“You Can’t Deny the Whole Student”: Student Supports During and After the Pandemic

 

Students faced compounding crises during the pandemic that affected their mental and physical health, their finances, and the predictability of their paths through college. These challenges highlighted the importance of the student supports that colleges provide and the need to serve the whole student to foster academic success.

The ARCC Network includes several projects that examine academic, financial, basic needs, and other student supports. Researchers from three ARCC projects recently sat down to talk about what they have learned about students’ support needs during and after the pandemic and how colleges are addressing them. Listen to the conversation below with Erin Delle from the Tennessee Board of Regents, Serena Klempin from the Community College Research Center, and Jennifer Hogg from the California Policy Lab. A transcript with links to the projects and publications is available below the recording.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Elizabeth Ganga: I’m Elizabeth Ganga, and I’m talking with Erin Delle, Serena Klempin, and Jennifer Hogg about their projects for the ARCC Network. The projects in the network are looking at how community colleges can recover from the pandemic. A big part of that is providing students with the right supports at the right time in areas including academics, finances, mental health, and basic needs. So, can you all go around and introduce yourselves and just tell me really briefly about your project?

Jennifer Hogg: Sure. I’m Jennifer Hogg from the California Policy Lab, and our project is focused on understanding whether students are using existing safety net programs to help meet their basic needs during college.

Serena Klempin: I’m Serena Klempin, a research associate at CCRC, and I’m here to talk about the ARCC institutional survey on pandemic recovery at community colleges. It’s a survey in six states—Michigan, Ohio, New York, Tennessee, Texas, [and California]—and is really geared to understanding how community colleges used federal pandemic recovery funding, which student populations were of the greatest concern, how successful colleges perceived that federal aid to be, and what ongoing challenges or unmet needs remain.

Erin Delle: And I’m Erin Delle. I work on the research and data team at the Tennessee Board of Regents. So, our project contains three parts—the first looking into pandemic-era effects on recent high school graduates who enrolled at community colleges and their success rates, the second analyzing labor market outcomes and then identifying the most promising pathways for community college students. Both of these have interactive policy briefs up on our website covering these topics in more depth. And then this third piece, which is what I’m really going to focus on today, is the implementation of a coaching intervention that’s targeted at recent high school graduates that are enrolling in community colleges for the first time that need what our state calls learning support, or better known as developmental or remedial education.

Ganga: So, we all know that community college students are not your traditional 18-year-old, necessarily. They serve a lot of adult students; they serve a lot of students coming back to college, who might have particular support needs. So, from your projects for ARCC, and everything that you know from your previous projects, what kinds of supports do community college students need, especially now with the pandemic recovery?

Delle: I can jump in. I really appreciate that question. And also, I suspect, it’s a driver of a lot of our projects. So, for our project, as we dug into the data on outcomes for our students in the early days of the pandemic, it’s pretty clear that already historically struggling students were seeing some of the biggest drops for common metrics like persisting from fall to spring, passing their gateway courses in math and English, earning credit hours in their first semester, and even persisting from year one to year two. So, students who are placed into courses with corequisite support, students of color, in particular Black males, students with low socioeconomic status—those were the most impacted in the wake of COVID. So, our take was to try to address the needs of these students through a targeted coaching intervention that adds coaching to the existing corequisite learning support structure. The coaches serve as a part of a dedicated support system that works with faculty and other support staff to connect students to on- and off-campus resources. They serve as their primary academic advisor. They work with them on academic and personal challenges. And they’re really there to help the whole student succeed.

You ask what do students need. We know that they have needs like mental health access, transportation, affordable childcare, housing, food, cheaper textbook options—the list can go on and on. But I think one thing that has become abundantly clear in working with these coaches and also speaking with students is having a dedicated person throughout their time in college that enhances the learning support that they receive in the classroom but also connects those academic and nonacademic supports, so whether that’s access to a food pantry, or helping them think through setting goals and overcoming challenges, or even just coaching them on how to talk to their instructor, navigating the bureaucracy. So, I think we understand they have all of these needs, but how do we put a person in place that can help address all the needs that students are coming to us with?

