Third in a series
Re “How West L.A College Helps Prep Students Gain an Edge”
[img]1816|right|Nabil Abu-Ghazeleh||no_popup[/img]With West Los Angeles College boasting of a hefty enrollment of 10,500 this afternoon, President Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh was asked if that is a valid yardstick for measuring the prosperity of the school.
“It is one measure,” he said. “As a California community college, of course, access is a very important issue. If we can’t even get people in the front door, then there are students out there who are not being served.
“We are in an odd space in the economy. While the economy itself is picking up, people are not quite running away from education to get jobs because jobs-growth has not been at a high rate. This is an opportunity for us to support more of our students.”
Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh, in his third year of elevating West L.A. College to increasingly lofty levels, said that “we have to work also on the other piece of what we do in community college, student success.
“Given the very large proportion of students we get who come to college not prepared for college-level instruction, we are continuing to work with those students to improve their chances.
“We have things like the Summer Bridge Program that we are trying to put in,” the president said, “We are trying to build a pathways project that will look at the entire experience of a student, from when we recruit them, all the way from middle school until he or she is on stage and shakes my hand when they get their Associate degree and/or transfer.
“That improvement is something we will continue to work on,” Mr. Abu-Ghazeleh said, “because our students come with some challenges.”
(To be continued)
