Summer Bridge Program Leads to Student Success at San Jose City College

Summer is the time to cool off, to read that page-turner or watch that thriller, take a walk in the woods or a stroll at the shore. With the likely easing of the pandemic’s stranglehold on our lives this summer, we hope to celebrate normalcy with backyard barbecues and family get-togethers. For students, after zoom fatigue and myriad online stresses, summer offers the chance to chill.

For some motivated students, however, summer offers the chance to forge ahead. These are mostly high-school students who want to take transferable college-level courses in Math, English and Ethnic Studies at their local community colleges to acclimate to college life and get a head start in their academic and professional goals.

For several years now, for six weeks (from the second week of June to the third week of July), San Jose City College has been offering a rigorous Summer Bridge program to help full-time (mostly high school) students complete an associate’s degree in two years. The degree translates to the first two-years of a bachelor’s degree in the California State University or the University of California systems (freshman and sophomore years).

The Bridge Program is the first step in the “San Jose Promise” launched by Mayor Sam Liccardo in March 2017 for the San Jose-Evergreen Community College District to ensure that community college was affordable and accessible to local high school students. Students continue their experience with a team of counselors, instructors, and peers to guide them beyond the first year of college to transfer and graduation.

With funding from “San Jose Promise,” students in the Bridge Program enjoy tuition and fee waivers, free textbooks, calculators and online access to coursework. They also receive personalized academic and personal counseling through a cohort of teachers, counselors, supplemental instructors, and administrative staff. The statistics tell the story. The overall passing rate for summer bridge program in math and English is about 88%, almost 38% higher than the usual passing rate.

I can attest to the success of the Bridge Program with an example. I was teaching a course on statistics in summer 2018. At the beginning of the third week, a student was absent. When he did not show the following day, I informed a counselor who immediately contacted the student. Because of a disruption in the family, he was depressed and had resigned himself to dropping out. The counselor visited him at home and spent time persuading him to continue. He did, and instead of becoming a dropout statistic, graduated from City College and successfully transferred to UC Santa Cruz. Early alert, combined with just-in-time empathic nudges via texts or visits, can do wonders for community college students about to fall off the grid.

The real issue is one of scale. Instead of offering personalized services to only a few hundred students because of limited grant money, how can such services be extended to all students numbering in the thousands at any given community college?

This is where President Biden’s $1.8 trillion “American Families Plan” comes in. A part of the President’s plan, to the tune of $109 billion, is to make community college free for all Americans. Currently there are over 5 million students, many from low-income families, in the nation’s 1,000 community colleges. California has the largest community college system with 116 colleges serving over 2 million students.

If the “American Families Plan” comes to pass, it may be possible to scale and replicate effective personalized services to help most, if not all, community college students stay on track, graduate on time and infuse their careers with purpose.

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to teaching an Online Precalculus Algebra class as part of the 2021 Summer Bridge Program at San Jose City College. Founded in 1921, San Jose City College is the oldest community college in Santa Clara County, celebrating its centennial anniversary this year. I am eager to interact with curious and creative students and share with them how to use exponential functions to model the growth and decay of the coronavirus and how to explain “whispering galleries” by using the properties of a conic section.