Last Friday, May 3rd, was our City College FRISCO Day. It was one day of action, added upon other days of action, that demonstrated the flywheel effect at City College.
You may recall the flywheel from your Physics textbook in high school. Our CCSF students in automotive technology know well what the flywheel effect is: how to transmit, store, and release energy to make a car’s engine run.
In our own engineering of sustainable growth for a great college like City College, transformations never happen in one fell swoop. There is no one single action, no grand innovation, no “bright idea” miracle, no iPhone debut show. Rather our process resembles pushing on a giant, heavy flywheel, building momentum and stored energy until a breakthrough comes. With enough pushes, the breakthrough is inevitable.
One big push came last Friday on FRISCO DAY!
In a single day here at the CCSF Ocean Campus our great team registered 767 graduating SFUSD seniors for Fall 2019, an increase of 39% over last year! These full-time students-to-be registered for an average unit load of 12.75 units, thus qualifying each of them for maximum financial aid. Of these 767 new students, 594 took their photograph and received a CCSF ID. And 15 of these students received an ID with their chosen name.
This enormous force on the flywheel was itself the result of many subsidiary pushes on the flywheel over the last two years: the expansion of the Bridge to Success program with SFUSD; the construction of a sturdy bridge between the Dean of High School Programs and California College Promise in Academic Affairs (Meg Hudson) and the Dean of Community Outreach & Student Engagement in Student Affairs (Alex Guiriba); the hours of work with the CCSF LGBTQ Task Force to convert talk into action; and the renewed focus on closing the achievement gap by graduating more African-American, Latinx and API students.
FRISCO Day was a team effort of colleagues who bought into the concept that we could enroll more graduating seniors from SF high schools with clear guided pathways and, most importantly, the full-time class schedule to move students along the path to graduation in less than three years. Then this team brought maximum energy to the outreach, recruitment and registration effort.
So please join me in congratulating CCSF energizers like Alex Guiriba, Mandy Liang, Meg Hudson, Monika Liu, Patricia Gant, Lidia Jenkins, Tessa Brown, Noah Lystrup, Rob Yung and the entire financial aid staff. Then there were the numerous unsung heroes: our counseling faculty; our faculty advisors, especially in English, ESL and math; our classified staff; numerous other volunteers from the City College administration, faculty and staff; and SFUSD staff.
FRISCO Day demonstrates the flywheel effect of the most important of the four major strategies or “pushes” to increase CCSF enrollment for the long term: to increase our share of San Francisco graduating high school seniors from public, parochial and private schools.
Last year, SFUSD graduated 4,089 students. Of that graduating class, 75% - which is approximately 3,000 students - went on to college. City College has historically enrolled about 25% of college-bound SFUSD graduating seniors, or about 750 new students, each year. But thanks to FRISCO Day and the many months of work it represented, we have already enrolled 767 new SFUSD full time students, breaking our long-standing record - and we haven’t even reached the high season for Fall enrollment yet.
We are now on track to enrolling 50% of SFUSD graduating seniors, which means we are well-positioned to increase our FTES by a thousand and our annual revenue by over $5M.
And this is just one push on the flywheel. There are many other energetic initiatives underway by colleagues who believe that now is our time to close the achievement gap by graduating and transferring more students to university; and by completing more students with workforce certificates to take on middle-class, livable wage jobs.
Today I close with a special note of gratitude to our faculty colleagues who teach SFUSD students in our dual enrollment and credit recovery programs. These dedicated teachers take on the most challenging of instructional tasks, both at SFUSD and here at City College. This work requires special patience, skills and a commitment to social justice, which is to say it requires love. You are special teachers. We are all grateful to you.
With sincere thanks,
Dr. Mark Rocha, Chancellor
City College of San Francisco