[Speaker 1] (0:44 - 1:12)
Thank you for providing time for the strategic plan review. I'm Douglas Walsers, serve as the provost. I'm joined by Scott Bennett, vice president of planning institutional effectiveness and research and enrollment management.

This workshop will be an update of the workshop that you saw in February, because now that a new academic year is underway, we have one more year of data to report on.

[Speaker 2] (1:19 - 1:25)
Good evening, everyone. And just as a point of privilege, because I know my daughter is watching, happy fifth birthday, Audrey.

[Speaker 3] (1:26 - 1:27)
Happy birthday. Happy birthday.

[Speaker 2] (1:29 - 7:09)
Thank you so much. All right. So before, yeah, I really do think so.

So before diving into the data, let's look at the strategic plan timeline. The plan was written in 2022, it was approved in December of 22, and it covers the period from the start of 2023 to the end of 2028. The big things that were on our minds when the plan was written were COVID recovery, SAC COC reaffirmation, replacing PeopleSoft, and the branch campus in Mont Belvieu.

And the plan was written to spread those things out so we didn't overwhelm ourselves. Of course, we expected there would be some surprises during the plan period, but we weren't expecting as many as we got. Some things that didn't exist in 2022 when we were writing the plan include artificial intelligence, performance-based funding, anti-DEI legislation, new federal rules for prison education programs, and the emphasis on post-graduation outcomes, including job placement and transfer.

These have all affected the strategic plan. All right. Student success is the first goal in the strategic plan, and it's measured by enrollment, retention, and completion.

As we look at student success, we need to remember that we have different populations of students. Regular enrolled students are about 45% of our population, dual credit students are about 40%, and prison education students are 15%. Figure 1 shows enrollment over time.

The blue line is the baseline, which is the average enrollment from 2019 to 2021, the three years prior to the start of the strategic plan. The target is shown as a green line. It reflects a 3% increase in regular enrollment and a 5% increase in dual credit and prison education program enrollment.

The red line marks the start of COVID. Regular enrollment declined for two years as a result of COVID. Prison education enrollment declined for one year.

Dual credit enrollment grew rapidly despite COVID. After the impact of COVID, enrollment grew steadily for all three groups. Regular enrollment grew slowly but steadily, but this year it has regressed by about 200 students.

It isn't clear if this is a trend or an anomaly. Dual credit increased massively from 2019 to 2022 as a result of a strategy on the part of GCCISD to focus on dual credit instead of other advanced courses for their students. We see another significant jump of 500 students this fall with an expansion of CTE education, career and technical education rather.

The enrollment of dual credit students is approaching the enrollment of regular enrollment students. The prison education program grew rapidly after COVID. There was a downturn last year as the supervision of prison education was transferred from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to Windham School District and increasing difficulty with transferring students to units where Lee College operates due to crowding in the prison system overall.

The recovery in enrollment this year is due largely to our new associative arts transfer program that enrolled over 150 new students. Graphs suggest that enrollment is growing steadily since COVID but at different rates for different populations. Figure 2 shows the percentage of high school seniors who enroll at Lee College immediately after graduation.

This figure is unchanged since you viewed it in February. New data will be released in January of 27. There's a significant decrease across all high schools for the class of 2020, which was at the peak of the COVID pandemic and in most cases for the class of 2021.

There's a noticeable increase for the class of 2022 as the pandemic diminished and many students wanted to re-engage with education at that time. For GCC ISD as a whole, 25 to 30 percent of graduating seniors enroll right after graduation. HISD also enrolls 25 to 30 percent of graduating seniors.

Rural schools including Crosby, Dayton, and Anahuac seem to have increased enrollment which may be the result of our shared college coordinators. As President Atkin has pointed out, about 50 percent of high school graduates do not enroll in college in the fall semester after finishing high school, nor do they join the military. This is a large population of potential college students.

The state has tried to increase college going rates with CCMR bonus which was created in 2019. The state pays school districts $3,000 per student that is college ready and enrolls in college in the fall semester after graduation. The bonus is $5,000 for students who are economically disadvantaged.

Lee College is doing its part. We created First Time Free at Lee to remove all the financial barriers for students who may be uncertain about attending college. Unfortunately, this is a stubborn problem and CCMR bonuses and First Time Free haven't been enough to make a significant change.

