Overview

Serving students on three campuses in an area ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College (MGCCC) provides exceptional educational opportunities for students to help rebuild the region, and more. MGCCC achieves high levels of graduation and transfer—including for its sizeable African American student population—through unusually strong counseling and tutoring programs that provide tailored services to students ranging from recent high school graduates to more than 1,000 military veterans and their families from a nearby base. It works hard to link graduates to good job opportunities and four-year colleges. Employers from Chevron to Ingalls Shipbuilding to the regional power company provide equipment and workplace internships and in turn rely on MGCCC to graduate students well-prepared for the first day on the job.  The results are clear: recent graduates from MGCCC earn more than the average entry-level worker in the region. Four-year colleges too rely on MGCCC to prepare students to succeed, and MGCCC transfer students have higher GPAs than other students at Mississippi’s four-year institutions.

A meaningful link with employers

Tommie Broome threw her head back, her face in her hands, and quivered and murmured with joy. Broome, a petrochemical refining instructor at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, had just learned that one of her former students had been offered a full-time job at Chevron. The intensity of her reaction reflects the depth of the college’s commitment to help students succeed, particularly by linking them to jobs in the Gulfport-Biloxi area. While it was the graduate’s victory, for sure, it was also very much Broome’s—because at MGCCC, relationships between students and faculty and between faculty and employers are unusually close.

The college’s former president, William Lott, used to say, “We are the community’s college.  As the community grows, the college responds.” MGCCC serves more than 10,000 credit students from a four-county district that is very rural in some areas and highly developed in others.  The resulting broad range of industry partners—such as Ingalls Shipbuilding, Mississippi Power Company, and Chevron Pascagoula—connects with the college in various ways. Businesses may contribute funds toward program development,  supplement instruction with on-site activities, or serve in an advisory capacity to guide an academic program’s continual improvement.    

Those relationships enable MGCCC to respond to industry needs and serve students better, even if that means backtracking. For example, when pipefitting graduates were no longer securing enough jobs to justify the program’s existence, it was closed. After some time, industry officials made the case for renewing pipefitting training. When an analysis showed a viable labor market, MGCCC reinstated the course offering.

When Singing River Electric Power Association wanted to create the first apprentice lineman school in the country, MGCCC assisted in writing the syllabus and helped the Association get the program approved at the state level, said Singing River CEO Lee Hedegaard. He noted that nearly every student in the program gets hired as a lineman—a job that pays at least $50,000 a year, and sometimes twice that.

John Shows, the dean of career and technical education, explains how the college attempts to meet national skill standards, not just those of regional employers. A graduate, Shows said, “may not want to leave Southern Mississippi, but we want to give him that choice—whether in Gulfport, Norfolk, or China.

“Commit to Complete”

On the lapels of employees throughout MGCCC, badges saying “Commit to Complete” are hard to miss. More than a slogan, these badges reflect a shared sense of purpose that is getting results: The percentage of students at the college who graduate or transfer within three years is 58 percent, well above the national average of 39 percent, and the success rate for underrepresented minorities is particularly strong.

Faculty members at MGCCC feel very invested in their students’ future, both inside and outside the classroom. Eighty percent of faculty are full-time employees—a large share for community colleges. Those teachers each serve as an academic advisor to about 25 to 30 students, collaborating with the counseling division to tailor services to students’ specific academic and personal needs and serving as the conduit to jobs.

Taryn Sammons came to MGCCC after being laid off from a full-time job at a law firm. She had an associate’s degree in elementary education and no clear idea of where she was headed next. She changed her major twice and finally found her future in hospitality management, where instructor Linda Craft taught her not just course material, but the art of networking. Craft encouraged Sammons to join industry associations and attend events to connect with people who could eventually hire her. It paid off: Sammons now works as the media relations manager for the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau. She credits Craft for her success as a student and as an employee. “She showed me what could be possible, and she really cared about me,” Sammons said.

From Craft’s perspective, supporting students is what her job is about. “We’re teaching what’s needed to be taught to enable our students to get jobs,” she said. “This degree won’t do anything for you unless you want it to. You’ve got to get beyond the books, and you’ve got to network. I tell my students, ‘Work hard, because one of the people in this class will be your boss someday.’”

James Gilbert, a math professor, is confident that the school does a good job “incubating” students for their future careers. “I spend as much time teaching them about time management and life skills as I do the course material I am teaching,” he said.

Wiley Clark, a guidance counselor at the college, believes that supporting students is not the purview of administrators, faculty, or any single group. For him, “a little something can make a big difference in people’s lives. It’s like the NFL, where there are a lot of good teams, but only a few are great. This school has heart.  It’s that little extra that you see in everybody.”

Tutoring for success

At MGCCC, students are treated as individuals, with their needs met accordingly. Nowhere is that more in evidence than at the college’s Learning Labs, the almost larger-than-life facilities that are magic to the 71 percent of students who use them for personalized tutorial instruction.

The labs on each of the college’s three main campuses are staffed by four or five full-time faculty, who keep long hours throughout the week so that students can get help when they need it, in science, English, and more. Faculty who work in the Learning Labs are not course professors; they are hired through a different process from traditional faculty, and must possess exceptional cross-disciplinary skills.

Janet Moody, dean of instruction at the college’s Perkinston campus, has high praise for the labs: “I would place Learning Lab right there with child care as the most important support service we offer our students,” Moody said. Her sentiment is echoed throughout the college, and the data bear out why: the average grade point average for students who used the Learning Labs for at least five hours during the fall 2010 semester was 2.8, compared to 2.5 for other students. At the Learning Labs, and throughout MGCCC, “Commit to Complete” truly comes to life.