What Sets Us Apart

What are CSM’s points of distinction? The following section looks at the foundations we’ve laid in academic and student support services, highlights the emerging character of current programs and services that build on those foundations, and points us to the future.

Academic and Student Support Programs: Our Foundations

CSM was a pioneer in creating programs that recognized the need for proactive services supporting students inside and outside the classroom, especially those whose social, financial, or personal circumstances might make it harder to achieve their educational goals. These services continue to form the backbone of student support today and are critical to enacting the College’s mission: creating access and inclusion, fostering academic excellence, and ensuring equitable outcomes.

Meeting basic needs is crucial to serving our students. For many of our students, access to education is made possible by long-established services — for example, EOPS, CARE, CalWORKs, and SparkPoint — supporting low-income or underrepresented students, through everything from counseling and tutoring to free groceries.

(We continue to work to improve these services; SparkPoint, for instance, will be re-engineered to more efficiently and effectively serve our students.)

For students with learning differences or disabilities (an increasing share of the student body), the Disability Resource Center offers vital support. Creating a sense of inclusion has also long been a priority; a variety of centers (for example, the Multicultural Center & Dream Center, Veterans Resource & Opportunity Center, or the Welcome Center) offer services and spaces to bring students into the campus community. The College also has foundational services that help students address potential educational disruptions: health care, wellness counseling, childcare (through the Child Development Center), and other services.

Broad academic support also has solid foundations at the College. The Library connects students, faculty, and the community to information resources and hosts student and classroom events. The Learning Center provides a space for independent work, tutoring, and small group work. And multiple labs across campus, staffed by faculty and student tutors, offer tutoring, instruction, and practicum work.

Academic and Student Support Programs: Today and Tomorrow

How are we building on these foundations, going forward?

One key theme is integration. There has been a distinct trend toward integrating academic and student support in recent years. Therefore, much of the focus today is on strengthening the connective tissue of the College — the bonds between college and high school, between different disciplines, between academic and career/technical education, and between instruction and student services — to help students achieve their academic goals. This integrated support is essential for assisting our underserved student population.

Some of this work can be seen in programs that integrate different disciplines and services to scaffold the student experience.

Academic & Career Communities/Guided Pathways

The Guided Pathways initiative, launched in 2017, focused on redesigning  the student experience to create an “equity-minded, student-centered experience that empowers students to reach their educational goals”. The emphasis is on a “close collaboration between student services and instruction” to create easily navigable paths that integrate academic and other support services, leading to clearly identified goals.

The support begins with improved navigation: the scores of degrees and certificates offered in dozens of disciplines are organized into six categories:

• Arts & Media
• Business & Public Service
• Health & Wellness
• Language Arts & Social Sciences
• Science & Engineering
• Explorers

The goal is to close the equity gap and to increase the number of students able to complete a degree, certificate, or transfer program in three years. (According to PRIE’s 2019 Equity Data SAP report, 59% of full-time students achieve their goal in six years, while only 29% of part-time students do).

Learning Communities

The College hosts a variety of academic communities: some cohort models, some based around specific courses or curriculum, some learning communities focused on distinct cultures or student populations, some homegrown, and some part of statewide or other initiatives.

Despite their variety, they tell a common story of a trend towards promoting a more proactive, holistic, interdisciplinary, and community-focused student experience.

Learning communities focus on offering proactive, wrap-around services and academic support that are integrated into the students’ academic lives. Most learning communities have a dedicated counselor serving cohort-based classes, helping students navigate through college, and supporting them through transfer and/or certificate completion.

At least one offers significant financial support, Promise Scholars Program (which began as Year One, a homegrown CSM program supporting first-year students before merging with the statewide Promise initiative). The program aims at degree completion in three years by offering “multi-year tuition support, individualized counseling support, textbook vouchers, and food and transportation incentives.” (collegeofsanmateo.edu/promise).  Students do not need to find their way to the services; the services are brought to them.

The academic focus of learning communities also tends towards integration. They are, by their nature, interdisciplinary, and the anchor for any learning community lies outside the specific classroom and any particular department. For many of our learning communities, that anchor is a distinct culture, and the program develops a curriculum emphasizing the literature, history, and experience of that culture: Umoja on African American culture, Puente on Latino/a/x culture, Mana on Pacific Island and Oceania culture, and Katipunan on Filipino/a/x culture. Two of our learning communities are anchored in a shared student activity — Writing in the End Zone and IX in Action serve student-athletes. The anchor for Brothers Empowering Brothers is the shared experience of male-identified students of color working towards a certificate, degree, and/or transfer. For Project Change, the community is defined by the particular needs of incarcerated students. And for the Honors Project, the anchor is a shared research experience. Serving these students requires collaboration between disciplines that enriches and strengthens student learning.