This remains a challenge for the college and our partner ISDs and the entire state of Texas.

[Speaker 4] (7:10 - 7:12)
Scott, again CCMR stands for?

[Speaker 2] (7:12 - 7:15)
College Career Military Readiness.

[Speaker 3] (7:18 - 7:19)
Dr. Bennett.

[Speaker 2] (7:19 - 7:20)
Thank you for the yeses.

[Speaker 3] (7:20 - 7:26)
One quick question. The slide, the bottom four ISDs have Liberty Center in parentheses.

[Speaker 7] (7:29 - 7:34)
Not getting any of those students? Not Liberty Center students?

[Speaker 1] (7:40 - 7:51)
That's just to remind us that they participate as part of the Liberty Center, right? Those enrollment rates are for all of the students at those ISDs, not just the ones that went to the Liberty Center.

[Speaker 2] (8:01 - 11:25)
Okay, so student success and fall-to-fall retention. Fall-to-fall retention is defined as the percentage of first-time degree or certificate-seeking college students who enroll in the fall and are enrolled in the subsequent fall or graduate prior to the subsequent fall. Fall-to-fall retention does not apply to dual credit students because their enrollment is affected by many factors unrelated to academic success.

Figure three shows retention over time for full and part-time students and for regular enrollment students and prison education students. The blue and green lines represent the national average retention rates for community colleges for the COVID period year 2020 to 2021 and post-COVID 24 to 25. As you can see, we are very close to the national average.

Retention rates for regular enrollment students has been largely unchanged over the past several years. Retention of full-time prison education program students has declined for reasons that are not clear. All right, student completion.

The completion rates represent the percentage of students who finish a degree or certificate within 150 percent or 200 percent of normal time. An associate's degree is a two-year degree, so 150 percent of normal time is three years and 200 percent of normal time is four years. Most certificate students take one year, so 150 percent of normal time is 18 months.

And 200 percent of normal time is two years. Completion rates always have a three- or four-year lag because we have to wait that long to see who graduates and who doesn't. Figure four shows completion rates for Lee College for students who started in 2019 to 2023.

Regular enrollment students have completion rates of about 30 percent for full-time students and 16 percent for part-time students. These rates have been steady for several years. The national average for full-time community college students is 43 percent.

Students in our prison education program have completion rates of about 62 percent for full-time students and 46 percent for part-time students. The completion rate for full-time prison education program students has declined for reasons that are not clear yet. All right, table one provides a comparison with our Gulf Coast peer group.

The comparison is based on the three-year completion rate for full-time students and the four-year completion rate for part-time students. This is not the same as the 150 percent or 200 percent rate, but it is what the THECB uses, so we use it for comparison. We remove PEP students from this comparison because none of the comparison colleges have large PEP programs and PEP students have much higher completion rates.

The college does well with the three-year completion rate for full-time students, but the four-year completion rate for part-time students is low.

[Speaker 7] (11:30 - 11:32)
Oh, yes, prison education program.

[Speaker 1] (11:40 - 15:38)
So, as we mentioned at the beginning, there's an increasing emphasis on end goals, transfer and placement in jobs, and so this increased attention is at both state and federal level. Transfer is getting a lot of attention and it's tied directly to our state funding. And as we pointed out, let's see, transfer rate is just a ratio.

The numerator is the number of students who transfer, the denominator is the number of students who wanted or indicated that they wanted to transfer, and this slide gives you different formulas. The top row shows the formula we use at Lee. The middle formula is the one used by the THECB, so when we're comparing ourselves to our peers, we use the middle.

So, here are the transfer rates after three or six years for Lee College students. So, three-year and six-year means after their initial enrollment at Lee College. In the denominator column, that's going to be the number of students who indicated that they intended to transfer, and those are the number of students who entered in the fall semester of those particular years.

You can see we're currently at a pretty high rate in the fall of 2022 with over 800 students. Our three-year transfer rate has declined a bit over the years. Our six-year transfer rate has remained constant.

The TBD because it hasn't been six years yet for those classes of students. When we compare ourselves to our peers, now using the THECB formula, you can see that our six-year transfer rate is on the low side compared to the other colleges in our region. The other end goal is employment, right?

