CSM Deepens Focus on Access as Part of Strategic Plan

The College of Southern Maryland (CSM) is continuing its work to expand student access, one of three pillars in its strategic plan “Built for Success,” along with momentum and mobility.

During an Achieving the Dream (ATD) coaching visit held April 23-24, CSM faculty and staff spent a day and a half exploring strategies to remove barriers, welcome more students to the college, and ensure the start of their student journey with CSM propels them to long-term success both in and post-college. The visit is part of CSM’s ongoing partnership with ATD, which includes on-campus, biannual coaching visits to support long-term student success goals.

“We launched our strategic plan last year in the fall,” CSM President Dr. Yolanda Wilson said. “After a year’s worth of conversations, we had over 100 of you that engaged with us and gave us feedback,” through strategic planning, retreats, and student and stakeholder input. 

CSM created its own Dream Achievers Team to help students along their college journey. “There’s something about saying that we are in the dream achieving business that I think is really special,” Wilson said.

Through this student success framework, “we begin by looking at our students as they come through the door. That is the access pillar,” Wilson said. “Next is momentum. Once they are here, how do we retain them? How do we ensure they persist? That involves examining our culture, practices and policies. The third pillar, mobility, focuses on program viability and the pathways we offer to help students enter the workforce or transfer to a four-year institution. “We have high level metrics in our strategic plan. But we’re also looking at other kinds of metrics along the way,” Wilson continued.

This was the third Achieving the Dream coaching visit looking at student access alone. “We’re not just going why – breadth. We’re going deep – depth. We’re delving deeply into those areas,” she said.   

Dr. Molly O’Keefe, CSM associate vice president of Strategy, noted the many accomplishments CSM has already made in the first year of the new strategic plan. These include more transfer fairs, the launch of the Center for Career Development and Success, and the introduction of new early college programs at the Regional Hughesville Campus programs

“Know that your work is helping the students and being noticed,” she told her colleagues.

Susan Mayer, chief learning officer of the Achieving the Dream network, said she first came to the CSM campus several years ago, and upon each return visit, she said she sees new capacities “that have enabled you to achieve those types of outcomes, those improvements, equitable elimination of barriers so that all students can be successful. Each time we come back, we see more growth, more capacity building, and more sustainability of the work in student outcomes,” she said.

Over the day and a half, presentations were made on understanding student prospects, admissions and advising alignment, following the early journeys of students from their interest in the college to the first day of class, K-12 dual enrollment and early college student trends and supports, and the educational experiences of CSM homeschool students. Attendees also participated in engaged dialogue and idea generation focused on intentional, innovative alignment between recruitment, admissions, and advising processes, as well as continuing to advance the college’s strategic use of data in planning and decision making.

To close the visit on the afternoon of day two, participants took part in the Finish Line Game, an interactive experience that highlighted the varied paths and real-world barriers community college students often encounter. The activities reinforced the importance of using data to inform strategies that promote student success and thinking creatively about factors impacting our students’ journeys both in and out of the classroom.

To learn more about Achieving the Dream, visit https://www.csmd.edu/about/achieving-the-dream/index.html.