Overview

Southwest Texas Junior College (SWTJC) serves thousands of students on multiple campuses across 11 counties totaling over 16,000 square miles. SWTJC demonstrates a deep commitment to providing higher education to a predominantly immigrant community, locating campuses in sparsely populated towns on the Mexican border and busing students in or housing them on campus because they might not otherwise be able to attend. This commitment is reflected in success on campus—graduation rates have steadily increased in recent years, and there are no graduation gaps between students of different races and ethnicities. In an area that has been losing jobs steadily, recent graduates from SWTJC have strong job placement rates and, on average, earn higher incomes than others in the region. The college works to build and expand programs that provide students with skills for regional jobs, such as welding training needed for a newly discovered oil well or the two years of teacher training needed for transfer to the nearby Sul Ross Rio Grande College for eventual employment in the K-12 system.

Building a culture of evidence

Southwest Texas Junior College received a blaring wakeup call when accreditors visited eight years ago. You may be doing good things for students, administrators were told, but you have no way to prove it. As Blaine Bennett, dean of institutional advancement and technology, explained, “We did not have a culture of evidence. We had a culture of ‘that sounds right.’”

The community college, aided by coaching from the Achieving the Dream organization, responded apace, and has begun to remake itself into an institution that uses data to identify its problems, collaborates in the hunt for solutions, and measures and documents what’s working and what’s not.

Now that it tracks its 6,000 students—more than four-fifths of whom are Hispanic—SWTJC is in a much better position to propel them forward. For example, administrators use data to isolate small groups of students who might be helped by a particular intervention. They were able to see that the more time elapsed before students took college math, the less likely they were to ever pass it. In response, various developmental math courses were paired as single semester-long offerings, to see if the intensified instruction would improve outcomes. For students in the higher tiers of remediation, it did—their chances of getting to college math doubled—so the practice continues for that level of students.

Perhaps most powerfully, professors are looking to course-level data to inform their instruction. An assessment system called Prosper enables them to immediately analyze test results by student and by concept. Rebecca Andrews, a developmental reading and writing instructor, does not even plan her classes until she learns from pretest results which of her courses’ learning outcomes her students need the most help on: finding the main idea of a passage, say, or figuring out vocabulary in context.

Through item analysis of exams, Mario Cardenas learned that his history students did better when concepts were taught through video clips. Computer science professors finally saw how much students struggled with vocabulary, which had always just been one element of other assignments, masked by the overall scores. They responded by increasing the amount of time they spent on vocabulary instruction and trying different teaching strategies. “I don’t think we would have seen it if we hadn’t stepped back and looked at the data,” said instructor Manuel Alejandro.

Expanding opportunity

Everything, they say, is big in Texas. So is SWTJC’s service area: more than 16,000 square miles across 11 counties. It is a rural area with few academic opportunities, so the community college continuously works to expand its reach: it has increased enrollment nearly 70 percent over a decade. Since the first campus opened in the town of Uvalde in 1946, five more outposts have opened, including two on the Mexican border.

Most community colleges don’t offer dormitories, but in an area nearly devoid of public transportation, the Uvalde campus has dorms that house nearly 300 students. At most of its campuses, the college runs vans to shuttle students to and from school.

SWTJC does not wait until students are college-age to reach out to them. They bring high school students for extended stays on campus through Upward Bound, whose local program gets minority students to attend college at unusually high rates. By installing a representative from SWTJC full-time in an office at Uvalde High School, and by bringing thousands of teenagers from a range of high schools to on-campus College Days, prospective students learn about and prepare for the opportunities a SWTJC degree can open to them that their high school diploma would not.

As well, 1,600 students from 21 high schools take dual-credit courses from SWTJC every semester. A coordinator regularly visits the high schools to observe the classes and work with teachers. Just like professors on campus, teachers learn how to use the Prosper system to analyze assessment results and improve their instruction.

A new toolbox

At SWTJC, as is common at community colleges, many students fall short in critical reading skills. In order to improve, some SWTJC professors, particularly those who teach developmental, student success, and key introductory courses, have undergone intensive training in instructional strategies to improve reading comprehension and student engagement overall.

The training is provided through Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, an instructional system that is expanding from its roots in the K-12 system to just 14 colleges nationally. One element involves teaching instructors to pass on reading and study skills to their students, no matter the subject matter at hand. Veronica Pineda Gracia, a 33-year-old criminal justice student, has learned from professors how to take organized notes in class, how to rewrite those onto index cards to reinforce what she’s learned, and how to highlight her textbooks more strategically.

Instructors have learned, too, how abandoning the lecture in favor of more engaging teaching methods can benefit students. Connie Buchanan, the business department chair, teaches an accounting course that has historically been a trouble spot for students. “The old way,” she said, “I would stand there and lecture, they would ask questions, and I would assume that I had given them all the knowledge they needed to walk out the door and be a CEO somewhere.” Now, she makes sure she delivers each topic in several ways, so that the material sinks in for any type of learner. She uses visuals, assigns collaborative work, and makes sure each class period involves a hands-on activity.

The completion rate in Buchanan’s class has improved 63 percent—a success story she’s sure to share with colleagues. “If you sit with a bunch of faculty members now, the conversation is so different than what it was five years ago,” Buchanan said. “You used to talk about what happened over the weekend. Now it’s, ‘You know what I tried in my class that worked?’” SWTJC educators have always been dedicated to reaching the greatest number of students possible. With this kind of collaboration and attention to outcomes, their ability to see students actually succeed is only improving.