Dive Brief:
- Lone Star College has worked to promote a "very collaborative" system of communication and governance across its six colleges to focus every discussion and decision around student success, according to several of the system's presidents, who presented during this week's American Association of Community Colleges annual meeting in Dallas.
- "Too many of our meetings were come in, listen to information dumps [which] may or may not have had anything to do with students, and just took up a bunch of our time," said LSC-Tomball Campus President Lee Ann Nutt.
- James McGee, Vice President of Instruction at LSC-Montgomery, said just making sure an agenda went out 3-5 days before meetings and that minutes went out within a week after the meeting made a huge difference in the efficiency levels; often, he said, they were spending large amounts of time re-hashing what had happened at the previous meeting, which cut into the productivity of the current day's meeting.
Dive Insight:
Trying to get the leaders of six different campuses on one page and moving in the same direction to implement major decisions in the same way is "not an easy task," as McGee pointed out. But the presidents, realizing they're "better together," are expected to provide seamless experiences for students from one campus to the next "because they just see it as Lone Star," said Nutt.
Many state system leaders are coming to the realization that their institutions have been operating as a number of individual and autonomous institutions, rather than as one system, which creates redundancies and waste. Houston Community College, for example, sits in close proximity to some of Lone Star's campuses, but is in many ways a worlds away in terms of the students it serves. Chancellor Cesar Maldonado said when he arrived in 2014, "we were operating as six medium-sized independent institutions," rather than as "one of the largest singly accredited institutions in the country"; and so, he created Centers of Excellence at each campus to centralize specific programs and consolidate faculty to reduce competition between the campuses for students and encourage greater collaboration in the system. And in doing so, he said, he was able to take "six pretty good programs" and move them to excellence, and give faculty a 15% raise over three years to bring their pay to market value.
The challenge isn't just limited to two-year systems. In Pennsylvania, for example, leaders realized elitism in the system created not just greater competition, but a refusal of campus leaders to work together. There too, Interim Chancellor Karen Whitney has suggested leaders share faculty and programs across campuses, though they have not yet been able to move in that direction.