Preparation/Awareness
- Building partnerships with K–12, universities, and employers
Materials
Leading Highly Effective External Strategic Partnerships (posted 4/5/2018)
In this learning module, participants apply the framework of collective impact to engaging four essential partners: K–12 schools, community-based organizations, employers, and four-year colleges and universities. (Aspen Institute College Excellence Program)
PRACTITIONER, PRESIDENT, AND PARTNER PERSPECTIVES
Jo-Carol Fabianke, Vice Chancellor for Academic Success, Alamo Colleges, Pathways Colleges (posted 4/5/2018)
In Texas now, starting two or three years ago, students have to choose a career pathway called an endorsement in the eighth grade. And so — yes. Now, that’s really young, but it does get students to begin to think about the fact that they’re going to have a career. And so we’re aligning our pathways with those endorsements, which the high schools are delighted about, by the way, so that we can help them to help students kind of choose that pathway. And then we’re aligning our programs with the four-year institutions or with jobs. So I believe all this pathways work is also bringing the different educational levels closer together because we have a common need to help students figure out what they want to do.
Josh Wyner, Executive Director, Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, Pathways Partner (posted 4/5/2018)
Community colleges have to see the goal not as completion at the institution alone. That’s very important. But also whether students succeed at the next stage of their lives. And once you do that, once you figure out where students are going, you’ll figure out which partners you have to bring into the conversation to co-design the experience and to inform the experience to ensure that the standards people have for the next stage of their lives are in fact being delivered by those at the community college.
Uri Treisman, Director, Charles A. Dana Center, The University of Texas at Austin (posted 4/5/2018)
One of the most challenging issues for faculty, staff, for college leaders and governance officials is shifting from working in our own institution to working in the set of institutions that our students will attend. This is complicated. Anyone who knows our campuses knows that every day, every hour, people are rolling up their sleeves and working their hearts out on behalf of their students. But most of the innovation is the product of a small group of people thinking only within their system and about their own students. In fact, if we don’t think about the places our students will go to, our innovations won’t survive. We can’t just make up a new course over here or a new advising procedure over here when the next institution our students will attend will not recognize that.
We can’t create an illiterate landscape of lost credits for our students. They need efficiency. This is expensive for them. This is their lives. So one of the really subtle cultural shifts is thinking about change not only of our own programs, but our own programs in concert with the other programs that they interact with. The internal version of that is we have worked with K–12, with adult basic education, with workforce programs, and we see enormous duplication of services across those efforts that started as special entities with particular populations. We need to rethink all of those in the context of today’s fiscal environment. And the starting place for that is the student.