Operation 100%, or, Completion by Redesign

Like other community colleges, Lansing Community College (LCC) has experienced many challenges in its efforts to increase completion rates for students pursuing credentials and degrees. In its good-faith efforts to address these challenges, LCC has learned that piecemeal, isolated approaches, though helpful in many ways, will not ameliorate the larger, systemic problems that prevent the maximizing of student success.With this understanding in mind, LCC has enthusiastically embarked on a bold, comprehensive, culture-changing initiative aimed at ensuring success for all students wishing to obtain certificates and degrees or transfer to a four-year school. Entitled "Operation 10096: Achieving Excellence in Student Learning and Success at Lansing Community College," this initiative sets as its goal 100 percent completion for students in degree, certificate, or transfer pathways. Central to the successful implementation of Operation 100% is an understanding that its goal is more an attitude than a measure, more a commitment to expected institutional behavior supporting student learning and success than an aim for perfection. To this end, we have initiated many new measures and processes to advance our own internal work as well as our work with both a statebased and a national student success pilot program.INSTITUTING NEW CAMPUS STUDENT SUCCESS MEASURESOperation 100% involves several major redesigns. For example, understanding the crucial importance of advising to the completion agenda, and recognizing the often burdensome caseloads for advisors, LCC is in the process of automating its registration system to ensure that students stay on track in their programs and that automated, real-time alerts are provided to faculty and advisors when students experience difficulty. This automation will enable advisors to have regular contact with students during the semester so that they can offer students just-in-time, personalized, ongoing, high-level support that will help ensure that students either remain on track and receive immediate, relevant intervention when necessary or change tracks appropriately.To help ensure college readiness, LCC is developing advising protocols for connecting advisors with students before the students enter the college. In addition, the college has radically redesigned its application for prospective students; the new application is populated with predictive analytic questions aimed at helping the college understand from the start a student's strengths and challenges prior to the student's beginning to take classes. LCC is also undertaking a major overhaul of its intake, orientation, and student support processes (orientations will be ongoing, and support will be provided to students even prior to their taking classes). By the end of the 2015-2016 academic year, all new students will have education plans, that will be regularly reviewed and updated and that will both contain realistic timeframes for completion and establish the criteria for accurate tracking of student progress. Given the importance of support networks to a student's success, LCC is also creating a model for support teams that will include peers, mentors, faculty, advisors, and when appropriate, family and community members.Space does not permit a full accounting of all Operation 100% major projects (such as, for example, the redesign of the college's website, the increased use of contextualized instruction within programs and within linked and team-taught course sections, and the redesign of general education into a nondistributive, integrated learning model). Nevertheless, as promising as all of these initiatives are, LCC has realized two essential undertakings pertaining to the success of Operation 100%. First, because many students-especially those from historically underrepresented groups or those with otherwise underprivileged backgrounds-struggle to succeed in gateway courses, LCC has committed to ensuring that all students succeed in these courses. …