Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) – Illuminating Pathways: Guiding Students to Success
Coastal Carolina Community College’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), Illuminating Pathways: Guiding Students to Success, addresses student success, a topic that is at the core of the Mission of the institution. The QEP is designed to enrich students’ first-year of college by providing structured pathways to success.
Identification of Key Issues
The College’s Quality Enhancement Plan emerged following a year-long process in which the College’s constituency—faculty, staff, students, administrators, and community—reviewed the institutional data and engaged in discussion groups, listening forums, and surveys to identify topics aligned with the College’s strategic plan. While a number of issues emerged during this phase, of most concern to faculty and staff were the challenges first-year students face in persisting at Coastal.
Focus of the Plan
The Quality Enhancement Plan, Illuminating Pathways: Guiding Students to Success, provides the framework for intentionally designing clear, coherent, and structured educational pathways to success. The QEP incorporates numerous high-impact practices to enhance first-year students’ academic success through the first 15 semester hours credit. The College will provide structured pathways through the implementation of three interrelated initiatives: Chart the Course, Navigate the Course, and Stay the Course. While ambitious, these initiatives represent a focused and thoughtful approach based on institutional needs and provide a roadmap for first-year students. As a result of the QEP, students clarify goals, identify a program of study aligned with their goals and abilities, create a Master Academic Plan (MAP), demonstrate persistence toward goal achievement, and utilize academic support services for success.
Institutional Capability
Coastal’s QEP has been developed and is implemented with the College’s institutional capabilities in mind. Successful implementation is dependent upon leadership, personnel, resources, and realistic timelines. It has been the experience of Coastal that successful projects are best implemented within the existing leadership and organizational structure of the institution. Thus, the responsibility for implementation is shared among the key leadership groups of the College. Whenever possible, the plan utilizes existing College resources to optimize the efficiency of implementation. However, additional financial resources are identified to implement and sustain the plan. Most importantly, the QEP is integrated by design into the College’s institutional effectiveness, planning, assessment, and evaluation model in order to further solidify its successful implementation and sustainability.
Assessment and Evaluation
Four carefully defined institutional goals, three student learning outcomes, and measures of success for each of the major initiatives of the QEP are clearly identified. Data from multiple sources are collected as detailed on the thoughtfully constructed assessment calendars, which specify responsibility for data collection. Evaluation results are used to assess progress in achieving student outcomes in order to optimize student success in the first year.