Overview

The first time Mauricio Isaac walked to Santa Barbara City College for a visit, he turned around before climbing the hill to campus. The second time, he made it up the hill—then turned around. Isaac, an eighth-grade dropout and recent prison inmate who has no family members with college experience, had never seen himself as a student. He looked up at the college and said to himself, “I don’t belong there.”

But the leaders, faculty, and staff at the Aspen Prize-winning college believed strongly that he did. SBCC benefits from a beautiful ocean-view campus, a faculty packed with talented professors, and proximity to a highly selective state university. Those assets are never used as an excuse to coast; rather, they are trained on one of the most vital missions of a community college: to boost the chances of the neediest students.

Isaac was being recruited through a program that prepares released inmates for SBCC. Noel Gomez, an adviser with the program, went to meet Isaac after he missed those appointments. He introduced Isaac to peers who had led similarly challenging lives and now were succeeding in college. “They looked like me,” says Isaac, 25. “They had tattoos on their head. And they looked happy, while I was miserable.”

High-Expectations, Strong Results

The college provides a rich array of resources—and high expectations—for traditionally underserved students, including a large and growing population of Hispanics, who graduate and transfer at unusually high rates. Countless students who say they were given up on elsewhere are inspired, tutored, and pushed to succeed by Santa Barbara faculty. (Isaac assumed he’d get an automotive certificate, until professors and counselors convinced him to pursue engineering. “To be a mechanic,” they told him, “you’re probably wasting your potential.”) A special program is designed to not just get minorities interested in science and math, but to move them through demanding courses so they are ready to transfer. Motivation begins before students even arrive on campus, thanks to an unusually strong partnership with the local high schools.                                                 
Fifty-seven percent of full-time students at SBCC transfer to four-year colleges within six years, and over half of those go on to get a bachelor’s degree. The Transfer Center, which Isaac visits often, takes students on college tours and helps them plan course schedules keyed to transfer. Articulation agreements with 76 colleges both inside and outside of California ensure that their credits will be accepted; several of those schools guarantee admission if students meet academic requirements.

"Express to Success"

The campus is saturated with academic support, including a writing center staffed by trained professionals and proven to improve course completion, and peer tutors embedded in hundreds of class sections. Despite budget cuts, the college expanded its tutoring staff and the office dedicated to transfer arrangements.  Moreover, SBCC courses are built with an eye to the academic standards of four-year schools. “Our faculty puts a tremendous emphasis on making sure students do a lot of writing and critical thinking,” says executive vice president Jack Friedlander. “Our students come back and tell us they were really well-prepared, that our courses were as challenging or more challenging than those at their transfer institutions—even Berkeley and UCLA.”

Because students can’t make it to a four-year school if they are stuck endlessly in remedial classes, SBCC faculty designed the Express to Success program, which moves students in small learning communities through two remedial courses in the time typically devoted to one. It’s a counterintuitive effort --  challenging students who are already behind to do even more -- which reflects the innovative thinking prevalent at SBCC. New hires are chosen in part for their willingness to lead and innovate; faculty are tasked with solving problems in creative ways and given the resources to do so. At other institutions, says president Lori Gaskin, “change has been looked at with a huge amount of trepidation. Here, there is a pervasive feeling of being open to taking risks and experimenting.”         

A Great Success                                      

The risk has paid off, with remedial course completion rates of Express to Success students exceeding those of their peers by 30 percentage points. One beneficiary is Isaac, who managed to move from the lowest level of remedial math to pre-calculus in two semesters.

Isaac is now a 4.0 student, writing and math tutor, and mentor for minority students interested in science and math. He is studying this semester in Rome and plans to transfer to University of California, Irvine. He never doubts anymore that college is for him, and knows that because of SBCC’s help he will succeed. “I have goals and I want to accomplish them,” he says. “I always have someone checking on me everywhere I go.”