Santa Barbara City College is sharing this year’s Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, along with the $800,000 prize, with Walla Walla Community College in Washington.
“The campus is saturated with academic support, including a writing center staffed by trained professionals and prove to improve course completion, and peer tutors embedded in hundreds of class sections,” wrote the Aspen Institute in its profile of SBCC.
Santa Barbara City College President Lori Gaskin (L) with Second Lady Jill Biden, at the Washington, D.C. ceremony where SBCC tied for the 2013 Aspen Institute Prize for Community College Excellence. Photo: Patrice Gilbert. (Click to enlarge).
College president Lori Gaskin received the award during a ceremony Tuesday at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. The college was a finalist last year for the award, which recognizes innovative community colleges. The award is coordinated by the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy organization.
Gaskin cited a culture of striving for excellence and not accepting the status quo for the college’s success.
“We are unafraid to take risks, unafraid to experiment, unafraid to say, ‘Let’s try something different or better,’” she said.
Winners are selected for showing “outstanding achievement” in four areas: student learning outcomes, degree completion, how successful students are in finding good jobs after completing their program, and the college’s ability to recruit minority and low-income students and help them succeed.
SBCC is above the national average in all those categories.
- More than 30 percent of the school’s nearly 28,000 students are Hispanic and of those, 48 percent graduate with three years, compared with 35 percent nationally.
- 64 percent of all first-time, full-time students graduate within three years; the national rate is 40 percent.
- Within five years of graduating with a two-year degree, Santa Barbara City College alumni earn about $43,000 a year.
- 57 percent of full-time students transfer to a four-year college within six years, and more than half of them go on to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Aspen Institute Executive Director Josh Wyner said Santa Barbara is especially strong in two areas. “At Santa Barbara City College, faculty and staff are providing students just what they need to transfer and complete a four-year degree – a rigorous classroom education surrounded by first-rate supports from remedial math to college level writing.”
Gaskin said she hasn’t had time to think about how to use the college’s $400,000 share of the prize money, but would like it to meet “the spirit and intent of the Aspen Institute’s Community College Excellence Program,” and have a lasting impact.
“I’d like that funding to pay it forward in some way,” she said. “I’d like it to be some way in perpetuity providing something to our faculty and staff and students.”
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