13 Issues, 55 Goals

Issue 1. The onboarding process disproportionately impacts African American students.

• Goal 1: The application to the registration pipeline is transparent and intuitive to students. Foothill retains students through the onboarding process, particularly those disproportionately impacted in the process (African American students).
• Goal 2: Explore further districtwide FHDA collaboration and the potential for a shared application.
• Goal 3: The onboarding process will be inclusive and take into account new students who seek to enroll in hybrid and exclusively online courses and therefore may not yet have an inherent need to physically be on campus.
• Goal 4: Orientation is accessible to all new students prior to their first day of instruction. Orientation content is specific to Foothill’s onboarding process, providing guidance on how to navigate instructional and student support services to help students become familiar with the campus and its offerings.
• Goal 5: African American students are consistently supported throughout the Connection phase, perhaps via a case management model shown to be successful at the college.
• Goal 6: There are no barriers in our enrollment and registration processes, regardless of the desired modality of class registration, on campus or online.

Issue 2. There are large numbers of students of color who are not accessing, are ineligible for, or fall out of eligibility for available financial aid programming.

• Goal 1: There are no tuition costs for all students across the CCC system. Increase administrative advocacy at the state level.
• Goal 2: Students are knowledgeable about the different financial aid programs and services available to them and successfully apply for that assistance.
• Goal 3: There are few to no incidental costs associated with being a student, including but not limited to textbooks, printing, and parking costs.
• Goal 4: There is no demographically predictable disproportionate impact among students with financial holds and/or drops for non-payment.

Issue 3. More recent focused outreach with a specific intent to increase access and enrollment of Latinx and African American students doesn’t readily connect back to a larger strategy to support and retain these populations.

Goal 1: Foothill has a documented strategic enrollment plan that expands access to college programs for underrepresented student populations, outlining touch points from outreach through registration to provide support for potential and incoming students.

Goal 2: Foothill’s CCAP dual enrollment partnerships have established pipelines from high school to Foothill College programs. Dual enrollment partnerships focus on expanding college access in the high schools for underrepresented student populations.

Goal 3: Foothill College has community-based partnerships in low-income and historically underrepresented communities, reflective of diverse and culturally relevant outreach models.

Goal 4: Foothill College implements and operationalizes credit for prior learning practices, including but not limited to competency-based education, challenge exams, third-party evaluators, industry certification, etc.

Issue 4. The current lack of coordinated infrastructure for basic needs services at the college (psychological services, food pantry, transportation, and homeless referrals) can make it prohibitive for students of color to access services.

• Goal 1: Foothill students seeking basic needs resources experience a streamlined referral process, providing coordinated assistance for all aid they are eligible for.
• Goal 2: Students’ housing needs are met. Long- and short-term housing solutions will be explored, including (but not limited to) homelessness initiatives in the county, transitional housing programs, and student housing. Students most impacted by housing concerns are empowered to lead conversations around potential solutions.
• Goal 3: Students’ transportation needs are met. Uncover the specific concerns around transportation; determine what is actionable, what may need to be revisited, and what actions are out of the college’s control.
• Goal 4: Students’ psychological needs are met. Creative solutions on how to expand racial trauma-informed psychological services for students will be investigated and employed.

Issue 6. Many programs perpetuate structural racism by failing to educate students on the history and ongoing racism implicit and explicit in their disciplines.

• Goal 1: The curriculum is explicitly race conscious.

• 1. Course outlines in every discipline include the epistemology of the field, highlighting the contributions of racially diverse scholars, and address the discipline’s historical and contemporary racial equity issues.
  2. Curriculum policies and processes prioritize equity outcomes. Where disproportionate impact is the outcome of policy implementation or compliance, the College Curriculum Committee and Administration take action to analyze the disproportionate impact and mitigate it and when necessary, work to advocate for change at the board and/or state level where the policy or process is beyond local control.
• Goal 2: Pedagogy is race conscious.
  1. Faculty are knowledgeable about the epistemology of their disciplines, especially about the contributions of racially diverse scholars, and they effectively educate students in these topics.
  2. Faculty are knowledgeable about historical and contemporary racial equity issues in their disciplines, and they effectively educate students on these issues.
  3. Faculty are aware of approaches for using their discipline to prepare students to be racially conscious and community and global leaders through opportunities such as service leadership.
  4. Faculty use culturally responsive pedagogy and engage in ongoing professional development around their teaching practices.
• Goal 3: Faculty are supported in their efforts to deepen their understanding of the racialized contexts of their discipline, including the contributions of diverse scholars in their field, update their curricula, and iteratively refine their teaching.
• Goal 4: Administration collaborates with the Academic Senate and the Faculty Association to support instructional efforts to achieve goals 1 and 2, by removing structural barriers to pedagogical success that are embedded in tenure, reemployment preference, and evaluation processes.
  1. Tenure processes support tenure-track faculty, tenure review committee members, and mentors in normalizing the practice of being race conscious while being supportive of continuous learning around this issue.
  2. Faculty evaluations are seen as an opportunity to continuously build on the quality of our teaching and are viewed as an opportunity to recognize outstanding performance, improve satisfactory performance, and provide useful feedback to encourage the growth and improvement of faculty both contractually and in actual practice.
  3. The processes by which part-time faculty attain and retain reemployment preference ensure these faculty receive the institutional support, resources, and mentoring they need to succeed and ensure their students' success.
• Goal 5: The Administration, Academic Senate, and Faculty Association collaborate to support practitioner efforts to achieve Goal 2 by ensuring faculty workload, including class size policies, realistically positions faculty to implement culturally responsive pedagogy effectively.

