administration communicate to students the essential message that they can succeed. In the words of Albert Einstein, “teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift, not a hard duty.” Queens College is working to ensure that the entire College community perceives its tasks in the service of students as “valuable gifts.”

Barriers to Student Success

In canvassing the campus community, it is increasingly clear that some academic departments and programs are confronted by the difficulties of providing, with their own limited resources, for inadequately prepared and financially strapped students. The financial burdens students face affect their academic progress. While the College cannot alleviate the financial burdens, it can work at addressing other barriers. The College continues to intensify its efforts to ensure that all students, once admitted, are encouraged and equipped to succeed. In an ideal world of optimal funding, the College could increase the number of faculty and staff available to spend time with students in need of information, advising and encouragement. Faculty and staff work closely with academic departments, campus offices, the Advising Center and the Office of Counseling and Advisement to provide advice that is clear and consistent. Faculty and staff will be encouraged to continue to make a collective effort to interact with students at campus events; for such informal interactions help to create and communicate a climate of accessibility. While faculty continues to be involved in advising, teaching and research activities, they must also be encouraged to participate more fully in advising initiatives.

Lack of Adequate Preparation

The College must address the inadequate preparation of some students for their academic program of choice, and put in place strategies to combat such inadequacy. Computer Science, for example, suffers as a result of its students’ lack of preparation in high school mathematics and analytical skills. Some programs have prerequisites in mathematics, sciences or literature which present a challenge for some students. Communication Sciences and Disorders and pre-med, for example, have prerequisites in mathematics and science.

The admissions index is not an adequate predictor of students’ preparation for study in specific fields. Many students experience difficulties in passing gateway courses (Table 1).

Need to Improve Academic Advisement

The Advising Center is understaffed and advisement across departments is uneven. The Center’s five full time advisors are responsible for the advisement of over 4000 new freshmen and transfer students every year, as well as the advisement of thousands of continuing students who have yet to declare a major (Table 2 and Table 3). While there are systems in place in departments for the advisement of majors, there is no organized system of advisement for students who have not declared a major, and students do not avail themselves of faculty office hours with the frequency they should. Many students confuse the declaration of a “field of interest” on the admissions application with a declaration of academic major, and this can lead to misunderstanding. Transfer students pose additional problems as their preparation and course needs are varied and a one-program-fits-all approach does not work. In addition many students must have personal counseling and there are many students with special needs. Another challenge to the College is meeting the needs of the sophomore population. The second year can be a period of academic uncertainty and questioning. Contributing to the problems of advisement is the lack of faculty availability during times of peak student need such as the summer.

Effective Articulation and other Issues affecting Transfer Students

There is need for close articulation of academic programs among the colleges, particularly with our feeder community colleges. Queens College must also present incentives for the community colleges to desire such articulation. It is often difficult for transfer students to get the courses they need upon entering the College. Due to the selective nature of some programs, transfer students cannot be accepted directly into all programs. There are too many bottlenecks in ″gateway to the major″ courses. The evaluation of foreign credits is not timely. The TIPPS system has great potential to facilitate a seamless transfer of students among colleges and efforts are being made to improve its effectiveness and harmonize it with our local transfer evaluation database, which includes non-CUNY colleges.

Student Financial Support

Many of our students must work at particular hours. This reality, combined with the personal obligations they often have, means they frequently face difficulty finding courses, especially advanced courses in the majors, at days and times they can attend. Students are also faced with the high cost of books. Transfer students who are unable to register in major courses may be in danger of losing their financial aid as they are required to follow a fixed curriculum.

Departmental Resources

Departments face challenges in meeting student needs with diminished (in real terms) OTPS funds and staff support. The lack of sufficient OTPS makes it difficult for many departments to adequately provide for undergraduate education. Examples include the scarcity of needed equipment and materials in teaching laboratories and the limited studio space in the Art department. Many departments are concerned about the lack of support staff. The English Department’s self-study external evaluation articulated the department’s need for additional secretarial support very clearly. English is not the only department affected in this way. The ratio of faculty lines to student population is disadvantageous to students. There are not enough sections of key courses offered in some departments. This situation also negatively affects transfer, evening and weekend college students.

