Dear City Colleges Community & Friends:

This past year, I have spent a great deal of time talking with our students – listening to their concerns, their needs, and about their experiences at City Colleges.  I am heartened to hear that our colleges, through the work of our faculty and staff, are changing lives.  At the same time, I am motivated to do more for our students who too often find obstacles along the path to achieving their dreams.  The five-year strategic framework and strategic plans that we outlined a year ago are central to removing many of these barriers and putting our students on the path to success.  While our strategic plans involve multi-year efforts, we have seen strong early progress towards our goals this year.

Our strategic plan work brings us closer to realizing our vision –to be recognized as the city’s most accessible higher education engine of socioeconomic mobility and racial equity – empowering all Chicagoans to take part in building a stronger and more just city. This vision is rooted in our values of student centeredness, equity, excellence, economic responsiveness, collaborative, and institutional health.Over the last year, faculty, staff, students, and partners have lived these values while working together in a continuous improvement process to implement their plans.

We are doing this work in the context of a global pandemic that has impacted our students’ lives and how we serve them.  Many of our students faced challenges before the pandemic, from homelessness to food insecurity, and have since found themselves confronting even greater hurdles.  In the face of this need, weredoubled our studentsupports– from student financial, technology, and wellness supports to a greater array of online class options – and are planning on how to strategically sustain theseenhancements for years to come.The work of the plans has proven even more urgent with the added pressures COVID has placed upon our students and communities.

We remain committed to creating an exceptional student experience from pre-admissions to completion.  As such, this year, we have implemented a student coaching model at all colleges that includes advisers, faculty and other support staff.  We have undertaken a review of our student enrollment processes and are systematically addressing barriers to access.  We have launched Streamlined Student Success (3S), a three-pronged project to implement a customer relationship management system, rebrand the institution, and revamp our website to improve the student experience.  We significantly increased our scholarships and financial assistance through the Chancellor’s Retention Grant, the Pepsi Uplift Scholarship, the ACE Scholarship, the Panther Pride Scholarship,the Statesmen Scholarship, the Black Excellence and Equity Fund and the Timuel Black Scholars program.Through Future Ready, launched in Fall using federal stimulus funds, we offer studentsaccess to 90+short-term programs at no-cost.  We are committed to removing all barriers to our students’ ability to access a quality, post-secondary education.

In pursuit ofexcellence and equity, we are making strong progress on the Chicago Roadmap,the path toour strongest-ever relationship with the Chicago Public Schools.  This past year, through the Roadmap, we saw thelaunch of a Transitional English curriculum in 13 CPS high schools, and the expansion of Transitional Math from 13 high schools to 15 schools, with a twelve percent increase in students passing their course.  Transitional English and Math allow CPS students the chance to start directly in college level coursework at City Colleges. We also launched a 15-credit healthcare model pathway for students at eight CPS high schools, which gives students access to an early college curriculum as early as freshman year.  We completed the design of three information technology model pathways and an advanced manufacturing pathway to launch in fall 2022.  We launched a pre-apprenticeship program designed to support students’ career exploration, and launched a new virtual dual credit course at 14 CPS high schools.  We grew the number of CPS high schools served by post-secondary navigators to 46, providing CPS students with transitional support, and launched a new strategy to reduce summer melt that led to a 17-percentage point increase in college matriculation.  Collaboration at all levels of CPS and CCC faculty and staff have been key to this success.

We are committed to addressing the economic needs of our city and have worked to build pathways and partnerships that unlock transformational opportunities for our students.Our Centers of Excellence continue to develop new credit and continuing education programs in high-demand fields, notably in technology and cannabis operations.This year, we forged a relationship with University of Chicago that involves faculty and staff from both institutions working to create pathways in growingSTEM fields like data science.  We developed several new transfer agreements to offer students a clear path to further their education in high-demand fields, including a new transfer agreement with the Mid-America Carpenters Regional Council and Dawson Technical Institute, a transfer agreement in accounting between Southern Illinois University and Harold Washington College, and a transfer agreement with UIC’s Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing program and Malcolm X College.  We also launched our first cohort of future CPS teachers through the Teach Chicago Tomorrow program at Truman College.We continue to grow the Weekend Warriors program to provide short-term certificates to students living in communities at risk for violence.  We also made physical enhancements to improve the learning environment with a new Tech Launchpad at Kennedy-King College and the Innovation One Technology, Training, and Resource Center at Truman College.

Collaborationhas been central to our work both with external partners and internally among our faculty and staff.  The Chancellor’s Leadership Forum, a monthly meeting of 75+ City Colleges staff, helps to break down silos between the colleges and with district office.  The Developmental Education Committee, led by Provost Potter and with strong faculty representation, outlined 20 steps to improve college readiness and student outcomes.

The health of our institution should never be taken for granted.  We outlined and piloted a new net promoter score measure to understand student satisfaction.  We put in place a new system to streamline legal contract reviews. We developed centralized methods of expense reporting and executed on a collaborative, district-wide HEERF III budget planning effort.  We began to restructure our advancement work to better position our fundraising team.

We measure progress across our students’ journeys – from their ability to access our institution, to their momentum through their programs, to their ability to complete and achieve upward mobility. Our key performance indicator targets were set pre-pandemic, and we know that COVID-19 has had an impact on our students.  We also know that when we focus on improving student outcomes, we see progress.   Passing gateway math and English courses are critical to our students’ persistence and completion. We placed a particular focus on the percentage of students taking and passing English and math in their first year.  We ended up exceedingboth our floor and reach targets in these areas, and increasing the percentage of students passing math by ten percentage points and English by two percentage points over the prior year.  This attention to our freshman students also could be seen as we exceeded our fall to spring retention goal for first year students and reached 98% of our retention goal for all credit students. We will continue to dedicate targeted resources to our students’ first-year experience.

We attained the highest IPEDS graduation rate in City Colleges history.  The IPEDS graduation rate, a federal measure of first-time, full-time students who complete within 150% of time, met our target at 26 percent.  Recognizing the limitations of this measure, we also added a new four-year outcome measure this year, which found 36 percent of credential-seeking students new to City Colleges earned a degree, certificate, or transferred to a four-year college within four years of enrollment.

Enrollment continues to be a challenge for City Colleges and community colleges nationwide.  In FY21, we reached 94% of our enrollment target at 68,832 students, with particular growth among continuing education students and a decline in adult education students.  We have numerous strategic efforts underway focused on creating an exceptional student experience and removing barriers to access.  While we believe our efforts will help to stabilize enrollment in the years ahead, we must first contend with the full impact of the pandemic, the effects of which will appear more starkly in our FY22 enrollment, retention and completion measures.

In the face of challenges, we are resolved to work our plans, making course corrections as results and conditions demand. In the year ahead, we will continue to focus on the first year experience with special attention to fall to fall retention in the first year.  We will also focus on the adult learner, and engage the community in supporting reengagement of those out of school for more than a year.  We will continue to develop our plan for an exceptional student experience that will culminate in a new student promise and standards of service.  We will strive to be an institution where cost is not a barrier to entry and scale our Future Ready program, among others, to serve as a model community college system that is “as free as we can be”.  As an institution that prides ourself on our diversity, we will assess and redouble our anti-racism work.

We cannot do this work alone.  City Colleges is an institution of and for the community and we rely on strong relationships with our partners in the community, higher education, and employers to help support our students as we all make our path forward.

We continue to find our strength in our unified vision and values, and in being seven strong.

Sincerely,

Juan Salgado,
Chancellor
City Colleges of Chicago