Klempin: And one thing that really jumped out to us from the survey was the extent to which colleges were prioritizing emergency student aid. So, the federal aid package: About half of it was designated for institutions, and half was intended to go directly to students in the form of emergency student aid. But colleges were also encouraged to use some of the funding that was for institutional aid to provide additional student aid, and we found that about 70% of colleges did so. And for those that used their institutional aid for additional student aid, it was their third largest expense. It represented about 12% of the total institutional aid they had received.

Another issue that speaks to this need for supporting students financially is unpaid account balances, so debt owed to the colleges. Colleges were allowed to use both institutional and student aid to cover unpaid account balances, so wipe out or forgive any debt there. And we found that the majority of colleges in five of the six states did so and that colleges were also actively reaching out to students with balances to inform them about the availability of services and supports and encourage them to apply for additional emergency aid. So just from looking at those numbers together, we see the emphasis on needing to support students’ financial stability.

Hogg: And we definitely see from prior and existing research that food insecurity is a big issue for community college students of all ages.

Ganga: And was there anything that happened during the pandemic that you have data on that surprised you about the need?

Hogg: I think something that surprised us is that while eligibility increased for CalFresh, participation didn’t necessarily increase. So that’s something we want to look into more to understand the relationship between the changing population in the community college system and who is eligible for these benefits and who is participating in the benefits. The CalFresh eligibility rules for students include a set of exemptions such as Work Study, and some community college students may not have one of those necessary exemptions, even though they’re qualified based on their income being low enough. We know that students who live with their parents may not be eligible for CalFresh because their parents’ income is included when looking at their eligibility. That can make them ineligible. So, there is a potential mismatch between student need and student eligibility for these public benefits.

Ganga: And did you all in Tennessee see any growing needs or changing needs with the pandemic?

Delle: I’m not so sure about changing as much as exacerbating. And so, yes, it’s happening in Tennessee, but also hearing about it broadly, the childcare piece of this. Everybody was stuck in the home. Everybody’s trying to get on this one internet service, so that that compounds it, access to internet, especially in rural areas. I think those are the two big things that stick out. But for Tennessee, for a lot of our community colleges, they serve very rural areas. So, these are things that, again, are not necessarily anything new but are exacerbated by COVID and definitely coming to the forefront of things that we’re going to have to continue to address going forward.

Ganga: With the survey, you all looked a lot at how colleges spent the recovery money. And that kind of gave you a sense of where some of the needs are. What did you find?

Klempin: Yes, it was interesting comparing expenditures in the first year to the third year, for example. During the first year of the pandemic, most community colleges were focused on making sure students had the technology and supplies they needed for remote learning. So, we saw large numbers of colleges using their institutional aid for laptops, Wi-Fi, basic supplies like that. And so, I think that reflects the extent to which students had been depending on the technology available on their college campuses, kind of a hidden need that we didn’t realize until college students weren’t able to be on campus. But then, by the third year, we definitely saw many fewer colleges using their institutional aid for technology, hopefully because some of that infrastructure was in place, but many more using it for mental health services. So, I suspect this reflects both an increase in mental health challenges as time went on during the pandemic but also greater awareness of students’ mental health needs on the part of colleges.

Ganga: I think we talked about the thinking behind adding coaches to corequisite courses. Was there anything else you wanted to add about that?

Delle: Yeah, part of the issue here is we saw these dips, and to say that we saw small dips is not how it happened; it’s a generous way to say it. We had very large dips. And so, I alluded to this, that our students were pretty hard hit, and that we are thankfully, as a system, finally starting to rebound, which has been no small feat to right that ship. But I just want to highlight a couple of points here. From 2019 to 2020, for our students needing any amount of learning support—so, any of those students that were testing into learning support—gateway completion in math courses fell by 10 percentage points, and 13 percentage points for those writing or English courses. And for those same students, comparing fall ’19 to fall ’20, we saw a 12-percentage-point increase in the students earning no credit in their first semester. So again, those data points are an impetus for why we implemented coaching.