Institutional Strengths

While Queens College excels in many areas including academics, cultural diversity and the celebration of student excellence, its greatest strength lies in the quality and commitment of its faculty, who excel in scholarship and research as well as in innovative and engaged teaching practice. Other strengths of the College are its attractive and inviting campus and its diverse and involved national and international student body. An active alumni organization is heavily engaged in college activities and support. Success rates on the CUNY Proficiency Examination are very good (Table 4). Based on a peer report of Public Large City Masters 1 Institutions, Queens College compared very favorably with other institutions, and the six-year graduation rate is high among peer urban public institutions. Overall, Queens College compares favorably with other Baccalaureate programs in the University (Table 5 and Table 6).

The College also has a wide range of special programs for students. Three divisional honors programs, Honors in the Humanities, Honors in the Mathematical and Natural Sciences, and Honors in the Social Sciences, provide students with opportunities to develop depth in their area of study. These programs offer an interdisciplinary forum of investigation and encourage students to conduct serious research as undergraduates. The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program also offers students opportunities for research. The College’s Undergraduate Student Training in Academic Research (MARC), the Louis Stokes New York City Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP), and the Queens College Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) encourage and support undergraduate research work. The SPUR program is funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to Queens College. SPUR fellows have the opportunity to work under the guidance of faculty mentors on biological, biochemical or biomedical related research projects.

The Advising Center

The College’s commitment to academic advising is seen in its ongoing evaluation of the Academic Center, its assessment of old initiatives and its experimentation with new ones. The Center is developing strategies, in collaboration with other departments and offices on campus that register students, to streamline the process of transfer evaluation and registration, and to further develop the Sophomore Initiative (Appendix 1 Sophomore Roadmap and Milestones). In this initiative, the Advising Center, working in close collaboration with the advising units of departments and other advising entities will focus on students’ early selection of a major. All of these efforts are based on the premise that there are pathways to graduation that will provide benchmarks to students to gauge their rate of progress toward graduation. A key element of this program is the number of interventions provided by the Center at important points in a student’s academic journey (Table 7 Queens College: Pathway to Graduation).

The College implemented a new initiative in January 2006. The Advising Center, working with faculty, the transfer credit evaluation office, the Registrar’s office, the Admissions office and OCT, offered workshops for transfer students, credit evaluation, and advice on the major in conjunction with faculty representatives from larger departments. The presence of faculty enabled students to be accepted into the major and registered for appropriate courses at the same time (Table 8). This initiative was in addition to the regularly offered transfer workshops run exclusively by the Advising Center (Table 9).

Departmental Advising

Departments are constantly working to strengthen their advising programs. Some programs are stronger than others. Departments require full time faculty to be available to advise students at least two hours a week. Students, however, must juggle work and school, and sometimes cannot fit advising hours into their crammed schedules. Departments continue to find ways for students to avail themselves of advising opportunities. Currently, the Political Science department is designing a new Pre-Law advisement system. The department has established an Outcomes Assessment committee to measure student progress in keeping with the mission of the department and the College. In the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education, advisors post hours in the department as well as on the department website. Advisement teams offer information and recruitment sessions throughout the year. The Psychology Department relies on two types of advisement. One is the periodic, but consistent updating of the Psychology Web page to provide all students with updated information about departmental requirements, offerings and opportunities. The department works closely with the Registrar on Pre-Registration procedures for the Fall, Spring and Summer semesters to all majors early opportunities to register for classes. The second component is the flexibility of the advising process. The Chair, Deputy Chair, and assistant Chair are available. In addition students correspond by e-mail stipulating days and times when they are available to meet with faculty. The Student Experience Survey (2004) indicated that 58% of Queens College students were satisfied or more than satisfied with Academic Advising. In essence, the College is in the mode of evaluation and assessment and continues to work with the Advising Center, college departments and all offices engaged in advising to increase, substantially, this percentage, for improved advisement will promote higher retention and graduation rates. Several of the initiatives mentioned in this report were recommendations by the College’s Enrollment Management Committee (2004); the implementation of some of these recommendations speaks to the College’s continuing commitment to improving the quality of undergraduate education.

