Sinclair Promise is a three-year commitment that started in 2024 to encourage student achievement and outcomes for alumni. The Sinclair Promise aims to prepare students for successful post-graduate outcomes.
The initiative is funded by the Sinclair Board of Trustees and the President’s Office, totaling $1.75 million in funds.
Vice Provost Lisa Mahle-Grisez said that Sinclair Promise is committed to helping Sinclair become a “student-ready” campus.
“That means that we no longer fixate on faculty and staff, on whether students are college ready. We are tasked with understanding how we, as a campus, a faculty, and staff are ready to meet students’ needs where they are now and push ourselves to retain more of them from semester to semester,” Mahle-Grisez said.
Community colleges face a decline. “We’ve been really good at recruiting new students and getting new students in the door, but we’ve been less successful at retaining students,” Mahle-Grisez said. Over 31,000 students attend Sinclair Community College from highschoolers taking College Credit Plus to students in the prison education program.
The Sinclair Promise hopes to aid students in their greatest times of academic need. There are several different areas in which Sinclair Promises plans to reach.
The Urban Zone pertains to seven to twelve school K-12 school districts who have students in need of support when attending Sinclair. Mahle-Grisez explained that the incentive is to: “Get their students through our doors, so that they can be successful in a living wage credential and ultimately, hopefully, a living wage job.”
They’ve been working with the Academic Advising Center. In the past, the Sinclair Promise has relied on students reaching out to them. “Instead of waiting for students to come to us, we are now in an effort to be student ready, engaging students earlier,” Mahle-Grisez follows. “Advisors are reaching out to students before they’re in a crisis using early predictors, and there’s some AI involved in that.”
“EAB Navigate is a platform that advisors can use to communicate with students who may be in the fourth week of the semester struggling, because once they get to a certain point in the semester, it’s very hard to turn that around,” Mahle-Grisez said. “Advisors are really the linchpin in retaining students and getting them to persist from semester to semester.”
Students who are reached through academic advising have persisted at significantly higher rates than the students who were not. 85% of students persist from fall to spring persistence, versus 67% of students, from one campaign.
Sinclair Promise has also helped add a new feature to class registration through the MySinclair portal. Students can now add future courses to their cart. “It’s not unlike an Amazon shopping cart,” Mahle-Grisez said. “At any given point, you should be able to see a full academic year of courses, and tag those sections that you’re interested in, and put them in your shopping cart.”
Mahle-Grisez wanted to follow with letting students know that the initiative, Promise 2030, is for them specifically. “Not for some student that we imagine when we plan programs, but for the actual student. For you with your actual schedule, your actual life, your actual goals,” Mahle-Grisez said.
Data shows that students who regularly meet with their academic advisors tend to be more successful than those who do not. Faculty members that discuss career readiness in their courses aid students in better connecting to their coursework and boost student persistence.
Achieve at Sinclair is a new peer mentoring program that began in the spring of this year. This program pairs a student with a higher GPA to a student with a lower GPA for mentorship. This trains peer mentors and helps them understand important persistence skills while providing support for students who may feel alone or are struggling on their academic journey.
On its second year, Sinclair Promise purpose is to show up for students and faculty to prepare Sinclair students for academic success and success after they finish their Sinclair journey.
Josofine Addison, reporter
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