Increase Student Retention? Listen to Us First.
Agotime is a student at Durham Technical Community College.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, only 41% of low-income, four-year college students graduate in five years. Many school administrators and elected representatives have expressed a heartfelt desire to resolve the college completion crisis, but over time, their speeches begin to sound repetitive and their improvements become stagnant. How can the U.S. move forward as a globally inclusive society if its own education system is failing to produce a prepared and educated workforce?
Our education system needs a facilitator, a convener, someone to listen to students’ hardships and do something about it. Last month, a DC-based non-profit organization called Mobilize.org filled that void. Last month, it hosted its first “Target 2020: My Education. Our Future” summit and reaffirmed the idea that community support and conversation are quintessential to bringing real change.
Colleges must begin to provide support services to meet their goals for student retention. Resources are plentiful and opportunities are available, but without an ongoing dialogue or support from administration within our schools to elected officials, community college students have no way of uniting our experiences and implementing the modifications within our schools. Target 2020 North Carolina, only the first in a summit series of three, convened about 100 students in Charlotte last month. Imagine what we can accomplish if we pool our resources and really strive for change. As they say, we have strength in numbers.
Convening students to discuss problems is just the beginning. What happens now? What can I do to better someone else’s life in the long run? This direction is what the Target 2020 summit exemplifies. My three colleagues and I created the Goal Program, which will assist students in succeeding by realizing and focusing goals, short term and long term, and then moving in the direction to attain them. Through the Goal Program students and faculty take steps together to deal with the hurdles head on through a collaborative effort, because it takes a community of caring people to make change.
Attending a community college has been an affordable approach to advance my career in biology and early childhood education. With plans to create educational programming geared toward science and cultural arts, I feel more motivated than ever to channel my experiences from Target 2020 and embark on a path to create a better future for myself and future generations of students.
See Agotime's original post on Mobilize.org here.
