On the sixth floor of the administration building of City Colleges of Chicago, faculty, staff, and students pore over reams of journal articles and research papers, jotting down ideas in spiral notebooks. Large pieces of paper—remnants of brainstorming sessions—cover the walls. Occasionally someone speeds by with an open laptop nestled between elbow and wrist, headed to one of many meetings.
Here, ruminating is everybody’s job.
Under a new chancellor, the 100-year-old community-college system is undergoing one of the most aggressive efforts in its history to ensure that its students are transfer- and career-ready. Rotating teams scrutinize every facet of the system, from remediation to technology to student-support services. The effort, called Reinvention, is taking on a daunting problem: Only 7 percent of the system’s full-time students graduate on time.
The first wave of recommendations is expected in May. But already, aspects of the system have been overhauled in ways that alarm some faculty and student leaders. A recently created blog is calling for the chancellor’s removal, and a straw poll taken at each of the seven colleges found that a majority of the faculty had no confidence in the administration.
The chancellor, Cheryl L. Hyman, is not one of their own. Hand-picked by Mayor Richard Daley a little over a year ago, she has no prior experience in higher education, or in education at all. The Reinvention project, which she began almost immediately after being appointed, is modeled on a similar effort at ComEd, an electric-utility company in Chicago where she had spent her career, most recently as vice president for operations strategy and business intelligence.
But her personal background provides a clearer picture of why the 42-year-old was drawn to lead a system struggling to graduate students. Once a high-school dropout who left home as a teenager, Ms. Hyman eventually found her way to the City Colleges of Chicago and graduated in 1993.
Ms. Hyman, always polished in her appearance and measured in her speech, says she was shocked when she was tapped for the chancellor position, and she was equally shocked to hear how few students had success stories like hers. City Colleges loses 54 percent of degree-seeking students in their first 15 credit hours. Only 35 percent of adult-education students meet their goals, such as earning a GED or improving their English-language skills. Ms. Hyman calls her new job a “calling.”
However, her enthusiasm for the system is being tested these days. Critics have accused her of going on a multimillion-dollar spending spree on new administrative hires, and have bridled at her decision, made jointly with the Board of Trustees, to make all but one of the seven college presidents reapply for their jobs. Over all, some people think Ms. Hyman is bringing a level of corporatization they do not welcome at an institution of higher education.
“Reinvention sounds like a great idea,” says Theodore J. Fabriek, chairman of the system’s student district council. “But a lot of the decisions so far seem to be tarnishing the project.”
The struggle at City Colleges of Chicago is emblematic of how hard it is to change the culture of an institution, even when everybody agrees the intention is commendable. Increasingly, community colleges have embraced the notion that change is needed, but how to achieve it isn’t easy to answer. And that tension may get in the way of meeting President Obama’s goal of the United States’ having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.
“We are not in this predicament because students can’t achieve,” Ms. Hyman says. “Every student who comes through our doors can achieve. We are in this predicament because change hasn’t come upon us in a long time. Access is good. Everybody should have access to a quality education. But it now must be coupled with success.”
Reinventing a College
What sets City Colleges’ project apart is its vast scope. Other community-college efforts to meet the 2020 goal have a limited focus, such as improving remediation or student-support services, but City Colleges intends to examine every aspect of the 120,000-student system and make changes in seven key areas: academic programs, student support, remediation, adult education, technology, operations, and faculty and staff development.
A hallmark of the project is that certain changes will occur immediately rather than be put in place after lengthy study. Officials say the dire academic situation at the colleges demands it.
Nationally, 22 percent of first-time, full-time community college students earn a credential on time. At City Colleges of Chicago, however, only 7 percent of its first-time, full-time students who come for a credential earn one within three years. Only 16 percent of such students actually transfer to a four-year institution after three years. More than 90 percent of students need remediation.
“We need to help students now,” says Alvin Bisarya, vice chancellor for strategy and institutional intelligence. “We don’t want to wait, especially if it’s a good idea supported by faculty, staff, and students.”
The Reinvention concept originated with Mayor Daley, but the project’s vision, strategy, and execution rest squarely on the shoulders of its young chancellor, who has no doctoral degree or teaching experience. In fact, to accept Mr. Daley’s recommendation, the Board of Trustees had to make an exception to the posted job requirements.
Ms. Hyman says she doesn’t need to be an academic to understand that a 7-percent graduation rate is a problem.
“I don’t see myself as, and nor do I claim to be, an academic,” she says. “But what I do claim is to be a leader who can build a very good team to move this institution forward.”
Finding a Calling
The passion Ms. Hyman brings to her job as chancellor has a lot to do with her past and the role City Colleges of Chicago has played in her life.
Ms. Hyman grew up in a housing project in Chicago’s West Side. She left home at 16, moving in with friends to get away from a bad situation—at the time, her mother and stepfather were substance abusers. She dropped out of high school and started working full time at Kentucky Fried Chicken, which allowed her to afford her own apartment. But unsatisfied with her job, she quit and moved in with a friend’s mother, who, she says, gave her the one thing she craved: a stable home environment. She returned to high school and graduated at 18.
“It was important to me that my life reflect my capability and not my circumstances,” she says.
After graduation, Ms. Hyman spent six months at a trade school that promised her an education in computer programming complete with a guarantee of a job. She ended up instead with a stack of certificates, student-loan debt, and no job after the school shut down. “That’s when I learned that there are no shortcuts in life,” says Ms. Hyman, with a chuckle.
