President's Podcast: Student Affairs at ACC

Austin Community College (ACC) President/CEO, Dr. Richard M. Rhodes, hosts a conversation on the evolution of student support services at ACC. With guests — Dr. Virginia Fraire, Dr. Guillermo 'Willie' Martinez, and Dr. Ruth Reinhart — Dr. Rhodes examines what the college is doing to better support and serve its students.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

JESSICA VESS: Three, two, one. Welcome. I am Jessica Vess with the President’s Podcast at Austin Community College, here with our President/CEO Dr. Richard Rhodes. Hi, Dr. Rhodes.

DR. RHODES: How are you today?

JESSICA: I am doing well. It is great to be back, ready for the Spring 2019 semester.

DR. RHODES: We are off and running.

JESSICA: We are, and we have a lot of good work going on at ACC, really, when it comes to serving our students.

DR. RHODES: Yeah.

JESSICA: That’s really the focus of our podcast today, and we have an amazing team of guests with us this morning. I’d like to introduce Dr. Willie Martinez, Dr. Virginia Fraire, and Dr. Ruth Reinhart, joining us in this conversation. Thank you all.

DR. REINHART: Thank you for having us.

DR. FRAIRE: A pleasure to be here.

JESSICA: Dr. Rhodes, this has been a strong initiative for you, to really focus on elevating the success opportunities for our students.

DR. RHODES: You know, this is a great time, and let me first say—before I hit this, let me first say that these are superstars, and so it’s great to have them on the President’s Podcast to talk about the importance of Student Affairs and the services that we provide to our students. You know, we keep with a theme of “innovation + collaboration = transformation,” and ACC is serious about transforming this community through education and training, and what are all of the support services necessary that every single student who walks in the door who anticipates or has a dream of coming to ACC and getting a higher education—how can we provide the right environment for them to be successful and achieve their dreams, and actually go out into the workforce or transfer to the university that they want to? So critical, critical components along the way to make that transformation of every single individual. And it—you know, it starts with just the heart and the passion to make a difference, and to actually implement changes and opportunities, and look for opportunities and ways that we can help our students. But, you know, one of the things that’s critical is, you’ve got to understand your students. The way to do that is through the utilization of data. And so taking a look at, you know, where are students, where do they come from, what skillsets do they have, and how can we then help them, you know—How many kids do they have? How many hours are they working? You know, what is their life situation that may get in the way? What’s their financial situation that can get in way? So how do we provide the right environment to allow them to succeed? So we’ve got to look at the data—be cognizant of that—and then we’ve got to look at the way that we deliver services. And we’re constantly looking at ways that we can improve and change and alter, because, you know, our community is changing. You know, if you go back ten years ago, unemployment rates in the Austin area were somewhere between 7 and 8 percent.

JESSICA: Wow.

DR. RHODES: Today it’s under 3 percent. So, you know, the life situations, the working situations, are changing dramatically. And so how do we anticipate that and do the, you know, the pre-emptive analytics, to make sure that we can address that?

JESSICA: Absolutely, and I think that’s a key—it’s about evolving as our community evolves. And the team here with us today really symbolizes the evolution of Student Affairs at ACC.

DR. RHODES: It does. You know, and we’ll have Willie talk a little bit about, you know, so how do we use data when we take a look at how we serve our students better? And what are we looking at, and how do we utilize that data that, say, ten years ago we weren’t?

DR. MARTINEZ: You know, you said it best earlier in that there’s subgroups of populations that we’re trying to pay attention to, and with analytics it’s, how do we look into that, just try to find out, who are these students? Who really needs tutoring? Who needs child care of some sorts? Who needs food support? Who needs advising, who needs counseling, who needs so many different things? There’s different subgroups. Now we’re doing a much better job of paying attention, and then by paying attention we can find out these students and try to say, “Hey, did you know that we have this available?” Because we have so many wonderful things available. Unfortunately, not enough people know that they’re there. So, one of the things that we’ve really been pushing, also, is communication and communicating all of these services, and letting people know and marketing it out there and making them aware, so that more people can take advantage. ‘Cause it’s only useful as how much more the students are taking advantage of it. As we’ve grown, our services have grown, our population has grown, and we just have to do a much better job of paying attention to all the nuances of it all, and then doing a good job of trying to find those subgroups again and helping them out as much as we can.

