Dear Highline College Community,

During Opening Week 2022, Dr. Mosby announced the formation of the Student Success Council as Highline’s new strategic planning oversight committee for the Strategic Plan for Equitable Student Success. This council is composed of faculty and staff and student representation and integrates the college’s formal governance structures, including Executive Cabinet, Deans and Associate Deans, Division Chairs, and representatives from HCEA, WPEA, Faculty Senate, Institutional Effectiveness Committee, Assessment Committee, Institutional Research, Title III, and the Public Information Officer.

The council is responsible for overseeing and holding accountable those involved in the strategic planning process. This includes ensuring that strategic priorities chosen by Executive Cabinet are in alignment with the college’s Mission, Vision, and Values and the college’s Core Themes.

With three regularly scheduled meetings fall, winter and spring quarters, the council will review action plans for strategic priorities, provide feedback for improvement on those plans, review progress made throughout the quarter, address barriers and set new priorities on a quarterly basis.

In the fall, the Executive Cabinet identified five priority areas and created action plans to begin advancing them. Those priorities were:

Complete the process for selecting, purchasing and beginning the implementation of a customer relationship management (CRM) technology tool to support the recruitment-to-enrollment pipeline
Status: Stakeholders for the CRM project have been meeting throughout the quarter to establish functional requirements. The group has received a demo of our primary option, a CRM module addition to our current Aviso implementation, and is slated to make a final decision by Dec. 16. The college is in conversation with CampusWorks about support for this effort and future steps will be mapped out after this decision is made.

Create awareness of Aviso to students and provide frequent and clear communication to students about how to find their advisor through the new Aviso system.
Status: A team was formed to implement a student communications plan about advising geared toward four student groups. The communications plan includes targeted text messaging, posters, flyers and rack cards. These four beta groups will have the opportunity to provide feedback to improve communication for future student groups. The team also incorporated Degree Pathways Program Maps into Aviso and added information into the COL 101 curriculum for students on how to contact their advisors.

In partnership with Federal Way and Highline Public Schools, engage staff and students to provide accurate information on Highline College programs and entry processes to include support for navigation through identified barriers as highlighted through our Strategic Enrollment Management planand feedback from high school partners.
Status: The High School Engagement Team has worked with internal stakeholders to build buy-in and collaboration in key areas to facilitate onboarding of the new engagement plan. Financial Aid is working with the team to provide training to college and career counselors in high schools. The team has created admissions workshops and a process to track prospective students. Using feedback from the recent CollegeCon with Highline Public Schools, the team will begin planning for a spring event that will add students from Federal Way Public Schools.

Increase capacity for the financial aid file review process and increase communication with students about the financial aid application status and other financial aid-related action items (e.g. receipt of documents, file review status, review/approval status, etc.)
Status: Highline College has entered into a contract with Blue Icon, a service that will assist in processing financial aid applications. Blue Icon personnel will begin reviewing files by the end of December. Financial Aid recently hired four advisors and is in the process of hiring an associate director, which will put the team to full staff. On Dec. 12, Financial Aid will train 56 staff on Financial Aid practices. Financial Aid department plans to pilot sending welcome letters in December and are collaborating with grant funders to review student communications on the drop process for non-payment.

Improve the college’s top-level site (highline.edu) and three most commonly visited subdomains: admission.highline.edu, registration.highline.edu and financialaid.highline.edu to provide clearer direction and access to information for prospective students seeking information to enroll, get financial aid and enroll in classes to increase enrollment quarter by quarter through 2022-23 and 23-24.
Status: Melodie Smith joined Highline in early October as the new lead web designer/front end developer and immediately got to work with the Communications and Marketing/Web Team to conduct a review and audit of the top-level site and the three identified subdomains in order to eliminate outdated and redundant content, re-write sections in plain language and increase effectiveness of the translation widget. Initial work with these three teams has begun.

The Student Success Council Communications Team, made up of select Student Success Council members, plans to provide quarterly and annual updates to campus on the status and advancement of the strategic plan. If you have questions or suggestions, please send them to President@Highline.edu.

Sincerely,

Student Success Council Communications Team
Danielle K. Slota, Joshua Gerstman, Jennifer Johnston, Gabrielle Bachmeier, Lisa Bernhagen, Liz Word, Raechel Dawson