Golden West College welcomes most students back for first time in 17 months
Golden West College vice president of student services Claudia Lee spent most of the first day of school Monday helping students. And, since most of the student body spent the last 17 months off campus, Lee was happy to be so involved.
“It’s been busy, which is amazing,” Lee said Monday. “Educators, we thrive off of personal interaction. I mean, that’s why we’re here. We love the energy we get from the students, the vibrancy of the campus.”
Golden West College, which had most of its programs strictly online last school year, returned Monday with a hybrid system in place. The junior college is offering on-campus classes and fully online classes. There’s also an option called a “live online” class, where students log into Zoom at certain times to interact with their teachers and classmates.
Flexibility is key as the college opens the 2021-22 school year, Lee said, with about 30% of classes being held on campus. Golden West is using the Signal Line messaging platform that gives students customized responses online to their questions.
“What we’re able to do, because we ask up front their student ID and some personal information, it gives them very customized responses based on the data that we have in our system,” she said. “If a student were to type in, for example, ‘What’s my cumulative G.P.A.?,’ it would spit that back out at them. That is very unique, because that really eliminates their need to wait to speak to a real-life human being.”
Lee said weekly customized text messages are also a key part of the school’s approach. Students can respond to the text with unrelated questions, which will be forwarded to the right person, or they can ask questions in the GWC app on their smartphone.
The college has more than 10,000 students registered for the fall, Lee said. Of those, about 3,400 have at least one on-campus — the school calls it “on ground” — class. In an added bonus for those who choose to return to campus, the school has waived parking fees for the fall semester.
“A college campus without students is just a place,” Golden West College President Tim McGrath said. “When you have students, you just feel an excitement. We get to do magic every August when new students come and their educational careers are set in front of them, and there’s an excitement about what they can do. High school or whatever they were doing is over, and this is a brand-new day … In the last [17] months, seeing the top of you on Zoom is just not the same as being able to be in the class and share. It just makes a huge difference.”
Golden West is one of three Coast Community College District campuses, which also includes Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa and Coastline College in Fountain Valley, that has adopted policies for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Students must wear masks indoors and will be asked by Oct. 1 to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test.
Meridith Randall, Golden West College vice president of instruction, said student performance did not drop during the 2020-21 year. This was despite the fact that the education was for the most part online only, aside from programs like the nursing, police academy and automotive classes.
She said the student success rate — the percentage of students who received a “C” grade or better — stayed at about 72% college-wide. The college awarded 6,468 degrees and certificates last school year.
“We may have had fewer students and they were all online, but we still had the same level of student success,” Randall said.
As she traveled through the center of campus on Monday, she remarked about how great it was to see students back on campus.
“They’re all being great about wearing masks, which is wonderful,” she added.
The Rustlers’ athletic programs are also gearing up for success. Athletic Director Danny Johnson said they’ve been training on campus since last October, but they are anticipating a full schedule this school year across the board, compared to about 70% last season. Student-athletes who are on campus have plenty of resources available to them, including a full-time academic counselor and tutoring at the Student-Athlete Success Center.
Rachel Miller, a sophomore outside hitter for the women’s volleyball team, said she was excited to travel across campus on Monday to attend her microeconomics class. It wasn’t really as special of a day for two teammates, libero Dallas Smulson and setter Kate Griffin, who said that all of their classes were online for this fall semester.
Allison Thai, a freshman who recently graduated from Fountain Valley High School, was on campus Monday. By early afternoon, Thai said she had already attended her microeconomics and business calculus classes.
Thai said she chose to stick to online-only classes for her last year at Fountain Valley High, but she’s switching it up for junior college.
“I realized I wasn’t really learning much when I was online, because I get distracted really easily,” she said. “Especially for math, I needed it in-person so I could be more focused ... It’s great. I got to talk to people around the table in my class. It was easier for me to communicate with people, talk to them, get their numbers.”
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