Before she had even heard of Calbright, Erendira Cid was working in Enrollment Services at a traditional California community college, and saw there was a problem.
So many adult students were dropping out, not because they weren’t doing well in classes or at college itself, but because they just couldn’t make college fit with their lives.
“I had a lot of students who would come into the office defeated, and they would say ‘I have to drop out of my class because my shift changed at work,’ or ‘because I’m the caretaker for my family.’ All kinds of things came up, because going to college was just one part of their lives. And so I wanted to make sure that I gave them the sympathy that I would want in their situation. I understood why they’d need to put aside their coursework.”
But sympathy was all she could do, and it didn’t feel like enough. So she brought it up to her department’s director.
“I told her that lately I’ve had so many students coming in having to drop out of their classes like this, and she said ‘oh, well you can tell them about Calbright.’ And I said ‘what’s Calbright?’”
That’s how she learned that California had recently started a new kind of college that would re-imagine higher education for working adults — an online college that is fast, flexible, and free. Calbright uses a Competency-Based Education model where students can study at their own pace, on their own schedule, and go as quickly or slowly as they need, without penalty. It’s a college, focused on career education rather than traditional degrees, that helps adult learners fit education in their lives so that they can advance or change careers.
It was exactly what the students Erendera spoke with everyday were looking for, and so when these conversations happened she followed her director’s advice and told them about Calbright.
“It happened enough that eventually I wanted to work at Calbright,” she said.
So she followed the college, looking for open positions. When she saw job postings she didn’t think her current skills and experience were a good match, so she worked with her director to develop her professional qualifications. “This mattered to me,” Erendera said. “It was something I wanted to be part of.” Eventually she applied for and was hired to an open position on Calbright’s Student Support team.
“I was originally hired to do Enrollment Services, but two months later they put me on what is now the Persistence team,” she said. “It’s a very different breadth of support that we give students. Enrollment is simple in a way, because it’s clear what the support is: Someone isn’t enrolled and wants to be enrolled. They haven’t applied yet and they need to apply, and that’s how I’m helping them. But Persistence is in the gray area, where each person’s struggling with something different and we have to work with them to figure out the problem and find a solution. Maybe someone’s just gotten laid off, or they need to travel for work, or their family is sick, and our job is to provide tailored support that works for them.”
This, she said, “is where I found my real passion for supporting students. At Calbright I can really work with them, help them, in a way that I couldn’t before.”
Working with students at Calbright, she discovered, is also working with data. “I’m working with students as people, my work is tailored to every student in a meaningful and intentional way, but we also use a lot of data so that we make informed decisions with students. We’re not just saying ‘let’s see if this works,’ we’re able to say we know that this intervention works well, but another intervention doesn’t, so we’re going to do what the data says works.”
That’s when the Calbright story truly became her story, as Erendera decided to go back to school too.
“I had to drop out of school myself when I became a mother and I hadn’t completed my associates degree when I got my job at Calbright,” she remembered. “And Dr. Amandeep, our Dean of Counseling, asked me ‘Eren, when are you going to go back to school?’ and by the end of our meeting I was enrolled in online classes again. And it was scary! I’m a single mom and I have to do work and care for my child and now I’m taking classes too! But the team at Calbright supported me, semester after semester, until before I knew it I had my associates.”
She’s now pursuing her bachelor’s degree in data science at Western Governors University (WGU), an online college that also has a Competency-Based Education model. Calbright has an articulation agreement with WGU, so Californians who earn their free certificates at Calbright can apply to use the credits for a traditional degree like a bachelor’s at WGU.
“I’m in my fourth term now, and it’s a really long degree, but I can already see it paying off in my work,” Erendera said. “The better I get at working with data, the better I get at working with students, and I’m excited to put my skills to work.”
Her experience on both sides of the screen – as a staff member at a college that exists to make higher education accessible to non-traditional students, and as a non-traditional student dealing with many of the same issues Calbright students have, means that Erendera is always talking to her the students she supports as a peer and colleague. She cares so much about their lives because they’re in this together.
“It takes one to know one,” she said. “I have not had the privilege of having things handed to me. I’ve had to really work for the opportunities I have, so did my family, and I resonate with students when they tell me it’s really hard. I completely understand when my students are telling me about what their kids need, and that they feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. I’ve felt that. And I can tell them from experience: Maybe you don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re still doing it. My passion comes from being able to say: I’ve had the experience myself, I’ve got the data in front of me, and I can see you’re doing great.”
Calbright is designed to solve the problems its students have. The most common issue she encounters, Erendera said, is that students don’t know there’s already a system in place to solve the challenges they face.
“A lot of students, especially students who haven’t been to college before, or don’t have much experience with technology, don’t understand their options at a place like Calbright,” she said. “They come to me with problems and I can say ‘we’ve already got great options for you, that are actually designed for you.’”
But we can always do better. Erendera’s goal at Calbright now is to learn ways to support even more kinds of students, especially from marginalized communities.
“Students who have had contact with the justice system, or who are living in halfway houses, or for whom English is not their first language, have unique needs, and I can keep learning, we can keep learning, about the kind of support they need,” Erendera said.
Whatever they need, her goal at Calbright “is to make sure that my work impacts students in the best of ways. Meeting them where they are. I have the privilege of being a bridge students can use to find the Calbright services they need. I want my legacy at Calbright to be a positive impact towards our completion rates, our retention rates, and what that looks like on the other side is for students to tell the people in their lives, ‘I went to Calbright and the support was great.”
She loves what she does.
