took “nearly a decade for the college’s leadership to change the
mindset of faculty and staff from a primary focus on access
and enrollments to a concern for student retention and degree
completion as well.”
Shifting the mindset among student affairs staff is just as
important to providing effective services. Years ago, Felix
Galaviz and Patricia McGrath of Chabot College in Hayward,
Calif., reviewed more than 2,000 student transcripts to
explore why Latino students were dropping out of California’s
universities at such alarming rates. They discovered that
three misinformed choices drove the dropout problem: first,
struggling Latino students were actually avoiding academic
counseling; second, they were failing to enroll in college-level
writing courses; and third, most students failed to easily accul-
turate to college because they were the first in their families to
attend postsecondary institutions.
In 1981, Galaviz and McGrath founded a program to attack
head-on the Latino dropout rate in California. Puente provides community college students with a counselor, an instructor, a developmental writing course followed by a transfer-level
English composition course, year-long academic counseling,
and intensive professional mentoring and leadership training
by members of the professional community. Today, Puente
operates at 59 community college sites in California, and the
Puente model has been replicated in various forms in many
other states. One has only to read Excelencia’s recent 2009
report, titled “What Works for Latino Students in Higher
Education,” to see a wide range of targeted services that
increase the academic achievement of Latinos, America’s
fastest growing undergraduate population.
From Joe College to the Students of the
21st Century
The traditional passive approach to student support services
that some colleges still maintain made more sense in an era
when college students were essentially a captive audience of
young privileged males who went to school full time for four
years and resided on campus in college dormitories. Charles
William Eliott, who served as Harvard University’s president
from 1869 to 1909, claimed that Harvard students “live in a
bracing atmosphere; books engage him; good companionships
invite him; good occupations defend him; helpful friends
surround him; pure ideals are held up before them; ambition
spurs him; honor beckons him.” Le Corbusier, the famous
Swiss architect, had a less elitist vision of American higher
education. Yet he, too, was so taken by residential colleges
that he decreed the “American university is a world in itself, a
temporary paradise, a gracious stage of life.”
Corbusier’s temporary paradise has undergone profound
change. Around 1980, women became the majority of
students in higher education, and today community colleges
enroll almost half of U.S. undergraduates. More than a third
of community college students are minority students, and
nearly three-fourths of all undergraduates enrolled on a full-
time basis now work while in school.
One in six full-time students actually works full time
while in college—as does more than 40 percent of part-time
students. Today, only about one in four students fits the
traditional model of full-time students at four-year residen-
tial colleges. In short, college today for most students is not
Corbusier’s gracious stage of life but rather a pressure-packed
juggling of work, child care, paying the rent, late-night
cram sessions, and campus commutes—with some fun and
intellectual stimulation thrown in. In the Foothill-De Anza
Community College District where I served as chancellor,
just a third of students were English-only speakers. To assist
students who did not speak English as their first language, we
identified experts in over 50 languages, including Urdu.
