A Message from the Provost: Vision and Priorities for the 2023/24 Academic Year

A lot of work goes into preparing for the start of a new term, and I appreciate all that our faculty and staff are doing to ensure that our students have a positive and warm welcome as they step into our classrooms beginning this week.

Last week I had the pleasure of welcoming faculty at the Districtwide kick-off of Faculty Development Week. My message highlights the importance of focusing our strategies and efforts to improve student outcomes for the purposes of achievement and equity. You can read my full comments below, where I lay out a vision of priorities and work to come.

The following remarks were delivered by Provost Mark Potter at the City Colleges of Chicago
Faculty Development Week kickoff on August 14, 2023.
Welcome to the 2023/24 academic year! I have now had the pleasure of welcoming faculty at City
Colleges back from summer break seven times, and as always, I am pleased to use this as a
reflective moment on where we have been and where we are going as an institution.

I begin the new academic year with a sense that our work to improve access and outcomes never ends. Similarly, I enter this coming year with a commitment that is as strong as ever to ensure that
every student has the best possible chance at achieving a high-quality education.

In that vein, this will be a year of celebrating gains and building on momentum while also focusing
on areas where will still need to improve.

Enrollment is one area where we have some positive momentum behind us. Although we still
need to maintain our focused efforts well into the fall semester, we have been tracking toward a
second year of Districtwide enrollment gains. These increases are tracking for nearly all student
pipelines into City Colleges, including new students, stop-ins, early college, and returning students.

We are also trending toward an increase in fall-to-fall retention of students, following upon a four
percentage-point increase in retention from Fall ‘22 to Spring ‘23.

This is the good news – this is the momentum we can build from. But of course we can’t rely on
momentum alone, and we especially have to keep our eyes on retention and do everything we can
to make sure that we are supporting students’ progression through their programs.

But I want to focus my comments this morning on outcomes, because retention is in service of
completion. City Colleges uses a four-year outcomes measure as one of its completion metrics;
this four-year outcomes measure includes all students and tracks whether they complete a
credential or transfer to a bachelor’s granting institution within four years of beginning at City
Colleges. It is thus a broadly inclusive completion metric that tells us more about our outcomes
than the more narrowly-defined traditional “IPEDS” graduation rate that only counts first-time
full-time students.

We have a bold goal for equitable completion that is tied to the four-year outcomes measure
(hereafter OM). By 2032, we aim for an OM rate of 55% not only overall, but 55% universally for
all race and ethnicity groups. Thus this is not just a completion goal; it is an equity goal as we seek
to lift all groups by our efforts and as we eliminate equity gaps.

We have some distance to go still to reach this equitable completion goal, as our rates have been
trending in the mid-thirties. Our data, though, are helping us understanding what will move the
needle.

We know, for example, that the number of credits a student completes in his or her first term
positively correlates with their likelihood of completing or transferring within four years. And yet,
since 2020, both the average number of credits enrolled and the average number of credits
earned in the first term by our students has decreased each year.

We also know that a student’s first-term GPA positively correlates with the likelihood of
completing or transferring within four years, and here too we have seen recent declines in the
average first-term GPA of our students.

And lastly, we know that our students who are enrolled in an AA or AS degree are the ones most
in need of structure and supports. They make up the bulk of our students – approximately 90%
this past year, but their four-year OM rate is only 32.2% compared to higher rates for students in
career associates degree programs like the AAS (62.9%), Advanced Certificate students (60%) and
Basic Certificate students (80%).

We should be asking ourselves why our students in career programs have stronger OM results,
and by a pretty large margin. I believe the answer lies in two sets of key differences that set career
degree programs off from the AA and AS degrees.

1. The first is related to structure. Students in career programs benefit from pathways that
   are generally more structured, and sometimes downright prescriptive. Some of these
   programs are delivered as a cohort model, with students progressing together along a set
   semester-by-semester pathway.
2. Secondly, because career programs are aligned to specific career opportunities, students
   in those programs benefit from knowing what career they are working toward and thus
   have a clearer sense of their goals and purpose attached to their education.

If we are to meet our equitable OM goal of 55% universal completion, we will need to consider
how we can apply some of these career program traits and our lessons learned from students’
experiences in those programs to our AA and AS degree programs.

But there’s more – our students’ post-completion outcomes – career and transfer – matter too.
Our students’ long-term socio-economic well-being depends on their completion of a credential
and on what happens after, in getting a job or in transferring and completing a bachelor’s degree.
So we also need to be paying attention to outcomes after graduation. Here I’ll focus just briefly on
transfer.

Among 14,652 students who began at City Colleges in 2016, only 20% transferred within four
years. 6.6% completed a bachelor’s degree within six years. Those are small percentages
considering that 90% of our students are enrolled in AA and AS degrees that are designed
specifically for transfer. This is a discrepancy that causes me, and should cause all of us,
discomfort.

So here is some of what we are doing to address our areas of need to improve outcomes. We can
do all of the following while also celebrating our recent gains and our momentum.

• We will be rolling out intentional mandatory advising for all students to support specific
  milestones along the student journey, including confirmation of their program of study
  and confirmation of their transfer or career plans.
• We are leveraging analytical tools to build class schedules that will ensure that the classes
  students need to progress in their programs are offered at the colleges where they’re
  enrolled, in the modalities, and at the times students need them.
• We are monitoring our transfer outcomes to our top transfer destinations to ensure that
  our students are having a seamless transfer experience and not losing credits along the
  way to their bachelor’s degree.
  • This will require us to examine and update our AA and AS pathways to ensure
    that they align with bachelor’s degree requirements at our top transfer
    destinations. We should not be advising students in pathways that are designed
    for transfer to take courses that, in the end, won’t transfer for bachelor’s degreecompletion credit.
• We are enhancing career exploration support early in our students’ journeys. This
  summer we worked with a partner on a current-state assessment of career exploration
  supports, and we will now be determining how we can best scale and embed not only
  career exploration, but resources as well to help students connect their interests to the
  relevant City Colleges programs and pathways – and to connect their academic
  experiences to their career goals.
• We are operationalizing an academic excellence framework that builds from collaborative
  work with FC4 undertaken recently to identify desired attributes and competencies in our
  faculty. Through this framework we are identifying and implementing strategies to align
  our most important investment – our human capital – with those attributes and
  competencies at all stages of the faculty lifecycle, from recruitment, hiring, and
  onboarding, through tenure, and then as senior faculty.

Our plate is full, but it is critical that as we continue to improve on our student retention rates, our
students are persisting toward outcomes that will benefit them well beyond their time at City
Colleges. The focus has to be on outcomes, and the priorities I just outlined will reinforce that
focus. There’s a simple theory of change that informs this thinking: When students have a clear
sense of purpose and can see a clear through-line to the end – their pathway to a job or transfer –
and when students have experiences that reinforce their sense of belonging and confidence that
they can get to that goal, they will by very likely to succeed, and together, we’ll be making a
greater difference for a greater number of students.