CUE at Queens College

By furthering collaborations between faculty and staff involved in the units of CUE, the College strengthens and improves undergraduate education. These collaborations cross disciplinary boundaries and foster the integration and cohesion necessary to implement the General Education project at the College. The assessment of CUE’s various parts is fuelled by the current discussions at the University’s CUE Council. Departments and programs responding to the call to assess their practices in the service of students were more often than not concerned about academic support services and the level of student writing. The Office of Academic Support is assessing the performance of ESL students. It is also discussing ways of improving its services to these students. It will explore new ways of addressing this problem by getting the entire CUE community involved. The SEEK Program participates in these discussions and shares information on their best practices. Tables 10 and 11 show ESL transfer students have a 6-year graduate rate slightly higher than students whose primary language is English, while freshmen ESL students have a 3% lower graduation rate. In addition to evaluating interventions in the Summer Immersion Program, the Office of Academic Support plans to pilot a course that integrates reading and writing, content and skills. Tutoring services have been expanded to gateway courses in the sciences, Biology, Physics, and Chemistry. Academic Support provides, in addition to tutoring, workshops, notes and study guides, review sessions, and study strategies in the sciences.

The Office of Academic Support oversees the preparation and testing of the CPE. Faculty are involved in ensuring that the important perspectives and writing abilities tested by the CPE are taught in courses across the curriculum. Yet compliance remains a concern. Faculty reach out to students invited to take the test. The College communicates with students in myriad ways, from advertising in the student newspaper and on the campus’s electronic bulletin boards to repeated mailings in the form of letters followed by reminder postcards and actual telephone calls to high-risk students. In spite of these efforts there still seems to be a gap in our ability to convey to students the seriousness and the crucial nature of this examination, with the result that many students lose testing opportunities. Fortunately, the bulk of our students do take the CPE in a timely manner and, more important, are successful in passing it. The Office of Academic Support offers mini classes and workshops in the summer as well as in the academic year. Students also have access to an online CPE tutorial. The College is exploring ways of getting faculty more directly involved with the CPE in terms of test preparation as well as increasing the number of students who take the test and succeed.

The Writing across the Curriculum Program, has existed at the college for a number of years. This year it is involved in assessment of its success, bringing together the faculty and CUNY writing fellows in an effort to engage the theory and practice of student writing across the curriculum and in the disciplines. This semester, out of an initial workshop on student writing a number of faculty fellows will be selected to analyze student writing and develop material aids to teaching; they will explore the kind of writing required in each discipline. This WAC/WIC project will join faculty development and assessment and address, in a tangible way, the methodology of WAC on the campus. Anthropology has found that the completion of one of their W courses is an ″excellent predictor″ of success in passing the CPE.

FYI, a key constituent of CUE, plays an important role in the advising and retention of first semester students (Table 12). Students’ engagement in community fosters intellectual collaborations and support; they are prepared to venture into the more challenging fields that the sophomore year provides. All students are not part of the FYI experience, and even FYI students are challenged by the second year. The College, extremely conscious of this reality, focuses considerable effort on its ″Sophomore Year Initiative″ described earlier. This initiative, spearheaded by the Advising Center, attempts to guide students towards the rapid completion of their course of study.

Under its umbrella, the several programs of CUE are consciously working to address specific areas of undergraduate development in order to ensure that students are given the necessary tools to prepare them to succeed in the world of the Academy.