By the same token, learning communities are also highly student focused. The bond that initiates the community comes from the students: from their culture, their passions, their challenges, and their ambitions. Learning communities, then, highlight an ongoing trend toward creating a more student-centered educational experience. They also emphasize that academic success often relies as much on a sense of belonging, of having peers and a supportive community, as it does on instruction and learning.

These programs position a sense of community as a key to academic inclusion and achievement. The focus, then, is on building community, establishing wrap-around services, bringing the students’ home cultures and identities into the classroom, and creating spaces where students can feel welcome. This is underscored by the fact that many of these communities have their own space in the newly expanded Village in Building 17. Above all, there is an emphasis on faculty and staff showing respect and appreciation for the knowledge, enthusiasm, and challenges that students bring.

The value of this sort of community building is highlighted by the fact that these learning communities were hard hit by the pandemic. As a result, Umoja, Writing in the End Zone, and Puente all saw significant drops in enrollment and success. While the reversal is temporary, it underscores both the importance of social connection and community and the vulnerability of a student population with less access to technological resources and higher financial needs outside school.

The role of the learning communities may also be clarified thanks to research by the California Community Colleges RP Group. Their African American Transfer Tipping Point Project (AATTP) researches the points along the academic path where African American students leave education; the “tipping points” that propel them into persistence; and any specific programs and practices that “are associated with greater persistence to and through the tipping points.” Data analysis has identified College of San Mateo as “particularly successful when it comes to serving transfer-bound Black/African American students.” The group plans to research our practices to try to identify what is working. This research will benefit our understanding of our work and our ability to build on it.

Athletics

As noted earlier, CSM has long been a standout in athletics, not only for its many championships but for its sports' diversity and extensive and recently renovated facilities. In addition, the Athletics program takes the students' academic work seriously.  Faculty have invested in collaborating with disciplines and services to ensure solid academic support, with the two highly successful athlete-oriented support programs, and more recently, a learning community focusing on women in sports (IX in Action).

International Program

CSM’s International Program is supported by the Center for Global Engagement, which provides wrap-around services from admission to graduation for international students. A distinctive feature of this program is the pre-departure modules, introduced to ensure that incoming international students meet requirements for math and English. The modules represent a collaboration with math and ESL instructors that have succeeded in steadily raising international students’ GPAs.

Conclusions

In these various learning communities, academic and student support programs, and pedagogical and assess­ment activities, some themes emerge:

• The importance of collaboration between different programs at the College, especially around academic support
• Integration of wrap-around services, instruction, and academic support
• Community building through dedicated spaces, cultural activities, and other support for student groups
• Outreach that meets students where they are, acknowledges who they are, and develops their confidence and sense of belonging in academic life
• The interconnectedness of disciplines and majors
• The need for a great degree of one-on-one and small-group attention

This has implications for how we support innovative collaboration between all constituencies of the College to create a first-rate, equitable education for all students. Students come to college with different goals, languages, and academic and cultural backgrounds. Sometimes they come with hope, sometimes with confidence, and sometimes with self-doubt. Students should feel at home on campus and have access to the academic support and experiences that their university counterparts enjoy (clubs, social events, research assistantships, and internships). We need to ensure equity within and beyond our institution; our transfer students should find themselves on at least an equal footing with other juniors. Learning communities provide a model for effectively supporting students from all backgrounds.

Focus on Recruitment & Access

CSM is positioning its recruitment and access toward enhancing the quality of the student journey, from recruitment to application to matriculation and registration. To that end, CSM is focusing on improving the quality of its recruitment and outreach by leveraging resources and relationships in the following ways:

• Strengthen partnerships with community organizations such as those serving migrant workers or people with hard-to-reach populations (e.g., Migrant Education Program, Moonridge farmworker family housing, LifeMoves, Boys & Girls Clubs in East Palo Alto).
• Expand outreach to more community events that serve diverse populations. Examples include the Black College Expo, LatinXExpo, Police and Sheriff’s Leagues activities, community celebrations, and local farmers markets.
• Strengthening relationships with high school counselors by maintaining regular communications and participating in college preparation programs (e.g., AVID).
• Expand awareness of CSM through multimodal outreach opportunities. Examples include virtual information sessions through Zoom and live academic program presentations through social media.
• Collect CSM student media preference data to inform and guide marketing messaging, delivery, and targeting.
• Expand translation of college information.
• Build cooperation and reciprocity opportunities with college recruiters from other colleges and districts.

College recruitment does not end with the initial information and outreach session. Therefore, improving the application, matriculation, and registration processes remains a priority for CSM. We offer:

• Application, matriculation, and registration workshops (e.g., outreach events at high schools, priority enrollment workshops, career presentations).
• A physical and a virtual front desk that gives students and applicants access to a live person to ask questions and access college services.