Title V
Total Amount of Grant Project: $3 Million
Grant Project: October 1, 2020 - September 30, 2025
Reading Area Community College (RACC) has been awarded $3 million from the US Department of Education for a 5-year institution-wide initiative, Nuestro Próximo Paso: Reframing A Community College for Student Success, that will transform the student experience from admissions to graduation.
Key elements of the initiative include redesigning curriculum into guided pathways, a movement that seeks to streamline a student’s journey through college by providing structured choice, revamped support, and clear learning outcomes. By improving its admissions and advising processes, leveraging new student-management technologies, and offering professional development to faculty and staff to support these new processes, tools, and curricular redesign. The award of Title V funding supports the goals and objectives within RACC’s strategic plan (2014 - 2019) and campus master plans.
Goals
First Goal
The first goal is to reframe and streamline enrollment and advising processes to ensure that students have a successful start to their college experience by contacting students early in their college experience, connecting them to college resources, and pro-actively advising them into one of nine guided curricular pathways.
Key Strategies: Reframing Enrollment Services
- Redesigned enrollment and orientation process
- Initiated new student coaching
- Implementation of new student proactive advising
- Implementation of early alert/CRM system
- Provision of professional development
Second Goal
The second goal is to reframe programs into nine guided pathways, organized with like-career communities across programs, to ensure that students can move within a community in the first year without loss of credit while exploring career options and developing an academic achievement plan to eliminate obstacles from the student’s pathway as they proceed on their academic journey, through a variety of programs and services related to proactive advisement, emphasizing goal planning and on-going contact.
Key Strategies: Reframing Curriculum and Instruction
- Development of 9 Guided Pathways
- Re-visioning of gateway courses
- Creation of academic supports and co-curricular activities
- Establishment of Learning Commons
- Provision of professional development
Expected Outcomes
Student Services and Instruction will work together to clear the pathway to student success. By 2025, Reading Area Community College objectives are to increase three year graduation rates by 10% and our first-year students’ fall-to-fall retention rates by 13%.
Title V Developing Hispanic Serving Institution Program
These grant funds are awarded through a competitive application process and administered through the US Federal Department of Education program, Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program - Title V. RACC is a public Hispanic Serving Institution in Pennsylvania. A Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) is defined as an institution of higher education that has an enrollment of undergraduate full-time equivalent students that serve at least 25 percent Hispanic students.
Connection Coaches
Contacts
Cynthia Seaman
Project Director and Senior VP of Academic Affairs/Provost
Email: cseaman@racc.edu
610-372-4721 x6271
Berks Hall B-316
Rhonda Hudak
Director of Grant Development and Management
Email: rhudak@racc.edu
610-372-4721 x5016
Berks Hall B-322