Past project — Conducted May 1, 2017 - November 19, 2019
The journey to college completion is a challenging one for many students, but is even more so for Native American students: Twenty percent of all first-time, full-time community college students earn a degree within three years, compared to only 14% of Native American students.*
Yet while community colleges often pioneer new strategies to address alarming statistics, frequently they do not have sufficient access to tools, resources, and institutional capacity to evaluate the initiatives and measure the progress toward key goals, especially toward student success. This is also true for tribal community colleges.
To address this concern, The Tribal Student Success and Completion Project will assist tribal community colleges in using data to promote improvements in student learning, student success, and completion. This will be accomplished by the tribal community colleges administering the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE), the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), and the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (CCFSSE). The colleges will also be encouraged to participate in a data workshop and convening. The purpose of the data workshop is to provide an overview of the SENSE, CCSSE, and CCFSSE data for the colleges. Workshop facilitators will guide the tribal community colleges to identify a student engagement benchmark to further review and strengthen, and will initiate important discussions crucial to increasing student success and completion rates.
The project will also include focus groups that will be conducted in fall 2018 with students and administrators at three of the participating colleges. In February 2019, the Center is releasing an executive summary report on the survey data collected, and the report will include quotes from the focus groups. The supporting report materials will include focus group video clips on the Center’s YouTube channel, which can be used to spur internal conversations about the tribal colleges’ work with their students. As an additional resource for all of the tribal colleges, the focus group protocols will be available on the Center’s website.
*U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), Spring 2015, Graduation Rates component. See Digest of Education Statistics 2015, table 326.20.