College of San Mateo's (CSM) new project, the Project Success: Curriculum Redesign Initiative, will address the need to improve measurably semester-length and term-to-term persistence throughout the college by creating a revitalized and internally promoted student success curriculum. Over the last decade, the student success curriculum, "housed" in CSM's Career (CRER) coursework, has evolved into a disparate collection of over a dozen separate CRER courses. Many of them were initially developed to address the needs of a more homogeneous population of students than the greatly diverse population CSM now serves. The core orientation-to-college class, College and Career Success (CRER 120), and the collection of courses dedicated to career planning (CRER 121, 122, 123) do not adequately address the fact that virtually all our students currently work, whether their short- and long-range goals include transfer to a baccalaureate institution or plans to upgrade their vocational skills. Considerable duplication exists among the course descriptions, creating confusion for academic advising/counseling staff, faculty, and students alike. Many official course descriptions and the associated curriculum materials shared by the student services faculty do not consistently reflect the best practices strategies validated by the current research on student success. And as a whole, the student success curriculum is not adequately promoted to capture the enrollment of students who would greatly benefit from effective student success courses and who are diverse in levels of preparation and in their life-planning, vocational, and academic goals.

Project Success Narrative

Student Survey data

Outcomes data