By Brooke Holland
Santa Barbara City College is offering a new Evening College program for people working full-time day jobs who want to earn their associate’s degree.
The program is being rolled out in pilot form with a limited set of classes for spring, and SBCC is planning for a complete launch in fall 2019, said Joshua Ramirez, SBCC’s Title V grant project director.
“Aside from merely offering classes in the evening that working adults can take on schedules that are more convenient, we are trying to provide more support services to help students succeed,” he said. “We are trying to build an evening presence and culture that we hope will serve the community.”
The classes are a combination of face-to-face, online and hybrid, and SBCC is trying to keep Evening College students on track to finish associate’s degrees in about seven semesters, with some students enrolling in summer sessions to maintain progress.
Last year, SBCC was awarded $2.7 million in federal Title V grant funding to develop a program aimed at serving part-time students, who make up about two-thirds of the college’s population.
“The federal grant that is supporting this effort was intended to build programs that serve students better,” Ramirez said.
“That’s not just classes. That also involves offering our faculty equity-minded professional development training to better understand who our students are, improve our practices in the classroom, and to help us learn to work with our students to create a sense of belonging-ness on campus.”
People can receive certain associate’s degrees while attending weekend and night classes as part-time students in the program, including: Associate in Arts for Transfer in Psychology, Associate in Arts for Transfer in Economics, Associate in Arts in Liberal Arts and Humanities, Associate in Arts in Social and Behavioral Sciences, SBCC said.
Antioch University Santa Barbara, a private liberal arts university in downtown, also is a transfer partner, creating a pathway for interested graduates continuing their education, SBCC said.
School counseling, tutoring and other support services will be available for students in the evening, and classes will be scheduled in a defined sequence to help people toward earning their degree, said SBCC spokesperson Luz Reyes-Martin.
— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com.