DR. RHODES: Right. And, you know, and Guided Pathways has really changed, also, not only the delivery of instruction and how we get students interested in pathways, career pathways, but it changes how we assist students and how we help them. And Virginia, I don’t know if you want to talk about that for awhile...?

DR. FRAIRE: Absolutely. I mean, I have had the pleasure to serve as Vice President of Student Affairs for the last four years, and I want to pick up on something that you shared earlier, Dr. Rhodes, and that is that the institution is really transforming. It’s in motion, and it’s evolving to meet the needs of today’s students. And we are really working to serve the post-traditional student and the student who may not have otherwise had opportunities to pursue an education. And the advent of Guided Pathways really was the impetus for a lot of—I mean, we’ve always been in motion. This is an institution that has always been on the leading edge of innovation, of partnerships, but I think that over the last four years, when we under Dr. Rhodes’ leadership adopted the Guided Pathways framework—that’s when I really saw this big, transformative change. And there’s—for me, what that means is that Guided Pathways really requires us to look at our structure. In order to do Guided Pathways right, you cannot continue to operate with the yesteryear’s organizational structure. So, there’s been a lot of changes within Student Affairs to really get ready to be proactive in our communication, to use data more intentionally. And it also requires us to look at process, and I’d like to speak about advising here, because in yesteryear, we used to look at advising as sort of a prescriptive role that an adviser would have, and today that has really changed, and we’re really looking at advising being more about coaching and case managing and teaching. And that’s a big shift from the process that we used to have. And third, Guided Pathways also requires us to really have what I call an attitudinal change, because it really requires us to put students in the center of everything we do. And not that in the past we haven’t done that, but with this framework, you have to do it really intentionally.

DR. RHODES: Right. Right. You know, you take a look at the history of higher education and how we are transforming, and especially at ACC and community college inaudible:, and you look at some of the changes in the delivery of academic services, and how does that then impact the services, the wraparound support services, that are necessary? And so just a couple of examples. So it was just about five years ago that we made a movement towards competency-based delivery of some of our coursework. That has a direct impact on it, whether we talk about financial aid, or the, you know, the tutoring, but—online tutoring—whatever it is, it has a direct impact on how we help our students be successful. Or you take a look at, you know, when we opened up the ACCelerator. So while it’s competency-based, it is also very one-on-one, individualized assistance in helping students move forward. And so taking a look at, you know, as we make changes in Guided Pathways and as we take a look at different delivery mechanisms, such as hybrid, such as distance delivery, such as competency-based—how does that impact the way that we help our students through the services that we provide, the wraparound services that we provide?

DR. REINHART: Um, so, I agree, and I think the advisers, our advisers, are doing a great job at having those communications with students. Before, it was very transactional—now, they really take the time to sit with students and ask them those questions: how many hours do you work? Do you have family? And then that way, the advisers can really refer them to the resources we have throughout the college: the ACCelerator, the tutoring, other support services that we have if they’re having food insecurities and things of that nature. So, I feel that students are really developing relationships with their advisers, and we’re seeing an impact, and I think that gives a great attitude adjustment for our advisers. They are really proud of the work that they’re doing, they love having those relationships with students. We are doing different communications with students now, where we do “nudges”—we nudge them when they’re, you know, mid-semester, when it’s registration time, you know, “You’re doing really great,” it’s midterms. So giving that support to students really is making a difference, and they’re seeing that, and they’re seeing the importance of the changes that we’re doing to better the students.

DR. FRAIRE: Yes, and I would add that, in Student Affairs, I like to sort of the divide the big scope of support services that we offer to students, because it’s a very large suite of services that we offer. But I often distinguish the different support services in three areas. One is, there’s a lot work going around, a lot of redesign in the kind of academic support that we’re providing, whether it’s academic tutoring, it’s supplemental instruction, it’s academic coaching. And then we also have the social support resources, all of the wraparound services that in many cases... Quite frankly, we have not... Uh, we’re building. We’re building that suite of services: the support for students who are experiencing food insecurity, the support for students who might be experiencing challenges with day care or textbooks. Those are the services that we’re really ramping up. And then we also have the more traditional support services that we have always had in higher education advising and counseling, and support services for people with inaudible: disabilities. But even in those areas, in almost three different areas, what we’ve been doing with this incredible team that I have is, we have really been looking at, how do we best meet the needs of students today? And so every part of those support services is really going through sort of a metamorphosis of really trying to redesign for what students need today. And so not only is the suite of services expanding, but the modality. Going back to what you were sharing, Dr. Rhodes, in terms of expanding our modality of delivering instruction, we’re having to do the same in Student Affairs. We can no longer continue to meet the demand of today’s students by simply having a brick-and-mortar operation where students come to you. We have to go out to them, we have to do nudging campaigns, we have to case-manage them, we have to assign them to somebody to really support them more intentionally, we have to provide online tutoring, online advising, telecounseling, and those are all new ways of delivering support services that are very different than what we’ve done in the past.