Community colleges are increasingly responsible for the employment of graduates of workforce programs. Workforce students aren't just in college to get the degree or the certificate. They're here to advance their careers and increase their wages, and it's reinforced at the federal level by the new Do No Harm framework and at the state level by the Return on Investment framework.

We are really fortunate. We are in the first cohort of colleges in the Employment Outcomes Support Project, which is led by the Ray Marshall Center out of the University of Texas at Austin. I'm showing you the other colleges that are in that group.

The purpose of this project is to report on the wages of graduates for each program at each college. The project began in April of 2025. We got our first set of wage data just three months ago, excuse me, about four months ago in June.

So a little bit about their methodology. They look at the date that the student receives their degree, and that is their completion date. They look at how much the student earned in the year before they received their degree because they want to see the effect of receiving their degree.

So you need to have the before number before you start looking at what they earned after their degree, and they track students for five years.

[Speaker 4] (15:40 - 15:44)
What if they weren't working the year before they graduated?

[Speaker 1] (15:45 - 16:11)
Then they didn't earn any money. So what they report on are wages reported on unemployment insurance records. So if a student had no wages, they wouldn't show up, and what they're reporting on are median wages, average wages, but they don't count zeros.

So only students who had reported wages get calculated in the median.

[Speaker 7] (16:16 - 16:21)
So if they didn't work at all, they're not going to show up in the median wages.

[Speaker 1] (16:24 - 19:39)
I don't think it hurts us or helps us. It just enables us to better interpret the data. And I'm going to show you the data, and this is the first time we've had this kind of data.

I picked three AAS programs and three certificate programs. On the first line, I've got nursing, and you can see that before they get their nursing degree, the median wage was $17,000. Most nursing students do not have time to work while they are in nursing school.

But after they get their degree, by year number two, the median is almost $97,000. So that nursing degree pays off, but I think we all knew that. If we look at process technology, before they get the degree, the median wage is $30,000.

We know a lot of our process technology students work during the day, and they come and take classes in the evening, so that number is not surprising. And again, two years after they finish their degree, the median wage has more than doubled. That is a field that's paying off.

I also put up the addiction counseling program. You can see before they earn their degree, $13,000, that's minimum wage-ish. Earnings or part-time earnings.

After they get their degree, it's not the same as process tech or nursing, but their salary grows substantially after getting that degree. Looking at the three certificates, the machinist millwright one kind of surprised me. You know, those are already highly paid, skilled workers coming back to upskill.

Before they got their degree, they're earning $75,000. That's, I think, a very respectable salary. After they get their degree, you can see how their wages climb with those additional skills.

Five, they're at $120,000. Drafting, similar but not as strong. Right?

Earning $38,000 before they get their degree. After they get their degree, steady climb by year five, the median wage is set. I'm not sure I understand the drop in the first year.

I'm not sure if they're looking for a new job, they went through some period of unemployment, or perhaps there are students who weren't counted in the pre-award because they had zero earnings, and they're now getting an entry-level job, which maybe brings down the median a little bit. Like I said, we've never had this data before. This is the first set that we got in June.

So you get, you know, you get to sort of share in the discovery. What does this actually mean? You know, certainly for the examples up here, I think it shows the value of the degree.

[Speaker 3] (19:40 - 19:48)
Walter, I would say on the CAD drafting, that could be field workers who don't want to work in the field anymore.

[Speaker 1] (19:48 - 19:48)
Absolutely.

[Speaker 3] (19:48 - 19:59)
So you're right that the next year, once they have their certificate, they're taking an entry-level office job to get out of the heat in the environment and waiting for it to pay off.

[Speaker 1] (20:01 - 20:31)
Yeah, which it does. So I've got six programs here. The college has 70 programs.

I do have data on all 70 programs, but I did not want to do them all tonight. But I, but this is the first time we've had this kind of data. I think this really adds to our understanding of the labor market outcomes that our students achieve on in their different programs.

[Speaker 3] (20:31 - 20:40)
I would, I would say the business didn't perform as well, prove as well.

[Speaker 1] (20:41 - 20:47)
I would agree that a certificate in business is one that needs to be continued.

[Speaker 3] (20:49 - 20:51)
Education needs to continue after that certificate.

