A recent report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce indicated that South Dakota needed 65 percent of its workforce to have a postsecondary credential by 2020. Postsecondary education in South Dakota closely aligns with the workforce needs of our state. To that end, the South Dakota Board of Regents (the governing board for the state’s system of public universities) adopted an education attainment goal of 65 percent of South Dakotans, aged 25 to 34, holding a postsecondary credential by the year 2025. While a postsecondary credential can include a high value certificate or license, the public universities are focusing on the primary credentials offered in our system, associate of arts or science degrees and bachelor’s degrees. It is an ambitious goal – in 2012, only 40.7 percent of this demographic held an associate or bachelor’s degree in the state and today the number is 48.6 percent.
As the state university system awards 60 percent of associate, bachelor’s, and graduate degrees in South Dakota, the bulk of this responsibility falls on us. Accomplishing our education attainment goal is not just a matter of enrolling more students. While the number of degrees awarded by South Dakota’s university system has increased by about 500 between FY14 and FY18, there are still unnecessary barriers to graduation to address. South Dakota’s work with Complete College America has greatly aided our efforts to increase postsecondary graduates, decrease time and money needed for degree completion, and improve opportunities for underrepresented populations.
CCA’s emphasis on data collection and analysis has steered our efforts into more strategic approaches to student success. South Dakota has implemented a number of CCA-related reforms, including but not limited to reducing the number of credits in degree programs to 120, encouraging students to complete fifteen credits per semester through advertising, advising, and scholarship incentives, and adding exploratory studies programs to help students find their major and reduce the accumulation of unneeded credits. These policies and others helped South Dakota improve its four-year graduation rate by 16 percent over the last decade.
The drive to meet our education attainment goal guides our most ambitious CCA-related project to date. Like most states, passing college algebra courses is one of the most significant academic barriers to completion in South Dakota. However, our new Math Pathways project will drastically change our use of math in our curriculum and our approach to remedial coursework. The Math Pathways project has two core components. First, CCA presentations inspired the design of a new system-wide Mathematical Reasoning course. Our university’s mathematicians spent a year discussing with other faculty the most valuable mathematics content for majors that do not require an algebra and calculus sequence. As a result, all majors in the state system now align with a specific general education math course. Over 80 majors will have Mathematical Reasoning as the required course instead of College Algebra. This change does not diminish academic rigor, better serves students, and should greatly reduce the need for remediation. Second, we are expanding use of corequisite remediation in math courses. This work first began in 2012, when CCA representatives visited South Dakota to help faculty design strategies for innovative corequisite remediation programs. In subsequent years, we added multiple measures to our math placement indexes and partnered with the SD Department of Education to offer online remediation support prior to enrolling in a university. This year, we are nearly eliminating traditional, non-credit math remediation by expanding use of corequisite courses that provide additional academic support in credit-bearing courses.
South Dakota and CCA has been a successful partnership. CCA’s recommended policies and practices have helped us change the narrative from enrollments to completions. Our work with CCA has and will continue to aid efforts to achieve our education attainment goal and make a college degree more obtainable for South Dakotans.