DR. RHODES: Yeah.

DR. MARTINEZ: And I want to reiterate what Ruth has said—I mean, what Virginia said. It really has been—Guided Pathways, to me, really has been about building real relationships. You only build real relationships if you truly want to know what’s going on in your life. And that’s what we’ve tried really hard to do with our students, but even within ourselves, and across Academic Affairs, across Operations, within ourselves, again—because in the past we had all these things, but everyone was always working very siloed. That’s something in higher education that you hear all the time—“We’re siloed, we’re siloed.” Guided Pathways has forced us, “You know what, I can’t do this by myself, we’re gonna need help and we need to work with each other and share all this information,” and making it, number one, it’s about the students and about their success, and how do we share with each other, everything that we’re doing in order to help more of the students succeed?

DR. FRAIRE: Yeah, and—

DR. RHODES: That’s a great piece of the conversation, because, you know, we talked about innovation and collaboration, and collaboration is not just external, ACC with external partners. Collaboration is also internal. And so how do we work more closely together, whether we’re talking about Academic and Student Affairs, or we’re talking about IT, or we’re talking about the Business Office? Because every single function in the college is interrelated and has a strong impact on the success of students. And so the close collaboration internally is just as important, if not more important, than the collaboration externally.

DR. FRAIRE: Absolutely, and to put a sort of a fine point on what both you, Dr. Rhodes, and Dr. Martinez are saying, is that Guided Pathways can be a really powerful framework. But it requires two key components, and that is personalization—as you were saying—and empathy for our students. And the way that that connects to collaboration is... I’ll give an example of what we have done recently given your leadership, Dr. Rhodes, is we are really looking at, how do we improve the student experience around the application process and the registration process? And so we put together a subcommittee of the cabinet that really went through the process, went through the application process, went through the registration process, to really experience first-hand what is it that our students are experiencing. And that experience was a really powerful experience, one, to build collaboration internally with my colleagues about the kind of challenges that we are facing as we’re supporting students, but it also helped to really create the empathy that we need to have for our students to better support them. So you’re right—the collaboration internally is so key, and sometimes we overlook that.

DR. RHODES: Right. You know, and the collaboration externally is important too, and that is, you know, you take a look at who are our partners outside, and there are a lot of partners. You know, you might start with K-12, so the schools, public and private. And how do we integrate our services with them to help students who are in the pathway, you know? And to make sure that they’re ready for college and that, when they get here, they’re gonna be successful. So what are the types of things that we do to assist in that vein? But also, the students who come here and decide that they’re going to transfer to a university—you know, how do we ensure that the credits they take with us are gonna transfer? And so a lot of advising, a lot of counseling that goes on there, well, there’s students that are going to go directly into the workforce. And so, you know, how do we help them, through career counseling, career advising, to make sure that they’re ready for that next step on their journey into the workforce? And it’s a key piece of this, is how you do that, because it means working with K-12, with university partners, with business and industry, with other nonprofits, to make sure that we’re all together and this is collaborative effort within the community.

DR. MARTINEZ: For our community college?

DR. RHODES: Yes.

DR. FRAIRE: Absolutely, collaboration with foundations and businesses. I mean, that’s how we’re able to leverage some of the resources to do some of the innovative work that we’re doing. We secured some pretty significant external support from an external entity to really help support the redesign around advising. We’ve also secured funding from another external resource to really look at holistic advising, and really study whether there’s an impact between students who go straight into only developmental courses, or who are students who are paired with a developmental course and in a college credit course, and found some really positive results for doing the latter. And so the collaborations are key to our work. And it’s also an opportunity to learn from the external community...

DR. RHODES: Right.

DR. FRAIRE: ...whether you’re partnering with local entities, or you’re partnering at the state level, or at the national level. That knowledge and that learning that you’re bringing really helps to fine-tune our craft that we’re trying to refine here on behalf of students. It’s key. I think one of the other points that I wanted to speak to a little bit... so, um...

