The Chronicle of Higher Education

dean for academic success at Asheville-
Buncombe Technical Community Col-
lege, also in North Carolina, which
started using the system this summer.
“This technology makes it much easier
for us to stay in contact with students.”
And frequent contact translates into suc-
cessful students, she says.
WHILE colleges are just starting to learn whether the system can easily be adopted by multiple insti-
tutions, education researchers feel the
idea has promise. “The approach cer-
tainly makes sense to me,” says Melinda
M. Karp, a senior research associate at
the Community College Research Cen-
ter of Columbia University’s Teachers
College, who has studied advising and
retention. Typically, she says, “there is a
huge disconnect bet ween the faculty side
of the house and the advising side.” She
does, however, have concerns that the
benefits of such a program will diminish
if contact with a student isn’t carefully
maintained from term to term.
Students feel that the program is al-
ready working. “I have a checkered past,
and I have not been to school in a long
time,” says Timothy A. Graham, a 49-
year-old unemployed truck driver from
Charlotte who has been enrolled at Cen-
tral Piedmont for a year. “So it’s really
helpful to be told, ‘ This is what you need
to do to succeed here.’” Finding out that
he was primarily a visual and auditory
learner helped him and his adviser craft
ways of taking notes that made it easy
for him to recall material, he says.
The problems Mr. Graham faces are
serious ones nationwide. According to
a 2011 report by the National Center
for Education Statistics, the retention
rate among full-time community-col-
lege students was only about 60 per-
cent. Among part-time students, it fell
to about 40 percent. And just 27 percent
of all students graduated within three
years of starting community college,
according to “What Works in Student
Retention,” a 2010 report by ACT, the
nonprofit education-assessment organi-
zation. The survey, of 305 colleges, re-
ported that the leading reasons for attri-
tion were a student’s lack of readiness for
college-level work, deficient study skills,
and money problems.
In 2003, Central Piedmont began
to tackle those barriers. With a grant
from the Department of Education,
it initiated a series of “college success”
courses for new students whose place-
ment-test scores put them into devel-
opmental courses in two subject areas,
because they needed remedial work. It
also ramped up its counseling center.
And it began work on the Online Stu-
dent Portal. “We decided on a shotgun
approach,” Mr. McElroy says. “We
were going to try everything that might
work. So we got everyone around the
table: faculty, counselors, the IT chief.
We wanted input and buy-in from ev-
erybody.”
In particular, he was interested in
improving students’ sense of what psy-
chologists call self-efficacy. “A lot of our
students don’t know they can be agents
in their own lives,” he says. “They don’t
know they can change things for them-
selves. And they have a sense of shock
when they come here.”
That’s why the college incorporated
learning-style and personality assess-
ments into the online profile, says Tony
Jones, director of counseling. “It’s not
defining them, or saying, ‘You are only
this way.’ It’s really a way of getting a
conversation started.”
When students log in to the portal,
they are asked to agree or disagree with
about 50 statements about their person-
ality, similar to those in the widely used
Myers-Briggs personality inventory.