THE FOLLOWING IS A DANVILLE AREA COMMUNITY COLLEGE RELEASE
(Above) Married students Colleen and Alex Wakeland graduate together at the 2022 Commencement ceremony
DANVILLE — A 43 percent score may not seem all that great on a calculus final exam. But in the world of community colleges, a 43 percent graduation rate has Danville Area Community College soaring among the nation’s elite.
This year, 511 students earned associate degrees or certificates at DACC. As DACC Director Tom Carey explains, “Graduation rate is the percentage based on students graduating ‘on time’—which for community colleges means within three years.”
DACC’s 43 percent graduation rate is the highest on record since the College transformed from being a transfer-only “junior college” known as DJC to an open-access, comprehensive community college.
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All Star Jaguars Sydney Long and Jenesis Maynard celebrate Commencement 2022 |
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 22 percent of our nation’s community-college students graduate on time. “Achieving a graduation rate that’s nearly double the national average is a tremendous accomplishment,” says DACC President Stephen Nacco. “You have to give credit to the College faculty and staff, the Board of Trustees, the DACC Foundation for providing scholarship support, and to the students themselves, who came to DACC to work hard and succeed.”
Student Services Vice President Stacy Ehmen praises this group of DACC students for their resilience. She says, “This graduating cohort came to DACC about six months before the start of the pandemic. When the Covid crisis shut down the world in March of 2020, many of these students had never before taken online classes. We distributed 150 laptops and at least 50 Internet hot spots. As you can see by the results, they overcame their challenges with online classes and many of them buckled down and stayed on track to graduate. I’m very proud of them.”
A key factor in the steady improvement of DACC’s graduation rate has been growth in high-school dual-credit enrollment. Dual-credit classes give college-bound students a head start toward graduating. In the past year, more than 40 local students had earned at least one year of college credits (or 30 or more) when they graduated from high school and seven graduated from high school with DACC associate degrees.
Over the past six months, Academic Affairs Vice President Carl Bridges has implemented a “DACC Academy” program to help raise high-school students’ awareness of the services available to them at the College.
Bridges says, “As I look at enrollment numbers for this Fall semester, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in the number of students taking dual-credit classes at DACC. Because of this, I would say that the message is spreading throughout the District. Dual-credit classes not only help defray the high cost of a university education, they also give students a tremendous advantage on the road toward getting a college degree.”
Fall 2022 10th day enrollment shows a 6 percent increase in dual-credit enrollment for classes taken at high schools and a 24-percent increase for classes at DACC.
