Dr. Brice W. Harris is chancellor of the California Community Colleges system, the largest higher education system in the nation.
Q: With regard to the high percentages of first-generation college students, what is the priority level to ensure those students are not only well represented on your campus, but how they matriculate and what services are available to them especially when they come from largely underrepresented groups?
A: For our institutions we have chartered a new pathway for student success. Part of the important first step is to get the data that shows how our students are doing, so for the first time we have what’s called College by College Accountability that disaggregates those data so we can look at how are students are doing by race and ethnicity, by age and gender and we find some very troubling performance gaps. So for us, it’s not only about all of our students succeeding at higher rates, it’s also about closing those gaps.
Q: With those gaps in mind, minority students have been known to do better academically when faculty, staff and administration reflect the student body. What does your system do in the form of diversity recruitment of faculty and staff to mirror the students that the California Community Colleges are serving?
A: There have been improvements over the last couple of the decades but there is room for more. The challenge that a lot of our colleges face, as it relates to recruiting faculty, the old way of doing it suggested that candidates have 45 percent based on academic credentials, 45 percent on their experience and the last 10 percent was working for a diverse student body. We need to change the equation to move away from 45, 45 and 10 to a third, a third and a third evenly, then I think you begin to see results in the form of diversity.
Q: Since many community college students transfer into the California State and University of California systems, what policy issues in the wake of the passage of California’s Proposition 30, are on the horizon to ensure diversity, inclusion and equal opportunity if all three systems are collaborating and not competing for funding?
A: For the first time in many years, our budget priorities used to just be cost of living increases and capacity for student growth. Those historically were the two driving forces for our budget. Now a third leg to that is the Student Success Initiative, where we are focusing on improving orientation, student support, and automating the education planning and counseling.
