San Mateo County Community College District staying online entire year

The SMCCCD, Faculty, Staff, Students, and Board are to be commended for their fabulous work managing COVID. Heroic efforts have been made throughout the organization. The Chancellor and Board made the right call to go virtual for the 2020-21 year. This gave faculty and staff critical time and predictability to plan for the long haul.

IT staff has worked overtime developing creative solutions to ensure all students have the equipment and wifi service to remain engaged and learning. The already overburdened counseling staff managed to mostly retain students despite the complications of providing advice and support on-line. The Staff has kept the District running and added critical services such as emergency food distribution with Second Harvest Food Bank.

We owe the highest praise to the SMCCCD Faculty who invested tremendous effort converting all instruction to 100% digital. Hours and hours of work have been invested by every faculty member in crisis conditions to learn the new tricks of virtual instruction. Our Faculty stepped up to the challenge and by all accounts have crushed it.

In fact, this investment in digital learning creates a valuable body of intellectual property that will have massive long-term benefits: improved student accessibility (flexible attendance times and learning pace, no transportation cost); more effective instruction (hybrid in-person + online materials), and better long-term cost management.

Post-COVID there will certainly be a larger component of on-line learning at SMCCCD which reduces the need for the physical plant on campus. This may contribute to solving the Peninsula's affordable housing crisis because surplus SMCCCD property may reasonably be converted to affordable housing.

All this said, I recommend that the Board/Administration prepare now for the post-COVID future:

• Ensure this very valuable body of digital intellectual property is preserved, organized, and clearly owned by SMCCCD so it can be leveraged in the future.

• Invest now to study, track, and replicate best practices in digital instruction. Seek to understand and replicate the techniques and practices which work best.

• Continue to invest in the hardware necessary to make all students and faculty remotely functional. Hundreds of computers and wifi hot spots have been loaned, but more are required to ensure all students have digital access.

• Plan now for reestablishing satellite campus(es) in the East Palo Alto, Belle Haven, North Fair Oaks area to reduce the cost of attending SMCCCD for these communities, and plan to reestablish the dedicated shuttle service through these communities in Fall 2021.

Congratulations and thank you to the Faculty, Staff, Students, and Leadership at SMCCCD.

The article states, "Early indications are that total enrollment dropped from about 55,600 students in the spring of 2019 to 53,700 in the 2020 spring semester after the pandemic arrived."

50,000 students is a lot! Few institutions of higher education can claim that. When I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, we once outnumbered Ohio State at about 53,000. Where are all those students at SMCCCD?

As an educational researcher, I believe it is important to get the facts correct. If not, people begin to question your credibility and the narrative you are telling.

First, there is a difference between "enrollments" (the total number of classes students are taking) and "headcount" (the number of students on campus).

The State Chancellor's DataMart indicates that headcount at SMCCCD in Spring 2019 was 22,900, while it dropped to 21,146 in Spring 2020, for a decline of 7.7%. The "enrollment" decline reported in the story was only 3.4%.

More problematic is the data on FTES (Full Time Equivalent Students). In the Spring of 2019, there were 8,703 FTES at SMCCCD, while in 2020 the number dropped almost in half to 4,604. That is a very significant decrease not reported in the story, no doubt given the data the reporter obtained (what was the source?). 

I can't wrap my head around the numbers in the story. During a pandemic, it would make sense that if many students moved from full-time to part-time, headcount might decline by 7.7% and FTES would drop 47%. How could "enrollments" drop by only 3.4% as reported in the story?

Someone please get your facts straight. Policy decisions should be made based on facts (i.e, COVID-19 data, not the President's gut intuitions). While it may be true that there were 53,700 course enrollments, don't call "enrollments" students. If the public were asked to fund 53,700 students versus 4,604 FTES, you might provide significantly less resources.

Don't present alternative facts that folks who are not in the know would not know not to be true. 

--

Michael B. Reiner, PhD, is a higher education consultant and educational researcher. Previously, he was a professor of psychology and college administrator at City University of New York (CUNY), Miami Dade College, the Riverside Community College District, and the San Mateo County Community College District. mreiner32205@gmail.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-b-reiner-phd-14057551/