Ivy Tech Community College is struggling with completion rates statewide and locally, but local officials say the system has initiatives in place to improve those figures in the near future.
According to the Indianapolis Star, only 4 percent of full-time Ivy Tech students graduate in two years. Within six years, 18.8 percent of first-time degree-seeking students receive a degree, 22.1 percent transfer without a degree and 9.6 percent remain enrolled.
“We’re nowhere close to where we need to be with completion,” Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education Teresa Lubbers told the Star.
Those numbers are fairly similar locally — 19 percent, 20.7 percent and 10.9 percent, respectively — said East Central Chancellor Andrew Bowne.
Because Ivy Tech hosts programs at specific regional campuses, Marion numbers are not tallied, said Marion Dean and Regional Vice Chancellor John Lightle.
Bowne said because those numbers are collected over six years, they include only students who started at Ivy Tech in 2006. During that time the college has added new programs to help improve rates, including some recently.
“We want to help (students) make a more direct path to where they want to go, whether that’s employment or transferring to a four-year school,” he said. “You start to see the improvement in retention. … The data will bear itself out in subsequent years.”
Last fall, the college hired “nine academic advisors in the East Central Region as part of a statewide strategy to hire 52 academic advisors across our 14 regions,” Bowne said, at a cost of $507,000 annually.
Lightle said that move will place an academic advisor with each student until he or she has completed 15 hours of college credit, as opposed to only in their initial course planning.
“Once they’ve declared (a major) … we make that handoff to a faculty advisor. We’ve got two people working with that student,” Bowne said. “Research shows academic advising … has a significant bearing on success.”
Bowne said financial aid advisors are also critical to student retention, and each campus has a dedicated department.
Lightle said dropping out of Ivy Tech remains less destructive monetarily to a student than leaving a university early.
Once students are enrolled, Bowne said, the college is working to help them stay that way by offering aggressive remediation programs.
Lightle said Marion offers labs with convenient access to help in subjects from math to writing to chemistry to accounting, both in person and online.
“Whether they’re in an English class or not, (students) can go and sit down with tutors who can help them with their writing, often faculty members who volunteer their time,” Bowne said.
The region has also used a $1 million grant from the George and Francis Ball Foundation to improve instruction from its adjunct faculty in “a very concerted effort … so that the experience is pretty consistent” regardless of the status of the teacher in a class.
The region is also piloting a program that enables students to take both a prerequisite course and the following course — for example, remedial math and Algebra — that Bowne said has been successful, with a 61.5 percent success rate versus 26 percent in a traditional model, and “will impact future completion rates.”
“Taking (both classes) in the same semester, (students are) getting just-in-time remediation,” he said. “Students don’t come to us knowing nothing. They come missing this piece and that piece. You time it so the developmental math class gives knowledge and skills students need to be successful in the (advanced) course.”
The college is also following up with students who have dropped out to “give them some encouragement to come back and see what we can do to make it easier,” Lightle said.
Bowne said together those programs can improve local students’ chance of completion.
“We recognize that there are opportunities for improvement that the community deserves,” he said, “and we’re going to do everything we can to help them move successfully through Ivy Tech and get them.”