Dear Colleagues,
Welcome back to a new semester! I wish you a successful and enjoyable semester. I also wish our newly retired faculty well in their latest journeys: Profs. Tere Justicia; Paul Italia; David Weiser; and Loreto Porte. Also join me in welcoming two new faculty, Prof. Victor Torres-Velez for Latin and Caribbean Studies and Prof. Mayra Mojica Butler for Accounting.
CUNY has partnered with Complete College America (https://completecollege.org/) and launched a momentum campaign (https://completecollege.org/city-university-of-new-york-cuny/ ) . The purpose is to employ strategies known to help students be successful and graduate on time. There are three separate strategies CUNY wants all colleges to implement. The first is the use of corequisite classes, where students take college-level English or math classes while addressing their developmental needs. We do this with our ENG 101 and 102 and with MAT 115 and MAT 119 for students who are not going into STEM fields and so can graduate with Statistics or Quantitative Reasoning. Another strategy is using degree maps which outlines the correct sequence of classes students need to follow, having students take 9 credits in their major the first year and highlighting the milestone courses, which are courses that students must take in a certain semester to graduate on time. We will have these degree maps up and ready to use before the next registration period in April. The third strategy is distinguishing between “full time” and “on time”. Twelve credits is considered fulltime for financial aid purposes but will not enable a student to graduate in two years. We will be launching a marketing campaign about “Take 5”, informing students that taking 5 classes a semester will enable them to graduate in two years and how they can take five classes for the same cost as taking four classes. You can learn more about this and other initiatives our division is implementing to help our students be successful at our “Get in the Loop” event on February 7th in the theater. Our latest ASAP cohorts witnessed a 42% two-year graduate rate and a 63.3% three-year graduate rate. Congratulations to those students and our ASAP staff! This supports our goal of 50% of students graduating in three years-we can do this!
Please share with your students, especially the new freshmen, all the services at the college to support their learning and Single Stop to support their non-academic needs. Remind students that learning is hard and sometimes messy. It takes work and time to learn something new.
Enjoy the semester and thank you for your dedication to our students,
Christine
Christine Mangino, EdD | Provost and Vice President, OAA
Division of Academic Affairs | Hostos Community College, CUNY