Issue 7. Insufficient culturally responsive, relevant, and sustaining pedagogy and other asset-based approaches in teaching and serving our students of color.

• Goal 1: Foothill College faculty, staff, and administrators are racially diverse.
  1. Racially diverse employees are retained
  2. Policies or procedures around course assignments do not disproportionately impact faculty of color.
• Goal 2: Faculty are supported in their efforts to iteratively self-evaluate their proficiency with culturally responsive pedagogy.
• Goal 3: Content and pedagogy are inclusive of and created with communities of color in mind.
• Goal 4: The college creates an Ethnic Studies division and hires demographically diverse faculty.

Issue 8. Microaggressions and unconscious bias negatively affect experience and learning for students of color.

• Goal 1: Foothill will reduce or decrease the climate of racial microaggressions. Welcome candid conversations about them.
• Goal 2: Campus culture supports explicit checking (39*) of unconscious bias.
• Goal 3: Professional development opportunities informed by or in partnership with students will be available to employees.

*39. Feeling supported in identifying when bias occurs and willingness to have the difficult conversation that may result.

Issue 9. Lack of a college-wide retention plan for students of color to progress through their academic career at Foothill.

• Goal 1: The college has a coordinated plan with a set of successful, culturally relevant interventions in play that retains students through three important milestones in a term: 1) course registration through to census, 2) from census through the end of the quarter with successful course completion, and 3) successful enrollment in the subsequent term. Specifically, this plan would consist of strategies that not only are proven effective for Foothill’s most vulnerable student populations (in this case, African-American and Latinx women) but can also be inclusive and encompassing of other populations’ needs.
• Goal 2: The promising practices of existing retention programs and learning communities are incorporated into the rest of the campus.
• Goal 3: The college addresses the retention challenges that arise when students, staff, and faculty do not have access to the physical campus and cannot meet with students in a traditional face-to-face environment. Challenges include but are not limited to privacy for confidential conversations, dedicated studying spaces with easy access to academic materials, resources and employee support, and connection to a college community that counteracts student isolation in higher education.

Issue 10. Lack, or underutilization, of campus support resources (tutoring, career center, transfer center, etc.).

• Goal 1: Tutoring models lead with equity to enhance access and utilization of their services. Ample support is provided to ensure the success of AB705 implementation.
• Goal 2: Career exploration support is offered at the onset of students’ educational journey with special focus on early intervention for Latinx and African-American students, careful to avoid implicit bias of channeling low-income & students of color into lower-wage programs.
• Goal 3: Service leadership activities promote peer-to-peer connections and emphasize college navigation, social support, and the building of cultural capital.
• Goal 4: The college is able to identify and address the challenges in accessing resources and support that are unique to students who engage with our campus exclusively online.

Issue 11. Students accessing our classes and services online are not receiving comparable spaces, resources, and services as students who access them on campus.

• Goal 1: The college understands the challenges students who access Foothill exclusively online face.
• Goal 2: Assessment of online services is sustained by the college because there will always be online students. The college will maintain a capacity of services comparable to the level of enrollment.
• Goal 3: All online classes are using the Online Equity Affirmation as a foundational lens for online course design.
• Goal 4: Technology and resources offered, at minimum, provide a comparable student experience as face-to-face.
• Goal 5: Faculty are fully equipped and prepared to teach effectively in the online/virtual environment.

Issue 12. Program and service area assessments did not invoke meaningful discussion and action around equity efforts.

• Goal 1: Equity is central to the program review process. Practitioners are well supported with quantitative and qualitative information (data) and resources to analyze their equity trends and efforts.
• Goal 2: The college identifies equity trends in programs and service areas and seeks to meaningfully engage others in college-wide discussions about what to do.

Issue 13: Across the California Community College system, all students are not succeeding in comparable rates at reaching their educational goals.

• Goal 1: Completion
  1. Increase all students who earned an associate degree (including ADTs) by 25%
  2. Increase all students who earned a Chancellor’s Office-approved certificate by 50%
  3. Increase all students who attained one or more of the following: Chancellor’s Office approved certificate, associate degree, and/or CCC baccalaureate degree, by 25%
• Goal 2: Transfer
  1. Increase all students who earned an associate degree for transfer by 25%
  2. Increase all students who transferred to a CSU or UC institution by 25%
     1. Increase transfer of African American students to a CSU or UC by 25%
     2. Increase transfer of Latinx students to a CSU or UC by 35%
     3. Increase transfer of LGBT to CSU or UC by 75%
     4. Increase transfer of veterans to CSU or UC by 75%
  3. Increase transfer of veterans to CSU or UC by 75%
• Goal 3: Unit Accumulation
  1. Decrease average number of units accumulated by all associate degree earners by 10%
• Goal 4: Workforce
  1. Increase median annual earnings of all students by 9%
  2. Increase all students who attained the living wage by +5 percentage points
     1. Reduce the living wage gap for females by -3 percentage points
     2. Reduce the living wage gap for African Americans by -5 percentage points
     3. Reduce the living wage gap for Latinx by -5 percentage points
     4. Reduce the living wage gap for Pacific Islanders by -5 percentage points
  3. Increase the number of students employed in their field of study by +2 percent
• Goal 5: African American students are consistently supported throughout the Connection phase, perhaps via a case management model shown to be successful at the college.
• Goal 6: There are no barriers in our enrollment and registration processes, regardless of the desired modality of class registration, on campus or online.