But turning to what the impact of coaches has been so far, so we have a bit of data on our first cohort of students that started in fall 2022. We have fall 2022 data and we also have spring 2023 data for those students. Looking at students that were assigned to coaching—because this is an experiment we’re running with coaching—for those students that were assigned to coaching, they were passing their math at 57% versus students that were not assigned to coaching, they had about a 50% pass rate for that gateway math. If we go a step further and we isolate students that actually engaged with their coach at least once throughout the semester, that number jumps even higher to 64% of students passing their gateway math course. So, we know that those students that engaged with their coach may be different from those students that did not engage with the coach in important and significant ways. But for every factor we’ve been able to control for, those results are still holding. So, you know, it’s clear that coaching is having a significant impact for students that are engaging with coaching.

One last data point that I have to mention is, you know, fall-to-spring persistence for students. For control students—so, students that were not assigned to coaching—we’re seeing 68% persistence from spring to fall. For students that were in the treatment group, that number was 75%, so students that were assigned, whether they engaged or not. When we break out engaged versus assigned but did not engage, those students that engaged with the coach persisted at 85% from fall to spring, which is a huge number for our system as far as fall-to-spring persistence rates go. And so, we’re really looking forward to updating these numbers with fall-to-fall numbers as we get that data in the coming weeks. But a big thing to linger on here is just a huge credit to the coaches on this project and our college partners because none of this is possible without the incredible work that they are doing with students.

Ganga: Serena, what did colleges in the survey say about whether student support needs are being met? Do you have a sense of that?

Klempin: Yeah, so we asked colleges if they had any concerns about the end of the federal funding, HEER funding, and they were far and away most concerned about their ability to continue supporting students who are experiencing personal and financial emergencies, as well as their ability to continue supporting students’ nonacademic needs, again speaking to the importance of direct financial support for students. And when we asked them their top priority for any additional funding they might receive, it was emergency student aid. So, that was definitely top of mind. But then colleges are also continuing to prioritize mental health and technology. I think those areas will continue to be ongoing needs.

Ganga: What should the role of colleges be given what we’re learning about the support students need?

Hogg: I’ll just say from our study, we see really large variation in the take up of CalFresh across campuses. And on campuses where take up rates are higher, we hear that those colleges are approaching these kinds of supports in a kind of holistic way of considering financial aid. So, thinking of it just as another element of your financial aid package, you get your standard financial aid, but if you’re living in a high-cost-of-living area, for example San Francisco, you probably need assistance with the cost of living as well. And so, I think that colleges providing that kind of proactive and also perhaps stigma-reducing approach to supporting students is really effective and where we see the highest take-up.

Delle: Students are overwhelmed. And, especially during the pandemic, with everything that was going on in their lives and the clear mental health crisis, as they’re coming to our doors they have a lot of confusion about the process. They didn’t have that in-person interaction to guide them through the orientation or how to navigate those first weeks of college. But as we’ve tried to move back onto campus, that doesn’t necessarily all go away. Students that are trying to navigate college for the first time—it’s as hard for an 18-year-old as it is for a 40-year-old. So, speaking with students who have lived that experience, speaking with our coaches, our advisors, it’s pretty loud and clear that students want—even if they don’t feel that they necessarily need it—a support team that’s actively engaging them to ensure that they have what they need and they know where to go when they have questions or they need to access resources. I think it’s historically hard, at least in our state, but I’m sure in every state, to access those community resources like CalFresh, SNAP benefits, any of those resources that our lowest income students or disadvantaged students really need. It is hard to get access to them, especially during COVID when those offices were shut down, and a lot of them have not opened back up. So, colleges have to fill that role if they actually want their students to persist and finish their degrees. You can’t deny the whole student.

Klempin: I do think that there are things colleges can do, including the work with CalFresh, partnering with community-based organizations, finding other ways to increase students’ access to SNAP and other public benefits. I think the findings about using aid to cover unpaid student account balances point to the importance of finding other ways to lower the cost of attending college for students. But I think even ensuring students are able to complete their credential on time, and that the credential is leading to a family-sustaining wage, that in and of itself is a way of lowering the cost of college.

Ganga: Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. I really appreciate you taking the time. For more on these projects and the other projects in the ARCC Network, come check out our website. And thanks again.