News

Southeast Community College was awarded the Ellucian Impact Award for 2022 in the Change Leadership category, which recognizes school leaders who led ambitious technology initiatives and successfully managed change across multiple groups toward clear, common goals.

Dr. Paul Illich, SCC president, accepted the award April 13 on the final day of the Ellucian Live 2022 conference in Denver.

“Our proposal for the Ellucian Impact Award was about our transformational journey we’ve engaged in the over the last several years,” Illich said. “We converted, over a four-year period, from a quarter to a semester calendar system, we added six learning centers, we implemented a new enrollment management model based on trend data to ensure that we’re providing a course schedule that meets the students where they’re at, and we developed a new advising model. What’s incredible about our story is all of these major initiatives happened simultaneously.

“The second challenge was extremely important to address, and that was creating a data infrastructure to allow us to know exactly how we needed to position ourselves to accomplish all of this transformation at the same time.”

During the initiatives, SCC used various Ellucian products, including Colleague, connectivity software for student data; CRM Advise, the customer relationship management tool for advising; and CRM Recruit, software used by the Admissions Office to track prospective students.

SCC saw modest enrollment gains from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021 while overall community college enrollment declined by 6% for Fall 2021.

The implementation of the new advising model also brought positive results. The pilot group had a better success rate (defined as receiving a final grade of A, B, C, or P in a course), 73%, compared to 61% in the comparison group (comprised of all undergraduates in their first term at SCC who were declared in a program of study). The pilot group’s withdrawal rate was 10%, compared to 13% in the comparison group. And the retention rate from Fall 2019 to Spring 2020 for the pilot group was 79%, compared to 74% in the comparison group.

Illich said software is vital to allow the College to make data-informed decisions related to student success.

“We leverage Colleague to create a very comprehensive data warehouse system that allows us to have eyes on every aspect of the institution,” he said. “The award is a wonderful reminder as to why we’re all here and that is for the students.”