[Speaker 8] (20:52 - 20:53)
Yes.

[Speaker 7] (20:59 - 21:23)
Yeah, certificates are mostly one-year programs, two-semester programs. Right.

[Speaker 1] (21:24 - 23:33)
In the strategic plan, the first section is all student success, and all that you've seen thus far has been about student success, including the new data on transfer and post-graduation outcomes. The second part of the strategic plan is expanding opportunity. And in this part, we used to disaggregate all of our data by race, gender, and ethnicity to look for performance gaps between those groups.

SB 17 has made that kind of disaggregation not useful. So you're going to see a different kind of disaggregation tonight. Now, our mission statement says we look beyond stereotypes to ensure that all students have what they need to be successful.

And what I'm going to show you is something called the Economic Hardship Index. The Economic Hardship Index is made up of six factors. The first one is poverty, which is the percentage of families with income below the poverty line.

That makes sense. Per capita income is the income per person. Educational attainment is the percentage of adults who did not complete high school.

Employment is the percentage of working-age adults who are unemployed. Dependency is the percentage of the population who are younger than 18 or older than 65. And crowded housing is the percentage of housing units where there is more than one occupant per room in the house.

Those are the six elements. When you average them, just a normal arithmetic mean, you get the Economic Hardship Index. None of these six elements reflects race, ethnicity, gender, or any other federally protected class.

So the Economic Hardship Index can be used to drive college programming and resources.

[Speaker 3] (23:34 - 23:34)
Equally weighted.

[Speaker 1] (23:35 - 24:33)
They are equally weighted. This is a map of our service area. And the boundaries you see are census tracts.

Census tract contains roughly 4,000 people. There are geographically large tracts in the rural parts of our service area where the population density is low. And when you get around Baytown, the census tracts get very, very small and very tightly packed.

But the point is, each one is roughly the same size in terms of population. And each one has its own Economic Hardship Index. Census provides those six factors for each census tract.

So if I know where students live, I make the assumption that I know something about hardships that they're facing because of the Economic Hardship Index for their census tract.

[Speaker 7] (24:37 - 24:38)
All right.

[Speaker 1] (24:40 - 30:09)
So we are going to take a look at retention and transfer and completion as a function of your Economic Hardship Index. So we're now looking at fall-to-fall retention. We looked at the overall retention rate.

But now, on the left-hand side, you can see the retention rate of our full-time students, which hovers around 60%. On the right-hand side is the retention of our part-time students, around 40%. But you'll see there are five lines in each graph representing the economic hardship quintile.

Quintiles are just 20% pieces, right, by the population into fifths. That dark blue line, which is close to the top of the graph, is the 20% of students with the least hardship. Light blue line is the 20% of students with the greatest hardship.

And you can see in the scale at the top, the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, those represent from 1, the least hardship, to 5, the greatest hardship. And what we see in these graphs is there's not a lot of difference between people at different levels of hardship. So the level of hardship as measured by the Economic Hardship Index is not a good predictor of whether, right, it, like, let me rephrase that.

We seem to be providing the supports for students who have a lot of hardship so that they can perform at a similar level to students who have very little hardship. Because not a clear pattern and there's a lot of crisscrosses in lines. So this is retention.

The next slide we're going to look at is graduation rate. And we see a similar pattern. On the left are our full-time students, graduation rate around 30%.

On the right-hand side are part-time students, graduation rate a little below 20%. And again, five lines representing students at different levels of hardship. And there's just a lot of overlap and a lot of crisscrossing.

Again, suggesting that we provide enough support so that students who face a lot of hardship have what they need to perform at the same level as students who do not have a lot of hardship. The third graph is the transfer rate of our students. And here we see a different story.

So on the vertical axis, the transfer rate, you can see 5% up to 45%. And on the horizontal axis, we're saying, how many years has it been since you initially enrolled? And most of the time, we're looking either at three years or six years from initial enrollment.

And regardless of whether you look at three or six years, there's a clear distinction between the students who have the least amount of hardship, which is the dark blue line, and the students with the greatest amount of hardship, which is the light blue line. At the three-year level, students with the least hardship have about a 28% transfer rate. Students with the most hardship, a 10% transfer rate.