She got serious about her studies and enrolled in Olive-Harvey College—one of City Colleges’ seven campuses. She earned nearly all A’s and later transferred to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science. She later earned an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Ms. Hyman has fond memories of her time at Olive-Harvey, including a professor who helped her grasp calculus and other difficult mathematics concepts.
“Being a graduate of this institution, I know firsthand what it’s like being a student here,” she says. “The statistics at City Colleges are very troubling, but I know there are many success stories that come out of this institution. One of the things our students need, more than a good-quality education, is hope. I feel like I can give them that.”
Ms. Hyman is as brash and assured as she is tenacious. At 12, she fired off a letter to President Ronald Reagan complaining about the poor living conditions in public housing. This year she turned a foot surgery into a marketing opportunity—ordering custom-made sneakers in the college’s trademark blue and green with “Chancellor” across the back.
Recently her high energy was on full display during a meeting with members of the remediation committee who were giving her an update on their work. Dressed all in black except for the sneakers, Ms. Hyman peppered team members with questions. At times she interjected mid sentence. As she listened, she kept an eye on her laptop and two cellphones.
Ms. Hyman has high expectations but, she says, she’s not afraid to surround herself with people who have opinions that differ from hers.
Barbara Griffin, a member of the committee on student support and pathways, says she had a good experience presenting her work to Ms. Hyman. She found that the chancellor was straightforward and engaged, and that “nothing was too small to talk about.”
Ms. Griffin, who teaches computer information systems at Olive-Harvey, supports the work of the Reinvention project. She says she has never seen anything like it in her 23 years of working at City Colleges.
The structure of the Reinvention effort at City Colleges is almost identical to that of a project Ms. Hyman worked on at ComEd. (In fact, ComEd’s logo for its rebates and savings programs is similar to the Reinvention logo. Both incorporate a green swirl.) Facing a revenue gap of more than $100-million, the company turned to its own employees to study the problem and come up with solutions. Within 18 months, they found ways to save money and close the gap.
The project proved to be so successful that the company created a permanent department to evaluate business practices. Rotating groups of employees leave behind their day-to-day responsibilities and work full time on projects.
The Reinvention project began in earnest three months ago, when committee members started their work. There is widespread sentiment, even among Ms. Hyman’s critics, that the goal of the project is laudable and much-needed. Many also say she is sincere in her desire to help students achieve academically.
But from the beginning, many faculty members were put off by her focus on City Colleges’ dismal academic record, perceiving that they were assumed to be at fault.
“A lot of faculty has been demoralized by the implication,” says David St. John, who teaches developmental math courses at Malcolm X College.
Mr. St. John, who is a member of the remediation group, also says the decision to frame the “case for change” using only statistics is shortchanging the students who do graduate or transfer to a four-year university.
High-Level Hires
Ms. Hyman has already made changes in keeping with her vision of student success. One of her first moves was to eliminate more than 200 staff positions she felt were redundant, and invest the $30-million saved in student services, including the addition of advisers, tutors, and mentors. But critics have focused on some high-level administrative hires, including a new chief of staff and an adviser to the Board of Trustees, both making six-figure salaries. Katheryn Hayes, the college’s director of external communications, says that, as with any new administration, the chancellor wanted to select her own team to help her lead the institution, especially as it undergoes a major transformation.
Tensions at the institution began to escalate in early March, when the decision was made to rewrite the job descriptions for all seven college presidents to include student-retention goals, and to make all but one reapply for their jobs, while at the same time encouraging outsiders to apply. (The one president exempted, Donald J. Laackman at Harold Washington College, had recently been hired under the new job description.)
That kind of decision indicates a push to run the system on a business model, says Perry J. Buckley, president of the Cook County College Teachers Union, Local 1600. And the fact that Mr. Laackman had no academic background (he was a principal at the Chicago-based Civic Consulting Alliance) makes faculty members worry that their input will be valued less, says Mr. Buckley.
Under Ms. Hyman, the central administration is also exerting more control over hiring. The faculty has grown increasingly concerned that the administration will strip individual colleges of their identities and hamper their ability to customize their programs for the needs of their communities. They point to the elimination of nursing programs at Olive-Harvey and at Kennedy-King College—though both programs lacked national accreditation, and Kennedy-King’s was being phased out when Ms. Hyman arrived.
Faculty also see it as telling that this year. for the first time, the system will hold one commencement rather than allowing each college to hold its own.
Ms. Hyman is not the first City Colleges chancellor to have faced opposition. In 2005 the faculty voted no confidence in Chancellor Wayne D. Watson following several changes he made to raise academic standards, such as overhauling the evaluation process for instructors and putting an annual review of the district’s academic programs in place.
Ms. Hyman says she recognizes that faculty members need to be a major part of any solution, and she points to their inclusion on the Reinvention teams.
As for the collective commencement ceremony, Ms. Hayes says this year’s graduation is an opportunity to celebrate the institution’s 100th anniversary. She says no decision has been made about whether the colleges can hold their own ceremonies next year.
It may be years before the system begins to award more degrees and certificates at graduation; the Reinvention project, after all, is less than a year old. But Ms. Hyman is confident it will happen.
For her, the work on the sixth floor is personal. Whenever she walks through the doors of Olive-Harvey College, she is reminded of how differently her life could have turned out.
