Student Success & Equity with Kathy Booth

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:

Learn how data can inform action to improve adult learner outcomes.

In this episode, I interview Kathy Booth, Project Director for Educational Data & Policy at WestEd.

(Scroll down to access the transcript.)

Focus of the episode: WestEd's Center for Economic Mobility

We cover the following key topics:

8:30:75: The Center for Economic Mobility resources and the significance of Skills Builder students

27:41:00: Strategy for transitioning Skills Builders into a transfer pathway

36:24:00: Psychology major: A liberal arts example that leads to careers in business & management

47:00:50: Structural change: relentless clarity & piece meal change to win hearts and minds (and avoiding Death by Pilot) 

58:28:00: Adapting to Artificial Intelligence

Select Kathy Booth episode quotes:

"Our most common group is the one that we refer to as if they are uncommon: adult learners."

"If you were to create a chart that looked at the number of students who are transferring and going on and earning a bachelor's degree for a community college setting, it is inversely related to the age of your students. We need to figure out ways to make education work better for those folks who have more in their lives than school. Unfortunately, we still run our institutions as if our students have all of the time in the world to go to school. I know that lots of people in our colleges wish that were true, but it's not. They've got jobs. They've got family responsibilities. And so if we could be designing our institutions around the reality that people have to flex schooling around these other responsibilities and priorities, we would do better serving everybody. And that could help us address the enrollment crisis that a lot of us are experiencing. And all this is a lead up to why we founded the Center for Economic Mobility."

"Somewhere between one in seven and one in nine of all first time community college students are participating in very short term course taking. We call these students 'Skills Builders.' Skills Builders get a significant short term boost. On average, $7,000 more a year, which if you want to talk about return on investment is fantastic. Take one class makes $7,000 more. I think a lot of us would want to do that, but it's not enough to get people to go up an economic rung."

"We're having this national conversation in which a lot of people are saying that they don't think it's important to earn a bachelor's degree, that it's sufficient to take a couple of classes, get a certificate, and then you can get a good job. Unfortunately, that is not what the labor market shows. There are definitely some occupations like welding and truck driving where you can do a short amount of training and get a really decent salary. But for most folks, that just isn't true."

"We at the Center for Economic Mobility have created a methodology so that any college researcher could very simply go in and identify how prevalent Skills Builders are in their institutions and identify what are the courses they are taking. We created a resource guide that explains what to do with that information. So basically, you can map those couple of classes onto your longer term credentials. So maybe someone's taking the first two courses in a sequence that leads to a certification in automotive, and then you could reach out to those students who are showing that kind of course taking and say, "Hey, why don't you come back and take these next three classes? And if you do, you can get this Toyota certification and you're going to make $30,000 more a year." That makes the value proposition really clear to individuals."

"There's a keynote speech that I sometimes give called 'The Seven Deadly Sins of Educational Reform,' and one of them is Death by Pilot. The reason why is that when we say, 'We're going to make change by helping a subset of our students, 142,' we're going to take our most talented change oriented people, and we're going to have them focus so hard on those 142 people. And it is amazing what those 142 students do. Incredible things. Then the other 10,000 students continue in a system that is not built for their success."

"What we're trying to do at the Center for Economic Mobility is find a place where colleges or adult schools or workforce development organizations really want to look at those underpinnings and figure out a better way to connect the money that we already have, the talent we already have to change what it feels like for most people going through those systems by just taking it down to a piece, really understanding the issue in your context. How do you make sense of that? What do you know that enriches a solution? And then walking people through that long change process so that we can stick with it, so that people can get through the rough days and keep pushing on because the students are clearly focused on that in their sights."

Learn more about the Center's services and get started. 

About Kathy Booth
Kathy Booth is Project Director for Educational Data & Policy at WestEd and staffs WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility, where she leads projects that help translate data into action. Her current projects include documenting how states are modernizing their linked data sets to strengthen equitable outcomes, measuring systems change efforts to broaden participation in STEM, and delivering technical assistance to community colleges on using labor market information to develop stronger pathways to living wages. Previously, she served as the Process Facilitator for the development of the California Cradle to Career Data System and supported the Guided Pathways movement. For over five years, she served as the Project Manager and architect for the LaunchBoard, a suite of dashboards that make data on student progress, completion, employment, and earnings outcomes available to educators for the purpose of program improvement. She also helps to map data across systems, including crosswalking K-12 and community college offerings, tracing adult education pathways from K-12 to community colleges, documenting educational pathways to employment, and aligning data captured by educational institutions and social service agencies that support workforce development. In her previous role as Executive Director of the RP Group, she led research and technical assistance projects in the areas of multiple measures, skills-builder pathways, and student support.

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 to improve student success and equity 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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