Translating Career Readiness to Meet Student Needs: A Conversation with the President of APACS

Dr. Renaldo Alba is President of the Association for Program Administrators of CSTEP and STEP, Inc. (APACS) and Co-Director of CSTEP/STEP Programs, Fordham University. Recently, he participated in an exclusive panel interview with Kaplan, sharing his insights on prioritizing student success, translating career readiness to meet student needs, and tracking students’ sense of belonging. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.

Briefly describe your organization and share how you uniquely support students.

Dr. Renaldo Alba: I am the President of the Association for Program Administrators of CSTEP and STEP, Inc. (APACS). With CSTEP and STEP, our programs are designed to increase the number of underrepresented students and economically disadvantaged students in STEM, health, and licensed fields—we are a catalyst of change in our individual campuses.

Right now we're a network of 134 projects throughout New York State. We have 56 pre-college STEP programs which serve as on-ramps into the university setting. And we have 78 CSTEP projects throughout the state of New York that work with undergraduates in dynamic ways to ensure that students are prepared, supported, and directed to enter the workforce in the STEM, health, licensed fields, or professional training and graduate school training in those professions. We are a network of projects within the New York State Education Department portfolio of college access and opportunity.

From your viewpoint, how do you define "student success" and based on that, what are your organization’s priorities for your students’ success?

Dr. Renaldo Alba: Beginning with the lens of student success is really considering the context of where students are coming from. Fellow panelist Cheryl Hamilton had mentioned meeting students where they are. You really have to understand the context and how our programs are created with the idea of access and opportunity. That's really critical to understand because we need to not only understand the academic needs and the engagement needs but, as Cheryl mentioned, the sense of belonging.

Everyone should have a copy of Dr. Terrell Strayhorn's book College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students. The theory in that book has permeated all of higher education and captures the essence of what it means to be in a place where you feel comfortable.

We have to also assess students’ social capital—the professional awareness, the how-tos of entering a professional space, even how to be a student at a college campus. The STEP and CSTEP programs uniquely address this. We're a network of more than 25,000 students and since STEP starts at the 7th grade, we are focused on what students are really experiencing. A lot of our institutions have both programs at their institutions and what that allows CSTEP to do at the undergraduate campuses is to really reverse engineer an experience for 7th graders.

It also allows us, at the undergraduate level, to forward-think of what's actually going on in real time within a generation. We don't have to wait a generation to learn about a generation, which is really critical.

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When it comes to tracking student success, what are the outcomes that you're focused on? What metrics and data are you collecting and analyzing?

Dr. Renaldo Alba: Of course, tracking student success is the buzzword. Data, data, data—it's almost an elusive experience because the more data that you try to collect, you have to ask, what is really telling our story?

The metrics that we're looking for sometimes are nuanced and on the cutting edge of things because it's not really about how many students are passing, or how many students are failing, or how many students are on probation. The students’ sense-of-belonging data is a lot richer because if you could understand if a student feels comfortable, then you can really understand the different layers of what, perhaps, may be impeding them to really grow and thrive at the institution.

When you look at academic advising practices at institutions, there are unique philosophies on that. The philosophy that we take in STEP and CSTEP is advising for retention first, because if you lose a student, you can forget your success metrics, the answer is you're not successful. But advising for retention is the unique way of engaging a student, not only looking with them and going through the traditional major university core requirements. It's strategy. Brilliance can be hampered by a lack of strategy at an institution. A student's coming of age and comfort gets compromised if, for example, you're a pre-med student taking biochemistry and calculus in the first semester and you're coming from a high school that perhaps doesn't get resourced.

But really it's having a philosophy, an understanding of the context of your programs and why you're charged with this work in higher education. And then having a way of conducting programming and advising to make sure your students aren’t staying behind.

The fact of the matter is we probably need some attention to figure out what the data set of the moment is and what it should reflect in the future, because universities would benefit from that when looking at advising structures and models. The day and age of traditional deans managing a class of 800 students hasn't worked because not all 800 students are going to get the love and attention that they need. So when you have private programs like STEP, CSTEP, and HEOPPO, they have to be relied on to be able to translate university values and programmatic values that are intertwined with student success.

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I'm a qualitative researcher and I think that it’s really important to point out that data is qualitative and quantitative. If you're running an office and you don't have foot traffic, if you're in the office and you have absolute silence, you have a problem on your hands. It's supposed to be buzzing with life. It's supposed to be buzzing with your door being knocked on, actually people walking in without knocking. That shows a level of comfort of folks coming into a space and feeling like they belong. We put outside our paperwork to address student needs.

When you understand context, and we talk about social capital, part of the self-evolution of a student has to be factored into the work. But also translating the skills that they do have is part of the validation, the affirmation and the confidence building that's part of the work as well.

