One of the greatest benefits that community colleges give to students is the ability to choose from a wide offering of majors, courses, and credential options. From Psychology, to Business, to Engineering, two year colleges present endless opportunities to take students where they want to go, both personally and professionally.

With a tremendous amount of choice comes a tremendous amount of decisions. In my decade of work with community college students we often struggled to keep track of which majors a student was interested in, or what colleges they were considering, both because students were sorting through a huge menu of options and because we were balancing demanding advising schedules. Many solutions, both pragmatic and philosophical, have been introduced to community colleges to tackle the issue of steering student choices from broad to narrow, in order to avoid the cafeteria model of course selection. Guided pathways, intrusive advising, and meta majors are all important parts of this conversation, and educators need hands-on tools that can help them implement these frameworks.

CCSSE (2017) recently noted that 50% of students who aspire to transfer have not met with a transfer advisor, which makes it difficult to implement retention best practices. How can we gather information on student goals, interests, and aspirations if they don’t connect with us? How can we have insight into their needs if we touch base with them, often at best, two times a year?

Introducing the Community College Educator Portal

RaiseMe recognizes that advising students is hard, and that students often change their interests which can be hard to track. Our new Community College Educator Portal allows you to view the students at your college who are using RaiseMe to gain insight into what colleges they are interested in, what activities they are logging (a co-curricular transcript!), and how much they earning in micro-scholarships. Additionally, our educator resource area is full of free tools that you can use to talk about transfer planning, financial aid, and financial literacy.

You can request an educator account here: Community College Educators

Our goal is to provide you, and your students, with the tools they need to be academically and personally successful. For more information of how RaiseMe partners with community colleges please contact Tara Zirkel at tara@raise.me.