Sinclair Community College will be breaking graduation records this year as a result of intentional practices, policies and initiatives that promote equitable student outcomes, particularly for minority and low-income students.
This Sunday, more than 1,300 minority students will be graduating, in addition to a record number of 2,103 low-income students as a result of the college’s participation in student success organizations like Achieving the Dream and League for Innovation, disaggregation of student data and offering of tailored support services to various groups on campus. Among the graduating class, more than 520 African-American males will be earning degrees or certificates, a 78 percent increase since 2018, officials said.
“This year is the first year ever in our modern history where the number of African American males graduating and the number of African American males [earning] certificates and degrees outstrip African American females,” said Dr. Steven L. Johnson, president and CEO of Sinclair Community College. “And the number of African-American males completing successfully exceeds the number of all the other minority categories combined.”
Johnson said these outcomes are a result of more than 20 years of work to move the college from merely an access institution to one that champions student success and completion. In that time period, Sinclair became a Vanguard Learning College, served as a pilot institution working with the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), participated in the College and Career Transitions Initiative under the League for Innovation and was one of the early member colleges within the Achieving the Dream (ATD) network.
“That’s when we started to look at disaggregated data of student success,” Johnson said of joining ATD. “We started looking at how are our African American students doing versus all of the other students? How are our Asian students doing and Hispanic students doing? And how many do we have? How well are they doing? And we were horrified.”
As leaders began to work towards solutions to address equity gaps in student outcomes, the college was selected to serve as a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Completion By Design college.
“That gave us a real boost, and we were starting to get more comfortable and better with the idea that we need to be about student success,” Johnson said. “We’re going to make a way or find a way. We can’t treat all students equally. We need to treat students the way they need to be treated for where they’re at.”
