Recognizing a need to better serve part-time students, Bunker Hill Community College—located in Boston—enhanced its Learning Communities program over the years in order to achieve more equitable student outcomes.
A new Center for American Progress (CAP) report titled, “A Promising Model to Boost Retention for Part-Time Students” finds that as a result of BHCC’s various learning communities, part-time, first-year students are seven percent more likely than other part-time students to remain enrolled in the college after a year.
Many part-time students at BHCC are students of color and their participation in the learning communities also show a “significant association” to their continued enrollment that was not evident for White students, institutional researchers found.
Bunker Hill’s “results so far should be enough to inspire other community colleges and four-year institutions to think about the potential of learning communities — or elements of them, such as peer mentoring and success coaching — to help improve the odds part-time students face,” wrote Marcella Bombardieri, author of the report and senior policy analyst of Postsecondary Education Policy at CAP.
Arlene Vallie, director of Learning Communities at BHCC, said the expanded effort to serve part-time students is guided by support from Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit that champions the use of data in institutional reform efforts around student success.
With more funding and resources, roughly 4,700 BHCC students during the 2017-18 academic year participated in the three types of learning communities offered at BHCC – Learning Community Seminars, Learning Community Clusters and Professional Studies Learning Community Seminars. Additionally, BHCC increased the number of success coaches available to help students from two to 12.
All professional studies students and other students taking nine credits or more are required to take a learning community course during their first year. Following the CAP report’s data, college leaders plan to consider expanding the learning community requirement to students taking fewer than nine credits and students in certificate programs.
