Planting the Seeds: A Community College Reaches out to Middle Schools

sem_logo-2007.gif Enrollment management efforts should include short-term and long-range strategies. Those of us who spend our days engaged in various aspects of enrollment management can appreciate the balancing act this implies.

Short-term strategies can include developing programs for immediate job skill training related to local business and industry workforce needs, creating a new tuition payment plan that helps low-income students face the mounting costs of education or developing a calling campaign. Community colleges, in fact, have a fairly good ability to nimbly respond to immediate opportunities to strengthen enrollment, especially if they can get their instructional leaders on board.

Long-range strategies may focus on such things as transforming an institutional image or brand, creating distance degrees, adding a new off-site center or reconfiguring student services. Community colleges, like baccalaureate institutions, face the challenges of marshaling the institutional resources to design and implement an intensive strategy that will not necessarily see an immediate, or even a directly traceable, effect.

Reaching out to middle school students, generally in grades six to eight, is clearly a long-term investment given that the students may not be of college age for another four to six years. But for community colleges it is an effort that speaks to one of our missions—assuring access to higher education.

There are several reasons that reaching out to these students is an appropriate strategy. First, within our public schools, a growing proportion of students are learners who have been traditionally underrepresented in higher education, such as low-income students and persons of color (1). Reaching out to them early builds the expectation that higher education is in their future and that there are financial options available to them.

Second, high school drop-out rates continue to be higher than any of us desire, particularly for African American, Hispanic and Native American students (2). If we focus only on high school juniors and seniors in our traditional-age outreach programs, we have missed the opportunity to get the message out to those who may need the message most.

Third, our need for college-ready students is acute amid the growing concern over the lack of math and science preparation and stagnating entrance scores (3). Middle school outreach provides the message to students about the importance of their progress and the strategic selection of their high school courses.

Fourth, the contact with middle school students does not stop at the student. These students have families, and the information and connectivity extends to parents and siblings who themselves may not be as informed as they could be about options for their child, or for themselves.

Fifth, middle school outreach programs build community relations. Too often we are scrambling to gain the attention of the high school counseling or career advising office, jockeying for the opportunity to visit or to participate in fairs, or to arrange visits by their seniors to our campus. Although many of us have good relations with our high schools, it is possible that our work with them is seen as ultimately self-serving—we want their students! Middle school personnel and parents of middle school students, on the other hand, are not inundated by college representatives and see our work with them as supporting their mission to enable students to complete successfully their secondary education.

Developing the rationale, based on the issues outlined above, is not very difficult (4). The difficulties lie chiefly in integrating this outreach into an already full effort and finding the campus talent to deliver it. For the past several years, Everett Community College (EvCC) has been working its way through this and has developed a variety of programs. The following examples may be adapted to a variety of college communities.

Our primary program, “I Am Going to College,” was spawned through collaboration with the Northwest Education Loan Association (NELA). For several years NELA has shared a motivational curriculum with middle schools with a high proportion of students characterized as “at risk.” The curriculum provides modules focused on gaining information about college. Our college’s role is to develop an on-campus event for the students that includes informational games such as the Money Game (5), sample college classes, a tour and a “graduation” with a certificate of “College Knowledge”—all with the goal of motivating students to see college in their future, to be aware that there are financial aid options and to appreciate the importance of staying in school and taking substantive classes. The students leave with a backpack full of information to carry home.

Another investment is the Increasing Diversity in Engineering and Science (IDEAS) Summer Science Camp. In collaboration with other community organizations, and funded chiefly by Boeing, the camp is aimed at females and students of color in middle schools, although it is open to all comers. The camp, which is not residential, features a week of day-long activities aimed at having fun with science through on-campus experiments as well as field trips. The constant message focuses on using their middle and high school experiences to prepare for college, and to be aware of financial support options. Parents receive mailings, attend an orientation and are invited to graduation. Follow-up mailings enable us to stay in touch.

Our outreach efforts also include visits to the middle schools themselves. Increasingly, middle schools appear to be providing fairs and other activities aimed at career exploration with the intention of improving their guidance of students. EvCC has developed a “menu” of presentations that middle school personnel can request. These presentations are designed to be interactive and can be used in a large assembly or in a classroom, with topics ranging from “Math in the Real World” to “Who Needs College?” to “Training for the Skilled Trades.” We have also taken our College Knowledge presentation to the middle school parent-teacher associations.