After six years, students with the least hardship are transferring a 35% rate. Students with the most hardship, a 25% rate. So a pretty big gap between students with significant hardship and students with little hardship.

So you get to see two things. First of all, you sort of get to see how our students are performing. And this is your first introduction to this new method of looking at providing opportunities for all of our students, regardless of their level of hardship.

And getting just to the summary, enrollment for our dual credit and prison education program is growing. Regular enrollment students, relatively flat. Only half of high school graduates are going to college.

And increasing that rate is going to require effort. Retention rates for regular enrollment students are flat, comparable to national average. Completion rates are flat and below national average.

Transfer rates, the three-year transfer rates have fallen slightly. Six-year transfer rates have been relatively constant. Difficult to compare because the way it's measured by the THECB is not the greatest.

Employment outcomes available for the first time, thanks to the Employment Outcomes Support Project and the Economic Hardship Index, has replaced the demographics that we used to use. And it appears to be most significant when we're looking at transfer. So, that is your strategic plan update.

Happy to entertain your questions. Questions for Dr. Walters?

[Speaker 4] (30:10 - 30:20)
I do. So, regular enrollment is flat. I know that you guys sit around and talk about that.

[Speaker 8] (30:22 - 30:22)
Who?

[Speaker 4] (30:22 - 30:27)
And, you know, why and what can we do? So, can you share just a little bit about that?

[Speaker 2] (30:34 - 33:11)
Sure. So, one of the things that we have invested in recently is a new CRM, Customer Relations Management System. So, let me give you a brief example.

When a student applies to the college, one of the things our recruitment office does is we follow up with a phone call. We follow up with an email, try to track that student and make sure that they get what they need and make sure it wasn't just a random act of application, but intentional steps towards the college. There are times, due to issues with Applied Texas or PeopleSoft, that we might get batches of applications that are maybe 100, 200 applications at a time.

And so, a recruitment staff of three trying to make that personalized outreach is really difficult. Now, this is something that I believe very much in and the staff and recruitment very much believe that personal touch is a part of our brand and what we can bring to students. But that volume is really, really challenging.

And so, a CRM is going to allow us to automate some of the low-touch communication. So, sending out a customized text message rather than us doing the texting. Sending out an email that's customized to the student rather than us writing that copy.

And so, we can then spend more time on actually building and developing relationships with the student. That's one example. One other thing, really and truthfully, this is something I could talk about for more than an hour.

President Atkins told me to keep it at a minimum when I can. But one thing I think is really, really going to greatly benefit us is moving to a modern ERP. So, there are times during the registration process with PeopleSoft that we might have some outages or it'll go a little slower.

Or really from a modern experience from a user interface, it's just not clear how to use it. It's not easy. It's not form factor great on a mobile.

It will work, but not ideally. And so, pivoting to Workday is really, really going to aid, I think, the college in terms of what the student would expect of an experience. Because really and truthfully, registration can be more difficult than it needs to be.

I think, you know, in today's age, you can create an account on Amazon, have something ordered to your house by the time you get home from this meeting, right? And the systems we have right now just are not modern. And so, we made an intentional decision a while back to replace PeopleSoft.

And so, I think we're going to see some gains from that. But those are a couple of examples of some of the challenges that we have and how we're trying to get around them.

[Speaker 4] (33:13 - 33:20)
Is there a trend that you see that enrollment on campus is flat at other colleges similar to ours?

[Speaker 2] (33:21 - 33:52)
So, you know, each college is different in what their experience is in their particular market. But what we saw this fall semester is we really saw a great drop in our enrollment of 25 to 39. So, our under 18 and 18-year-old population did grow this fall semester.

So, students right out of high school. But that's where we saw the biggest decline. And, you know, I don't want to just say, oh, the economy right now, as evidence of that.

But I think that has a lot to do with it, with the cost of things, particularly within that bracket.

[Speaker 4] (33:53 - 34:22)
Okay. And last question. Several of the graphs you showed us, you said, this has declined or it's low.

We don't really know why. So, does it ever get to the point where you just don't have time to address some of those things? Because they are not low-hanging fruit.

There's so many other things that are so much more important and more impactful that you just can't address everything?

