Chamber, schools look to bump area's college grad rates

Times-Union

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2014-12-01/story/chamber-schools-look-bump-areas-college-grad-rates

Too many in community lack degree, backers say

By Andrew Pantazi

Business and education leaders announced Monday a plan to tackle the First Coast’s low college-graduation rate.

JAXUSA Partnership teamed up with the presidents of the local colleges to organize Earn Up, an initiative that will study the best practices for helping people earn college degrees or work certification.

The program will use about $600,000 in grants over the course of three years. The largest amount, $175,000, comes from the Lumina Foundation. The rest is funded locally, JAX Chamber spokesman Matt Galnor said.

The Northeast Florida College Access Network will run the program with the goal of raising college completion rates from 36 percent to 60 percent, according to a prepared statement.

Tina Wirth, JAXUSA’s senior director of education and workforce development, said the grant money won’t go directly to universities, but she hopes the new program will help the colleges receive other grants.

In the spring, Earn Up will give out report cards, grading how efficient different local programs work.

She said a lot of what the initiative will focus on is putting together a list of all the local programs — like the city’s Learn 2 Earn program that allows high school students to experience a week of college life during the summer. Earn Up will describe what works and what doesn’t.

“We have too many people in our community with no college or some college or college debt but no degree to show for it,” said Cynthia Bioteau, Florida State College at Jacksonville’s president.

Though the leaders at the Monday press conference didn’t lay out specifics, they described their goals.

They want to improve how high school students enter college through dual-enrollment and Advanced Placement classes. They said they want to help prospective students by accepting credit for previous classes, adding online courses and assisting students who also have to work. Lastly, they said they want to help military veterans obtain work certificates and degrees for new careers.

For the last six months, Galnor said, the organization and college leaders met to decide what issues were most important to tackle.

The colleges will now have to search for solutions.

“How many people do we have that start and don’t finish?” Galnor said. “What are the barriers to them not finishing? Is it child care? Is it transportation? Do we not have enough online classes?”

Each of these institutions looked around and said what can we do better in these areas.

A major part of the initiative, Galnor said, “is letting people know what services are available. Some of that is reaching out to high school students. Some of that is reaching out to people leaving the military. Get that information to the folks who can use it.”

Earn Up, Bioteau said, will bring each of the college presidents together focused on the same problem.

She said the initiative will particularly need to focus on educating first-generation college students about how to wisely manage time.

“What are proven practices at JU [Jacksonville University] and UNF [the University of North Florida] we can use at FSCJ?” she said.

Andrew Pantazi: (904) 359-4310