Let me give you an example, if you show up at a general office and you have a student who’s perhaps babysitting or lending a hand at home, that's something that we have to factor into our advising and center that in our work. Other places may say, "Well, you don't have priorities." Well, good luck to you if you don't understand the context of a student's life at an institution. We translate for the students that they have the ability to carry out a disciplined schedule and contribute to the home in a different way. We are able to capture a unique student narrative in a way that conveys the empathy and the humanity that's needed in the world.

How are conversations shifting when it comes to bridging gaps between how universities are preparing students for careers and external employers’ expectations?

Dr. Renaldo Alba: We need to engage people in recognizing the reality of the times today. We want to strengthen and reassure students who pay tuition money that folks are making an investment that they're going to have not only the skills but the awareness of how to navigate landscapes. Your office of career services, and the career readiness they help students build, is an essential partner in that because they have colleagues that can talk about the various ways of interviewing and how students are showing up at work. All institutions receive feedback on their graduates. If a student is not performing well in the institution or industry that values the time that they invested at your institution to recruit, you’re going to hear about that.

The reality is that career services cannot be separated from the rest of the institution. It cannot be the traditional hierarchy of faculty leading everything. That's not the way it works everywhere and it's not working like that anymore. The world has been interrupted and has changed and evolved where everything is an equal partnership now. We have to translate for each other to reach the student. So faculty have an idea and that's what they're there for. Then that idea needs to be translated to a generation of students who perhaps may not be where that idea is to receive it well, but they need other professionals to come in and talk about career metrics, talk about the aspect of being career ready.

It’s critical that you have a model for students to secure internships, research opportunities, and experiential learning. It's how you get to the end point of being career ready. There’s the social capital that we talked about earlier, but it's also the capital that you learn to develop at an institution as a student leader, as a part-time worker, at a retail store, folding clothes for 12 hours a day and having to deal with customer service. Every professional on campus needs to be engaging each other to make sure we're delivering a message. Essentially we are talking about a branding concept of what being a professional is. You can't separate yourself from that anymore.

We live in an IG world—if it's not on Instagram, it never happened. This is what the college students are saying. This is why they interrupt traffic and interrupt tours to take a picture. We need to understand and move into the world as well with our own branding message of what career readiness looks like and what that means for an institution.

How do you think about career preparation at a community college in terms of transferring out of associate degree programs, which are not preparing students for immediate employment post-graduation but rather for further study at a university?

Dr. Renaldo Alba: Let's be clear, community colleges and the role that those institutions play are essential to all of this. Career readiness should be tied to a community college philosophy or curriculum. We hope that students find the resources and are in a situation where they can continue on a four-year journey.

My mother was a 2-year community college graduate and eventually 20 years later found her way back into a bachelor's program and was able to continue on from there. Community college is essential. The values across the board at the community college is critical, just as it is for a four-year institution.

And this is where students coming from different journeys and paths have to be accommodated. If your institution is going to stay afloat during these difficult times, it has to be focused on career readiness. Every institution has to be ready for a transition, which is difficult, especially if you are under-resourced during this time. That's the value proposition to consider.

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In looking forward to five years from now, what do you think is higher education's biggest opportunity?

Dr. Renaldo Alba: When you think of higher education and what that provides for the future, don't get lost from the fact that the basics also work. We have technology integrated, we have challenges of ethics and societal values and what that means for different communities. Those ideas have to continue to be developed and discussed.

We also have to continue to talk about what higher education means to society. For people who may be denigrating the value of higher education, they need to consider if they're giving up on education for themselves or their children. They're not. What we need to create is a marketing campaign on why higher education is important. Not only for career readiness, but for emotional readiness, psychological health, and well-being. Career readiness is not only about monetary value. It's about an investment in a philosophy of living and of wellness.

A Shared Commitment to Student Success

One of APACS’s innovative initiatives supporting students as they become career ready is through its partnership with Kaplan’s All Access License®. Kaplan is providing CSTEP’s undergraduate students pursuing careers in STEM, health, and licensed fields at 27 of its campuses with free test prep courses for graduate-level admissions exams, including the GRE®, GMAT™, LSAT®, and MCAT®. And they have the opportunity to take a number of technical and soft skills-building courses to help them prepare for their next steps after graduation.

Dr. Renaldo Alba shared, “We’re incredibly excited about providing this transformative experience to so many of our students. Much more than just providing standardized test preparation, Kaplan’s All Access License represents a holistic approach to boost student success by increasing matriculation to graduate and professional schools and increasing licensure pass rates, while also making students more career ready for STEM, health, and other licensed fields. We see this as a model partnership and real game changer in higher education."

Empower all of your students to achieve their career goals with Kaplan’s All Access License.