DR. RHODES: One of the other areas that we did receive external funding for is, you know, students—Life happens to students, and financially they run into an issue. So the college was fortunate enough to receive some funding to look at emergency aid, and how—what a difference that makes in student persistence and success.

DR. FRAIRE: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we... and our approach around emergency aid is really changing. We had a very, kind of like, “Let’s not tell anybody that we have an emergency aid program,” to “Let’s tell the world, because our students need access to it.” And it really required us to forge some partnerships with local foundations to get some funding, with our own college foundation, that also supports our efforts. But the City of Austin was also contributing to build our emergency aid program. And so we’re seeing some real impact because of the collaboration, where certain students who really are, um... are... can use the help.

DR. RHODES: Right.

DR. MARTINEZ: And emergency aid, inaudible:, I mean, it really is to help with life. Life happens. That car breaks down. I can’t pay electricity, I can’t pay this, I can’t pay this, this just happened, I need help with this. Sometimes it’s small, sometimes it’s a little bit bigger, but it’s literally any emergency in life, and a lot of people historically haven’t known, for whatever reason, that—’Cause we’ve been doing it for a long time. We’ve done it for years.

DR. FRAIRE: Yes.

DR. MARTINEZ: Almost since it opened. So this year we’re hoping that we have some sort of additional emergency aid help. But now it’s getting more people out there and letting them know. You know, before you say, “I’m gonna stop out, I’m not gonna finish, I’m gonna put my dream on hold,” you know, come talk to somebody. Come talk to somebody in Student Affairs and say, you know, “Can you do something to help me? This situation happened.” And more times than not, the answer is, “Yes, we can help,” and that little gesture, that little support, might be the thing that pushes them past the finish line. 

DR. RHODES: Absolutely.

DR. MARTINEZ: It’s gonna change their life.

DR. REINHART: And to speak to that, we’re talking about redesigning. We even redesigned how we inaudible: the application process. They looked at it, and we redesigned it to make it more efficient for students, and that’s overwhelming for them, and I think that has really increased, I mean, the relationship that they have with their adviser there, to have those conversations, and they can walk them through it and it’s a lot easier process for students. And, you know, I think sometimes students get overwhelmed just with life in itself, and it’s difficult just to say, “I need some help.” And I think these relationships, when, you know, advisers are talking to them, the counselors are talking to them—it really opens up that opportunity that they feel comfortable to say, “I need some help.”

DR. FRAIRE: I have some—

JESSICA: We talked about conversations, and I want to go to that, because I think that is an important facet that is easily overlooked at times. And it’s not just about looking at what we think students may need, but talking to them and understanding. The data helps as well, filling the gaps. But Ruth, you and your team really get that opportunity to work front-line with those students and have those conversations and discussions, and truly find what that hold or struggle is.

DR. REINHART: Yeah, and I think we know, with the redesign, of how, with the holistic advising and the coaching or training they receive—they were a little overwhelmed at first, to be honest, but now they really see the benefit, and probably would not ever go back to what we were doing before. It was just really transactional. Now they have a relationship with students. You know, they know—because we’re working with faculty now—instruction. You know, they’re needing assistance, they know who exactly to refer them on the instruction side. So they are getting the wraparound support services from students because they’re having those conversations. They’re opening that door for students and saying, “You can talk to me, I’m here to help you. You can shoot me an email, you can...” You know, other modalities to be where the students are, what’s most convenient. You know, we extended our hours to be where the students need it, because people work during the day, you know? Some students don’t get off at five, so we extended our hours to help students who are here till seven. And so I think all of the changes that we’ve done to really help students to know that “We really want you to succeed. We want to provide all the services that you need to be successful.” And I think, overall, in Student Affairs, we’ve really—you know, we’re working, continually improving, we’re adjusting, and I think it’ll always continue to adjust as our students, you know, have different life challenges and things. So I think we’re doing a great job, but we have a lot of work still to do. But I think just students knowing that we’re here to support them is everything to them.

JESSICA: So what are those next steps? How do you continue evolving?

DR. FRAIRE: So, uh... We continue to learn every day. In terms of next steps, it’s just making sure that we are able to sustain the momentum, because a lot of the work that we have touched on is really transformative, and it really requires a lot of leadership and a lot of support to be able to sustain this level of transformation, because what we’re doing is, we’re not just simply creating boutique programs for, like, a little emergency program, or a little bit of child care, or a little bit of this. We are really creating change at scale, and we are measuring at scale. To really make sure that we—At the end of all this work, we are ensuring that students come to get what they signed up to get, which is a credential that pays a living wage and that has market value. That’s what—At the end of the day, that’s what this work is about. And so we will continue to do what we need to do to ensure that we meet that end goal. 

