Post pandemic, more students are reporting that they feel uncertain about how to navigate college processes which feel like a maze to them—and they want and need help from faculty.

As with any large organization of people, we know that we have plenty of members doing great things—and we also know that there's always room for improvement.

You can look at Courtney's promotions article and see how many of our members met or exceeded the requirements for their respective promotions this year. You can read about any of our members' JEDI comments and/or contributions and see that they're committed to making SCCC a better place for all of our students.

And you definitely should come to our 2nd annual FA/Guild Spring Fling at 6 pm on Thursday, April 21, at the Bellport Country Club, where you'll hear about the truly outstanding work of even more of our members.

At the same time, we need to be honest with ourselves and take a long look inward to see how more of us can go the extra mile to help the students who are struggling at SCCC. Those students need us and, given our expertise in our essential work, we're the right people to help them.

This became even more apparent to me on the evening of Monday, February 28, when two of my students, Athena Giangrasso and Dominique Mauldin, had the honor of addressing NYS elected officials via Zoom about what their education at SCCC means to them. Dominque and Athena had the courage to tell their stories to some of the most powerful people in New York, including Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins.

The narratives of our students are moving. They make great sacrifices in order to pursue their education. In March, I was asked by NYSUT to be an observer for two focus groups of students who were considering leaving college or had already left college. The focus group students who shared their stories were from both CUNY and SUNY community colleges.

The good news is that the participants viewed community colleges as a viable, low-cost option to pursue their education. Additionally, participants reported that they enjoy the freedom to explore multiple areas of interest (for students who were undecided about their major).

The bad news is that some areas where students felt colleges could improve to help ease their struggles was also consistent within both focus groups.

While low-cost education was appealing, the CUNY and SUNY community college students in these focus groups disclosed that they have been burdened with other financial commitments and responsibilities. This impacted the amount of time they could dedicate to their studies as a result of having to take on a full-time job or help with family matters.

Additionally, students disclosed a lack of consistent instruction from their professors. To be clear, nearly all of the participants were able to think of at least one instructor they found to be excellent—but the participants also reported that they had many instructors that the students perceived were not helpful or did not care.

Some focus group students thought the quality of instruction did not equal the amount of the money they were spending with one student noting, “I didn’t think I was learning as much as I was spending.”

Overall, the quality of instruction was by far the most negative item these community college participants discussed during the focus groups.

Another area participants found frustrating was the lack of counselors and support staff at their respective institutions. Often students felt “lost,” as they put it, when it came to navigating financial aid, academic advisement and college and campus resources. For first-generation students and for any student who just spent several years in a tumultuous mix of remote and in-school learning, college really can feel like a complex maze.

In an ongoing era of plummeting enrollment, awful retention and graduation rates and a lack of resources to support community colleges, this critical student feedback on where we need to improve is disconcerting but also informative.

No one will doubt that more resources are needed to help our students along in their journey, but these focus groups teach us that our students often feel isolated in the big maze of higher education and, significantly, they are looking to us as faculty for help.

They know that we have the expertise and they want us to share it with them. We need to provide that help.

In the FA, we will continue to engage the college administration in the important conversations of retention and how we can improve our existing practices and systems at SCCC. We want all students to know that they belong here and that we will do our best to help them succeed.