Comprehensive First Year Experience Program with Dr. Cynthia Mosqueda

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Learn about a highly successful comprehensive First Year Experience (FYE) program.

In this episode, I interview Dr. Cynthia Mosqueda, faculty coordinator, First Year Experience Program, El Camino College. 

(Scroll down to access the transcript.)

We discuss the following topics:

7:49:08: What is FYE exactly and what are the basic components of it at El Camino College?

16:53:02: What's needed to ensure a comprehensive FYE program is successful?

22:28:20: What can a campus do to start building a comprehensive FYE program?

29:04:17: How does FYE look like from the student perspective?

36:37:22: Alignment with the Guided Pathways framework.

39:39:12: What have been FYE student outcomes?

43:09:18: Addressing capacity issues by partnering with other programs.

46:09:15: How FYE has helped student complete a certificate/AA and/or transfer.

50:03:19: Changes to FYE services during the pandemic.

 
Other resources:

El Camino College First Year Experience Program

For more information, contact Dr. Cynthia Mosqueda: cmosqueda[at]elcamino.edu 

Select Dr. Mosqueda quotes:

"If you want to have the kind of success that we've had at El Camino College, if you want to get as large as we have at El Camino, we've only been able to do that because we have a full-time team. If it's one person who's overseeing the entire first year experience program, it's not going to work. It can't be an individual that has 50% release time, and it's just that one person. You can't scale like that. You have to have the support. One of the reasons we've been around for 20 years and have been successful is because we have a full-time team. I oversee this program full-time. I have a co-coordinator who oversees the instructional component, full-time, who's helping with recruitment of the faculty, professional development for the faculty, and overseeing our faculty development meetings. I oversee the student services side of the component. But even on the student services side, we have full-time faculty. We have anywhere between 12 to 15 adjunct counselors that work in the program. We have a full-time secretary. We have about two full-time advisors and three additional success coaches on top of that. So, we're talking about this is a team of people! And we're 100% funded through district funds. We're not funded through soft money."

"You have to be willing to change. The model we have today is not the model we had in 2005 or 2010 or 2015. We have changed as the needs of our students have evolved over the years. And so the cohort structure has changed over the years. For example, we knew early on that we had to change the structure of some of the services to really align with guided pathways. We wanted to make sure that our cohorts were aligned with a lot of the meta-majors."

"Our institutional research office has done some studies that show that students who have a comprehensive educational plan on file in general will complete about 21 units per academic year versus students who only have an abbreviated plan. They might complete anywhere between 6 to 9 units. A comprehensive ed plan really plays a role in the number of units student take."

"When we originally kicked off this program 20 years ago, it had maybe 100 students. Today, it has about 2500 students that participate in first year experience. We have about 50 learning communities (e.g., linked courses) that we offer that are structured for first year students, and they're also aligned with guided pathways. And we have anywhere between 42 to 52 cohorts."

"Our students are three times more likely to graduate or transfer than first year students who did not participate in our FYE program."

"Our FYE students are three times as likely to pass their English and math class on first attempt than students who were not part of the cohort."

"A lot of times when programs get bigger and they don't increase the support services or the staff, you're going to see a gap in student outcomes. Because you just can't do the same amount of work when you get bigger if you don't have the proper support to do it."

"I think the theme of this podcast is partnerships. That's one of the things our program does really well is we partner up with other areas [such as the outreach department, the dual enrollment program, the Promise program, and the transfer center.]"

About Dr. Cynthia Mosqueda
Dr. Cynthia Mosqueda is the faculty coordinator for the First Year Experience Program at El Camino College, in Torrance, California. El Camino College’s FYE program has received accolades for exemplary program status through the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges and through the California Community College Chancellor’s Office for outstanding contributions toward student success, transfer, and retention. In 2012, Dr. Mosqueda received the First Year Advocate Award from the National Center for First Year Experience and Students in Transition from the University of South Carolina for her work in helping first-year students transition into college life.

Dr. Mosqueda holds a degree in counseling and earned a doctorate in Educational Leadership from UCLA. She has been a strong advocate for community college issues and serves on the board of Communities in School Los Angeles. In her 20 + years in the community college system, Cynthia has spearheaded numerous programs and campus-wide initiatives to close equity gaps for students of color.

About Dr. Al Solano
Al is Founder & Coach at the Continuous Learning Institute. A big believer in kindness, he helps institutions of higher education to plan and implement homegrown practices that get results for students by coaching them through a process based on what he calls the "Three Cs": Clarity, Coherence, Consensus. In addition, his bite-sized, practitioner-based articles on student success strategies, institutional planning & implementation, and educational leadership are implemented at institutions across the country. He has worked directly with over 50 colleges and universities and has trained well over 5,000 educators. He has coached colleges for over a decade, worked at two community colleges, and began his education career in K12. He earned a doctorate in education from UCLA, and is a proud community college student who transferred to Cornell University.

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