Bakersfield College

Challenge

Create seamless transitions for students transferring from community college

Results

• Increased number of degrees awarded
• Increased number of students who successfully transfer
• Improved the student experience by listening to students and studying the data

Summary

As an educational institution, we really are focusing on some of our rural initiatives to really create college going culture for our rural students. We worked with our local partner to create what we call Finish in Four. We created seamless transitions for our students that would take courses at the community college, transfer to our local university seamlessly, and not have to repeat courses.

Ellucian Banner® was used as what I call our data repository. So, if we needed to identify or pull any piece of data information regarding curriculum, regarding student course taking patterns, regarding how many units a student has, Banner became the repository where we could access that information.

We have had remarkable results by grabbing the data. We have started to see a significant uptick in the number of degrees that we are awarding. What that then means is we are also seeing an uptick in the number of students that are transferring on to receive their bachelor's degree.

The student voice is amazing and important. Listening to what the students have to say is a valuable piece of data that, again, helps us change the way we do things to make sure that we are actually keeping it student centered, student focused.

We've had lots of lessons learned. I believe advice I would give would include don't forget the student voice, because students are why we exist. The other piece of advice is don't forget the data, because the data drives what you do. And it shouldn't be, oh, yeah, let's look at this piece of data. It should be central. This is what the data is showing. Now, what are we going to do about it?