Diablo Valley College is a public two-year institution located in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area, serving more than 18,000 students. A recent economic impact survey found that the college and its students added just short of a billion dollars in income to the local economy and supported more than eleven thousand jobs, including its 300 full-time and 370 part-time instructors.
During my most recent visit to the college, I was struck by the beauty of its Pleasant Hill campus, and its leadership’s commitment to placing equity at the focus of its organizational structures and its institutional strategic planning.
Mark Akiyama, Dean of Guided Pathways and Special Projects, shared his experiences with bringing equity to the forefront. “As a faculty member, I chaired the equity council for 11 years and helped author three equity plans. And we threw a lot of things at the problem, but after all of that, the equity line was flat, a failure. We were not moving the needle. More recently, instead of doing multiple things with multiple people, silos amidst silos, we went for a more integrated plan.”
DVC has been continually building on their Guided Pathways framework, which is integrated into both their Educational Master Plan and Student Equity Plans. They have grouped their programs into five meta majors or what they call “interest areas”: arts, communications and language; business, computer science and culinary arts; math and engineering; science and health; and social sciences. DVC has realigned their instructional divisions accordingly and is looking at other organizational structures of the college, working to realign them with the four stages of the student journey.
The intended outcome of this restructuring effort is to make the college student-ready so that DVC can meet students where they are. This is a shift from the traditional perspective that students should be college-ready and conform to the way that higher education has functioned for more than a century in this country. To further support their students, DVC has created student centers for each of their interest areas, as well as Academic Support Centers (ASC) for undecided students.
The student centers were developed to bring student support to students instead of them having to search them out on campus.
- Each student center has tutoring for subjects within the interest area, though they are piloting offering English tutors in multiple centers.
- Faculty tutoring coordinators are working with each discipline in their interest area to recruit and develop tutoring and faculty office hours schedules for each center.
- Each student center also has a faculty lead who is responsible for developing events like workshops, alumni and career panels, informational nights, and support during exam times. They also survey students to make sure the centers are meeting students’ needs.
- Additional services include counselors and library liaisons holding open hours within the center.
- Eventually, they are planning on having representatives from areas like financial aid also scheduling hours within the centers.
“I use the math and engineering student center to get tutoring support with my calculus 1 class. Many of the concepts in class are brand new to me. My tutor is really familiar with the material and can explain it to me in a way so I understand the concepts much better. So helpful!” said Michelle Roebuck, a DVC STEM student.
President Powell & President Lamb
President Susan Lamb shared that rather than taking an all-or-nothing approach with a single initiative, they approached the challenge much like the modern development of apps, with versions that are constantly modified in response to “user”, or in this case student, experience. The results have been impressive.
The high-touch and local engagement led to over 9,000 student visits (much during the pandemic) and over 8,000 student hours logged across the centers. Online services and information available on student center webpages also provided important services and resources to students, including over 1,300 virtual online tutoring visits during the spring 2022 semester. During the 2021-22 academic year, the newly launched student center webpages had over 43,000 views.
In addition to deeper engagement for all students, the college saw a greater utilization of these services by BIPOC students. Data gathered from spring 2022 indicated that African American and Latinx students made up 39% of visitors to one of their ASCs. This is encouraging data that speaks to the promise of DVC’s model considering that these populations comprise 32% of the college’s student body.
To learn more about Diablo Valley College, visit their website at https://www.dvc.edu/.