DR. MARTINEZ: You know, I want to add to analytics, in the context of higher education and the context that we’ve been implementing it here at ACC. You really have to keep in mind that, when we look at data in the way that we’ve set up this group, we’re looking at data points. But we have to understand that every data point is a student’s story, and understanding that student’s story means actually following up. And again, it mentioned that we’re building real relationships, asking them the questions, finding out more. You have a data point that tells you so much, but yeah, actually working with the students and finding out what is that life situation, and then working to figure out how to help—that’s what we’ve equipped them with. It’s not just about data for the sake of data, and data is not just about numbers—not quantitative. There’s a big qualitative piece, and that big qualitative piece is every individuals’ stories. And the reality is, we’re a very large organization, you know, serving 70,000+ students a year—40,000 at any given time. That means that the different combinations of groups of different supports of different stories—it takes a lot of work to comb through that and try to understand what’s going on, so that we know where to divvy up all our supports.

JESSICA: Makes a lot of sense.

DR. RHODES: I’ve got to give a plug for our foundation, too, because one of the aspects, you know... They just celebrated giving, awarding over a million dollars in scholarships during this past year. And, you know, sometimes we think, you know, that just helps people that are already going to college. No—it’s a difference-maker, because many of those students will not be able to go to college without that investment, personal investment, from the foundation. And so it truly does make a difference, in it’s a collaboration between them, the foundation, and our financial aid office. Who are the students who really need help in being able to move forward? And then having the students and the services inaudible: foundation, so they feel even more encouraged to help more. And so it’s that communication, it’s that relationship between our financial aid office, between our students, between the foundation, and other supporters throughout the community that makes that difference. You know, one of the things that we talked about, too, is the demographics of our students are changing. And so, you know, if you go back ten years ago, we were not a Hispanic-serving institution. Today we are. And, you know, fastest-growing segment of our population—Hispanic/Latino students. And so, how does that make a difference in the way that we look at the services that we provide?

DR. FRAIRE: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think we have to constantly be really serving to close the equity gaps. And we know that, in some areas—especially when it comes to serving Latinos or Hispanics or African American students—that there are some areas for great opportunity for us to really improve. And as we continue with this work that we’re doing, we now have the data that tells us where we need to hone in, rather than sort of having this, you know, approach where you try to catch everyone and you catch nobody, and you don’t have any impact. Today, because of the intentional data-gathering and analytics that we’re gathering in the interventions that we are putting out there, we are checking to see, what’s the impact? I mean, we can get to a granular level on the impact of the ACCelerator on Latino students, on African American students. And you are gonna find that, overall, that incredible facility is having a significant... making a significant difference in a student’s ability to persist from one semester to the next. Overall, it’s 6%. And, you know, that’s serving a pretty significant number of students, and you—Willie has those data memorized like the back of his hand, so feel free to add. But the same thing applies in the tutoring. We can see whether tutoring—our tutoring interventions—are serving our students who are least likely to persist. And if not, we know who they are, and we know how to reach out and serve them.

DR. MARTINEZ: Now, with any equity discussion or initiative that we’re trying to do, you have to be very intentional—intentional in how you analyze, intentional in how you implement, and really, intentional in how you just pay attention to what’s going on. And too many times, our mind always jumps into the race/gender, and that’s very important because that’s front and center. That is probably one of the most important things when you’re talking about equity. But at the same time—and I’ve mentioned it before—that subgroup analysis, I mean, we’re talking about veterans, we’re talking about people that are struggling to succeed, we’re talking about all these other life circumstances, and trying to do a better job, from an equitable perspective, of saying, “Where are you and what do you need?” Not everybody needs tutoring, but some people really need it. Not everybody needs to feel like they have to go to Student Life and be fully engaged. But everybody benefits—the statistics show that everybody has double-digits likelihood to persist if you attended our Student Life events. That’s wonderful, ‘cause it’s showing engagement, and engagement is good for everybody. Can’t hurt anybody, right? And then the data shows that it doesn’t. But from the lens of that things are changing, our demographics are changing—yeah, we’ve gone from 25% Hispanic seven, eight years ago to 37% Hispanic, and that’s gonna continue to grow. We’ll eventually hit 50% in the Central Texas region, because that’s where the Central Texas region is changing demographics. That’s important, because that means that we need to pay attention to our success rates by different demographics, because we’re still closing the gaps. A statewide initiative of closing the gaps helped inch along and close somewhat those gaps. 60x30 is trying to really close those gaps, and it’s much more ambitious. But the reality is that we do have to meet that goal, and if we don’t meet that goal and if we don’t pay attention to the changing Hispanic population, the large gap in the Black population’s success rates, then all of a sudden—simple math—you’re gonna do some numbers and you’re not gonna reach your goal. At some point, you’re gonna see a...

