Designing with Careers in Mind

Their Approach

A streamlined schedule with reliable course offerings and clear pathways is key to student success and career advancement. Recognizing this, Lake Tahoe Community College (LTCC) aimed to build a student-centered schedule using data-informed guidelines. Before making sweeping changes, LTCC realized it was necessary to achieve a collective vision for a “Tahoe Clear” schedule. A cross-functional team from LTCC joined the IEPI Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) cohort to develop guiding principles and establish a thoughtful and systematic approach to scheduling based on a collective understanding of why SEM is meaningful for students. Those shared principles also enabled the group to implement a campus-wide plan for evaluating degree offerings, strategically scheduling courses, and ensuring that labor market information and students’ academic and career goals are primary drivers in decision making.

What They Did

Using a collaborative approach, LTCC organized stakeholders from across campus to address the issues of high course cancellation rates (which led students to lose trust in the schedule and created barriers for timely completion) and a number of degrees and certificates that were not directly supporting students’ goals. A SEM team with faculty, counselor, and administrator representation was tasked with analyzing enrollment and student data to create a streamlined three-year projected schedule that would allow students to obtain degrees and certificates within two years and would decrease course cancellation rates. Simultaneously, the College Learning and Enrollment Management Council, which has cross-campus representation, began reviewing all programs to streamline the catalog by recommending the elimination or revision of offerings that are duplicative, don’t meet student needs, or aren’t clearly aligned with college and career pathways.

What They Learned

Lake Tahoe has learned that the key to aligning successfully with career outcomes and streamlining degree and course offerings is to establish a shared vision for a positive student experience. It is also vital to take a collaborative approach and include voices from across the college in the process. By uniting around the “why,” LTCC has been able to bring a representative group of college constituents together in a productive and powerful way to help improve outcomes for students.