Santa Barbara City Higher is sharing this year's Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, forth with the $800,000 prize, with Walla Walla Community College in Washington.

"The campus is saturated with academic support, including a writing centre staffed by trained professionals and testify to improve form completion, and peer tutors embedded in hundreds of class sections," wrote the Aspen Institute in its profile of SBCC.

Santa Barbara City College President Lori Gaskin (L) with Second Lady Jill Biden, at the Washington, D.C. ceremony where SBCC tied for the 2022 Aspen Institute Prize for Community College Excellence. Photo: Patrice Gilbert. (Click to enlarge).

Santa Barbara City College President Lori Gaskin (L) with 2nd Lady Jill Biden, at the Washington, D.C. ceremony where SBCC tied for the 2022 Aspen Institute Prize for Customs College Excellence. Photo: Patrice Gilbert. (Click to enlarge).

College president Lori Gaskin received the award during a ceremony Tuesday at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. The college was a finalist last year for the honor, which recognizes innovative community colleges. The laurels is coordinated past the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy organization.

Gaskin cited a culture of striving for excellence and not accepting the status quo for the college's success.

"We are unafraid to have risks, unafraid to experiment, unafraid to say, 'Let'south try something different or better,'" she said.

Winners are selected for showing "outstanding achievement" in four areas:  educatee learning outcomes, degree completion, how successful students are in finding good jobs after completing their program, and the higher'southward ability to recruit minority and low-income students and help them succeed.

SBCC is above the national average in all those categories.

  • More than than 30 percent of the school's nigh 28,000 students are Hispanic and of those, 48 percent graduate with three years, compared with 35 percent nationally.
  • 64 percent of all outset-time, full-time students graduate inside three years; the national rate is 40 pct.
  • Within five years of graduating with a two-year degree, Santa Barbara City Higher alumni earn about $43,000 a year.
  • 57 pct of total-fourth dimension students transfer to a 4-year higher within half dozen years, and more than one-half of them keep to earn a bachelor's degree.

Aspen Institute Executive Director Josh Wyner said Santa Barbara is especially stiff in two areas. "At Santa Barbara City College, faculty and staff are providing students only what they demand to transfer and consummate a four-year degree – a rigorous classroom instruction surrounded by showtime-rate supports from remedial math to college level writing."

Gaskin said she hasn't had time to retrieve near how to use the college'due south $400,000 share of the prize money, just would like information technology to see "the spirit and intent of the Aspen Institute's Community College Excellence Plan," and have a lasting impact.

"I'd like that funding to pay it forward in some way," she said.  "I'd like it to exist some manner in perpetuity providing something to our kinesthesia and staff and students."

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