JESSICA: Widening?

TOGETHER: Widening.

JESSICA: Willie’s using his hands.

DR. MARTINEZ: Yeah, sorry.

[all laughing]

DR. FRAIRE: A lot is riding on how we target support services for our veteran populations. One of the things that we have not touched on, and I think it would be good for Ruth to speak about, is the incredible work that’s going around the redesign of counseling.

DR. REINHART: Yes, so, we embarked on redesigning our counseling unit. So we broke it down into three specialties. We have clinical counseling, ‘cause a lot of our students do have a lot of mental health issues. When I first started at ACC—I’ll just go back a little bit—the modality was, “We don’t do any type of counseling for students,” but as our students have changed, the needs of our students have changed, we have come to realize that a lot of our students do need help and don’t have access to that. So we’re providing that service to students. And then we also have our career counselors, who are working with students who might—maybe, for example, a veteran who’s needing to reintegrate into the workforce, they will help a veteran do that kind of thing. And then we have our completion counselors. These are really critical, because these are the folks that are really working with our students to finish their degree or credential. Because before, we had the data of how many students had 45 hours and no credential, and how can we get them to the finish line? And then that kind of evolves into, “What’s keeping you from reaching your goal? How can we help you?” And it’s those conversations that we have to have with students to help them get their credentials, so they can make that minimum wage—you know, that living wage. So that’s good, and then we’re also—And now, we are hiring some success coaches, and those success coaches are gonna help with—we just had this meeting the other day—on analytics, our cohort of students, and they’re gonna follow a cohort of students from beginning to the end, and so they can kind of keep on their track to graduate on time, within three years. So, we’re doing a lot—so we’re using a lot of data to make decisions on who sees who: you know, who sees an adviser, who sees a completion counselor, who sees a success coach. We’re using the data, so how can we help our graduation rates go up, students succeed, and complete their goal? And if it’s transfer, we also have a great transfer and career team that we’re actually gonna have a career center at our Highland campus, and where people help with resume building, things of that nature. Willie’s team also actually helps with that, as well, in the ACCelerator, with resumes and things of that nature. So, we’re really trying to encapture everything our students need to be successful—not only in school, but in life, so they can get great jobs and things of that nature. So we really are trying to really wrap the student around all the services, so they can be successful.

JESSICA: It is about being the difference-makers and among the difference-makers at ACC, as you mentioned, Dr. Rhodes. So it’s an ongoing and continuous journey, and one that, in the end, is designed to help all students find that success.

DR. RHODES: It is. You know, and I might add one other thing, and that—You know, we talk about equity and inclusion and how important it is to us here at ACC, and it—you know, it starts with a commitment. And what you’ve heard from our three guests here is, it also means that you have to be very intentional. You have to be passionate about it, you have to be very intentional. And as a result, it becomes the culture, is that we want to make sure that every student succeeds. But to do that, you’ve gotta be very intentional about how you deliver services and how you help support them in wherever they are in their life situation.

DR. REINHART: Exactly.

DR. RHODES: And so, I just wanna say thank you, congratulations—you all are doing an awesome job, an amazing job, and it is showing up in the data, it is showing up in the relationships that are transforming lives, our students, and our community. And so, you know, I just wanted to say thank you, ‘cause you three definitely are superstars, and making a difference.

DR. FRAIRE: Well, thank you, Dr. Rhodes, because I think that you have been incredibly supportive. Some of this work has required a lot of support, because we are like any other institution—change is sometimes difficult—but you have been a great champion for us.

DR. MARTINEZ: Mm-hmm.

DR. REINHART: Thank you.

DR. RHODES: Thank you.

JESSICA: This has been the President’s Podcast with Dr. Richard Rhodes at ACC. Thank you for listening in, and we will see you next time.