[Speaker 1] (34:27 - 35:00)
So, I think the two things that I identified as not sure why they declined are both in the prison education program. Declining retention rate and a declining completion rate. And I don't know why.

And, you know, your question was, you know, do we ever just stop investigating because we run out of resources?

[Speaker 7] (35:06 - 35:14)
Those are critical issues for us, right? So, something else, but we're not going to ignore.

[Speaker 3] (35:16 - 35:45)
I have just a question on the 50% of high school graduates who do not go beyond high school. Have we thought about partnering with our ISDs and being on the stage when they hand them their diploma, shake hands, we give them a packet, a welcome packet to Lee College with a coupon, first time free at Lee, right there, on the spot.

[Speaker 2] (35:49 - 36:23)
So, we have done some things similar to that, but one thing we do have, so we do have staff that are called shared college coordinators. They are paid partly by Lee College and partly by the school district, and so they work on the different high school campuses and working with students who are not in dual credit to encourage them to either go to Lee College or college or the military, but those folks during the summer, that is entirely what they do is work with that list of students who aren't going anywhere to try to get them to come to college.

So, yes, that is something that we do work on.

[Speaker 3] (36:23 - 36:28)
That's after they left. That position is there's one per district in our service?

[Speaker 2] (36:28 - 36:34)
So, we have one with Goose Creek, we have one with Crosby, and we have one with Dayton, Liberty, and Wackenhart.

[Speaker 5] (36:44 - 37:32)
I think maybe I misunderstood the session tonight. I thought it was going to be a strategic plan to where maybe we could understand what we're going to do in the next five years versus what we've done the last five years. I would like to understand what our plan is to improve all those numbers.

So, what are we going to do? What do we need? What tools do you need?

What can we do to help? You know, if you had a few suggestions here, you know, numbers are flat. I'm concerned about the regular enrollment.

I'd like to know what our plan is to get those numbers up and what our goal is for each of the next five years. You know, 5%, 2%, whatever it is.

[Speaker 3] (37:35 - 37:58)
I don't disagree with that statement. This was an update to our current strategic plan. So, it is about where we started and where we are.

But looking to the future is an equation of expanding the strategic plan based on the information you've pulled from your previous. I think this data is what's needed to continue.

[Speaker 1] (38:02 - 38:10)
Well, not tonight.

[Speaker 3] (38:11 - 38:26)
Well, we know that the strategic plan grows each year. It's not just one plan and we're done. And so, it's an evergreen plan.

And I think the data is what's used to address all these issues. And then you come up with the plan to address the issues, right?

[Speaker 1] (38:27 - 38:32)
Then we come up with individual strategies to goals in the strategic plan.

[Speaker 3] (38:33 - 38:36)
What we're doing is measuring the strategic plan we've had in place.

[Speaker 1] (38:37 - 38:47)
That's correct. Which also that's to the end of 2028. But as we pointed out, there have been a lot of big unexpected changes.

[Speaker 3] (38:50 - 39:17)
Started with the plan and the plan. It's like what Boxer said it. You go in the ring with a plan until you get punched in the face, right?

So, here we are. But we know that you're not just looking backwards. We know you're looking forward.

We do look forward to as we update the strategic plan and add a few years to the back end of it. That's when we'll get to see all the strategies to address everything that we now have data on.

[Speaker 6] (39:19 - 39:32)
And I would mention that tonight was about providing the next year of data so that you can see the most current trends. It also gave us an opportunity to share the workforce outcomes data.

[Speaker 2] (39:33 - 39:33)
Right.

[Speaker 6] (39:33 - 39:58)
Which is brand new information. But to your point, it is time for the college to refresh its strategic plan. And we will be working on that between now and next spring.

And this will be a primary focus of part of the board retreat that we'll have April or May next year.

[Speaker 3] (40:01 - 40:06)
Right. Any other comments on Dr. Walter's presentation and Dr. Bennett?

[Speaker 4] (40:08 - 40:11)
Thank you very much. It's very interesting.

[Speaker 3] (40:13 - 40:30)
Hearing none. That was our entire agenda for tonight's workshop. So, any matters of concern for future agendas?

I think we have one, Regent Hempson mentioned. So, we'll be working on that one. Anything else?

All right. We're hearing none. We are adjourned.