Departmental Collaborations

Departments and Programs across the campus are collaborating to create courses to meet the needs of students and the society in which they exist. Following is a small sample of joint ventures: the Comparative Literature department, like many others, has been participating in the development of the new General Education curriculum and is working with other departments to create synthesis courses; the Accounting department is working closely with the BBA program to establish a new BBA Accounting major; the Anthropology department regularly participates in the FYI program offering three to five sections each semester; the Art department works with Education in the major in Art Education and the MS in Education soliciting advice in creating courses that would appeal to its majors. In addition, Academic Advising, Student Life and Student Development collaborate on a comprehensive Freshman Orientation program that includes advising and registration, small group engagement with student leaders, and a parallel program for parents.

Suggestions for College Action

· Disseminate special entry requirements for departments with high demand majors, for example the BBA and the major in Communication Sciences and Disorders that have special entry requirements; students would apply directly to these programs and be informed early if they are accepted.

· Establish procedures to allow high demand academic departments to assume greater partnership roles with Admissions to evaluate and place transfer students in appropriate upper division classes.

· Plan a one or two year class schedule to facilitate long term course planning by students to the extent possible given the large number of sections taught by adjuncts.

· Work with relevant departments and the Office of Academic Support to raise the level of effectiveness of the tutoring in the sciences and the ESL programs.

· Extend to transfer students the college’s CLIQ program, introduces new students to life beyond the classroom, and “fosters intellectual, social and political growth by having students participate in campus events.

· Make more college activities available during the free hour.

· Plan a one stop service; consider on line requests for the Registrar, Bursar, Financial Aid and the Advising Center.

· At Queens College, the ESL program is of limited significance, needed by a relatively small number of students. Other delivery models might be considered to serve our ESL population.

Channels of Communication

The College takes its communications to students new and old very seriously, and is working to ensure that all messages transmitted in all forms are consistent, transparent and helpful. To this end, the College will focus on improving the existing technology so that there is a virtual space where essential academic information is posted; at the same time students can be made aware of extracurricular activities. OCT is working with CUNY CIS to make BlackBoard more accessible to students and reduce problems with registration on the CUNY portal. OCT is communicating through the Student Union to the Student Government, clubs and at orientations to ensure that students receive their accounts before classes begin. Students and faculty should be encouraged to use available technology to join in the current discussion concerning the state of the College and their place in it. Students should have access to 24 hour electronic help. Departments and programs should be given the technological support they need to be able to function efficiently. The Registrar’s Office, as the guardian of student records, is central to the College’s intent to communicate clearly and consistently with students. Student satisfaction rests upon the notion that requests are performed in a timely fashion and that students feel that their concerns and particular tribulations are important to the College and will be resolved if at all possible. The success or failure of students’ interactions with the Registrar’s Office is a key ingredient in determining whether or not students are happy with the institution. The Registrar’s Office, therefore, is constantly engaging in technological advances that will enhance the way students are serviced. The college is currently deploying Degree Works, an advisement tool that will help advisors help students meet their educational goals.

Suggestions for Central Office Action

· Allocate cluster lines for academic advisement.

· In view of the time demands on students and the definition of full-time as 12 credits per semester, consider graduation measures other than 4-year, such as 6-year.

· Focus meetings of the OAA on specific academic goals, limiting length and number.

· Continue to develop TIPPS, expanding interactivity and usability, and consider extending to colleges beyond CUNY.

· Evaluate the Writing across the Curriculum Program

· Work with high schools to develop competencies in mathematics and in analytical/logical reasoning.

· In view of the mission of the senior colleges, provide for research, administration, and advising in the Instructional Staff Model.

· Include quantitative definitions of other faculty work, such as advising, in the contractual agreement.

Conclusion

The College has reached out to all members of its community to assess current practices and to look seriously at ways in which we serve our students. As the Campaign for Success proceeds, we hope that this process will bring together new collaborations within the College and between the College and the Central Office that will result in the exchange of new ideas, the development of creative initiatives, and the implementation of projects that will contribute to our students’ quest for academic excellence throughout their undergraduate journeys.

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