Many community college students balance their pursuit of academic success with a job, family, or both, and around a third are first-generation students blazing their own trail in higher education. These factors make community college students ideal candidates for one-on-one success coaching with a focus on soft-skill development, goal setting, academic improvement, and orientation to campus resources.
Community colleges implementing success coaching have seen their students reap benefits in perseverance, academic performance, and credential attainment. This guide explains how success coaching positively impacts students and how to achieve optimal results from success coaching at your community college.
Community college students who stand to gain the most from success coaching are those grappling with one or more of these challenges:
If your community college aims to start or expand a success coaching program, expect to see significant results over time. Here are the top 10 positive impacts of success coaching for students.
Success coaching gives students a tailored advising experience, accounting for their unique backgrounds, needs, and goals. This advice can go beyond course selection and credit requirements to cover study skills, career prospects, and holistic well-being. Student data analytics and consistent student-coach relationships support maximal personalization in success coaching.
Coaches and students can collaborate on personalized SMART goals. While inspiring students to cast their own vision of academic success, coaches can help them clarify timelines, milestones, and methods. This process models goal-setting skills for students while motivating them to take ownership of their progress.
The coaching relationship is a safe point of contact from which students can feel supported to connect with faculty and peers, enhancing their confidence and well-being. This, combined with personalized guidance and goal setting, makes the college experience more engaging and satisfying.
Coaching sessions can equip students with skills that are vital to academic and career success but are seldom an explicit focus of course curricula. These skills include:
Success coaches can identify the study and support resources a student would most benefit from and proactively share them. These resources include:
By referring students to these resources, coaches can help overcome the reluctance and uncertainty some students feel toward seeking help.
Coaches can identify key academic improvement opportunities and provide study habit coaching, mentorship, and tutoring recommendations tailored to each student’s needs and learning styles. This can translate into higher GPAs and greater academic confidence.
With the constant support of their coach, students can learn effective strategies to manage stress, overcome challenges, and adapt to change. Acquiring and applying these tools in the real-world arena of community college forges resilient individuals ready for success in the classroom and beyond.
The support, encouragement, and mentorship that success coaches provide can help students overcome academic obstacles and persist to graduation. One study showed a 6 percent increase in fall-to-fall retention and an 8 percent increase in fall-to-next-spring retention when community colleges implemented success coaching.
Success coaching can improve a student’s likelihood of completing their qualification. However, the extent of this positive impact depends on success coaching implementation factors like:
Research shows that success coaching with institutional buy-in can lead to a 9 percent increase in credential completion and a 12 percent increase when a student remains with the same coach throughout their studies.
A success coaching program can help minority, first-generation, and at-risk students excel in the classroom and persist to graduation. For example, studies have shown retention improvements ranging from 8 percent to 50 percent among Black students with success coaches. This support makes a vital contribution toward closing equity gaps between the academic outcomes of student demographics.
Here are four ways to maximize your success coaching results:
Effective success coaching implementation at your community college can improve performance, retention, and equity among your students. As an industry-leading provider of higher education software, Watermark partnered with the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) to study the positive impacts of combining our solutions with success coaching. This study of 11 schools, called the Minority Male Success Initiative (MMSI), showed a 22.4 percent retention boost when institutions implemented Watermark Student Success & Engagement and hired student success coaches.
Student Success & Engagement can help your community college:
Request a free demo of Student Success & Engagement today to see how we can enhance success coaching at your community college.