Within the community we have partnered with the YMCA’s Minority Achievers Program (MAP), which includes middle and high school students. Services are aimed at students who come from low-income and immigrant families and students who are traditionally underserved in education, and the program provides homework activities, career exploration and other support services that build school persistence. Many of the students also participate in “I Am Going to College” and the IDEAS Summer Science Camp.

Do these efforts result in tangible enrollment gains? In some respects, it is too soon to tell because most of the students we started connecting with several years ago are still underage. Anecdotally, however, we have some success stories. For example, an East Indian student who attended summer science camp several years ago subsequently enrolled in our Running Start high school dual enrollment program. A young woman who had participated in MAP and summer science camp enrolled last year with a scholarship. Recently a science camp student from the first year, whose family emigrated from the Middle East, came in to register as a freshman. Obviously we can and will track the science camp students because their participation in the camp required registration. Our large group events both on campus and in the middle schools do not require registration owing to records confidentiality restrictions on the part of the middle schools, thus inhibiting our ability to track the students.

So why am I suggesting that middle school outreach can or should be a part of a long-range enrollment management strategy? My rationale is that it is a part of our mission of assuring access to higher education. It provides the right message at the right time to young people and their families who may not get the message in other ways. Furthermore, middle school outreach affects more than the young students themselves. For many of them, their parents become aware of the community college as a place to improve their English and to develop new career skills. We also know from experience that these students have siblings, some of whom are in the traditional age range for college and others who will follow them into EvCC outreach activities next year. We hear “My brother came to ‘I Am Going to College’ last year and I couldn’t wait until I was able to come this year!” We are building a familial loyalty to our college. We are also aware of how our collaboration with middle schools enhances our general relations with our school districts. We are seen as stronger partners and not as another college anxious to take seniors out of class to tell them about our school.

Enrollment management is not only about how many full-time equivalents are garnered for the next fall term from a particular effort. It is also about strengthening your position and your partnerships, about enhancing image and about diversifying your contacts with prospective students and their networks. In the case of middle school outreach, it is about fertilizing the ground and planting the seeds for future yield.

(1) “Forty-two percent of public school students were considered to be part of a racial or ethnic minority group in 2005, an increase from 22 percent of students in 1972.” From Planty M., S. Provasnik, W. Hussar, et al. 2007. The condition of education, 2007 (NCES 2007-064), p. 26. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

(2) Snyder, T.D. et al. (2006). Public high school graduates and dropouts, by race/ethnicity and state or jurisdiction: 2001–02 and 2003–04. Table 102 from Digest of education statistics: 2006. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Available at: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d06/tables/dt06_102.asp?referrer=list. [September 24, 2007] See also http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16. [September 24, 2007].

(3) Glenn, J. (2000). Before it’s too late. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching. Also found at: http://www.ed.gov/inits/Math/glenn/report.pdf [September 24, 2007]. For an example of a state initiative, see http://stem.ohio.gov. {September 24, 2007].

(4) For a lengthier discussion of these issues, and the research that identifies the challenges, see Vargas, J. H. 2004. College knowledge: Addressing information barriers to college. Boston: The Education Resources Institute. Available at: http://www.teri.org/pdf/research-studies/CollegeKnowledge.pdf. [September 24, 2007].

(5) The Money Game is a group activity where participants are split into teams and given pseudo-dollar bills in an amount commensurate with the average monthly earnings of persons with a certain levels of educational attainment. In round-robin fashion, each team then identifies how much they are able to spend on housing, utilities, food, transportation, clothing, entertainment, etc. The lesson quickly learned from the game is that those with lower educational attainment may not have as much money to spend.

By Christine Kerlin

Christine Kerlin is vice president for enrollment management and executive director of the University Center of North Puget Sound at Everett Community College, Everett, Washington. Previously she served as director of admissions and records at Central Oregon Community College and as director of admissions at The Evergreen State College (Washington). A frequent presenter at American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ (AACRAO) and Pacific Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ conferences, Dr. Kerlin has also authored chapters in several recent AACRAO publications. Dr. Kerlin holds an Ed.D. in community college leadership from Oregon State University.

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Posted on July 12, 2007