From data to doing: The productive urgency of what students told us

“The RP Group last fall released the most comprehensive study of African American and Black community college transfer in California history. More than 7,000 students. One hundred sixteen colleges. Three phases of research funded by Lumina Foundation. The study identified four tipping points that determine whether these students reach the transfer gate: passing gateway math and English in the first year, receiving academic counseling, participating in “Umoja” and avoiding academic probation. The findings are widely cited now, as they should be. (Umoja is a Kiswahili word meaning unity. It runs at more than 70 California colleges. The program serves Black students through counseling, shared history and community.) Students who met with a counselor three or more times were 19 percentage points more likely to feel focused on their goal. Umoja students who transferred credited the program at 93%. Sixty-four percent of Black students said they would prefer to meet with a counselor who shares their background. Only 53% do. These numbers describe outcomes. They do not describe the source. As dean of counseling and guided pathways at Los Angeles City College (LACC), I oversee the work that produces those outcomes one meeting at a time. Between fall 2025 and spring 2026, my counseling team delivered 5,204 student contacts. Our appointment completion rate was 98.5%. When Black students at LACC book a meeting with a counselor, they show up. The willingness is there. What the data cannot tell you is what it costs the counselor on the other side of the desk. Quashing the noise There is a signal in the RP Group study, and there is noise. The signal is clear. Relationships work. Frequency works. Counselors who reflect students’ cultural backgrounds work. Umoja works. The noise is what distorts our ability to act on the signal. Microaggressions inside classrooms that make a student fail math before the course begins. The word “probation” devastates before a conversation happens. Institutional declarations that a 20% Umoja bump means the problem is solved. And perhaps the loudest piece of noise, which no one in higher education is measuring: counselor depletion. Five thousand contacts in an academic year is not the sign of a well-resourced counseling operation. It is the sign of a system that has decided, quietly, who absorbs the pressure when budgets tighten and enrollments shift. How power moves inside an institution under stress tells you what the institution is actually afraid of. Right now, higher education is afraid of its own financial future. Counselors are absorbing that fear one student at a time. Counselor capacity A counselor on my team recently described a meeting with a first-generation Black student who had just failed a math course for the second time. The student sat down and said nothing for the first four minutes. The counselor said nothing either. Then they began, together. That silence is not inefficiency. It is the condition the relationship required before anything else could happen. The counselor who sits with a first-generation Black student facing probation does not do that work from a protocol. She does it from her own interior life. From her capacity to see past the student’s surface presentation to the weight underneath. From her willingness to challenge the student toward a truer version of themselves without flinching. From her ability to hold the student across the threshold when the student cannot yet hold themselves. This is formation, not training. Right now, higher education is spending it faster than it is replenishing it. The interior life of an educator is not a personal matter. It is an organizational asset. “Conscious gratitude” is not a wellness program. It is the interior formation that makes sustained equity work possible. When that asset is depleted, students feel it first. Black students feel it first of all, because the margin for error in their journey is thinnest. This is the claim that changes what the data mean. If the counselor is the tipping point, then counselor capacity, not counselor count, is the policy variable. We cannot hire our way to equity while we burn out the people we hire. We cannot scale Umoja by replication alone if we are not building the interior formation that makes Umoja work in the first place. The Alamo Colleges model What does this look like in practice? It looks like case management advising models where counselors see the same students over time. My team at LACC is building CITYadvise, informed by the work of the Alamo Colleges District (Texas), where counselors reach out before students are in crisis. The point of the model is not efficiency. The point is continuity. Relationships that span terms, not transactions that span minutes. It looks like institutional investment in the professional formation of counselors, not only their credentialing. A counselor with an M.A. who has never been taught to hold her own interior life under pressure will burn out at the exact rate her students most need her to stay. It looks like retiring the word “probation” statewide, as the RP Group explicitly recommends. The word does the damage before the counselor gets the chance to repair it. The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office has the authority to rename it. The moral case has already been made. The administrative case is straightforward. What is missing is the will. And it looks like philanthropy that understands the assignment. The $48 million Ballmer Group investment in Cal State Los Angeles, announced last month, will prepare more than 1,000 culturally responsive counselors and social workers for Los Angeles schools. That is the right scale of ambition. Community colleges are the pipeline into those graduate programs. If we want the pipeline to work, we have to build it deliberately, from the front end at LACC through the credential programs at Cal State LA and beyond. Building bridges The transfer gap for African American and Black students in California is not a mystery. The mechanisms that close it are documented. The state has the authority to fund what works. Institutions have the authority to protect the people who deliver it. Neither has yet been willing to treat the human infrastructure behind Black student transfer as the strategic asset it is. The counselor is the tipping point. The counselor’s interior life is the asset we cannot afford to keep depleting. When the humans holding the mission are depleted, the data shows it in the outcomes. By then, the student is already gone. Invest in the counselor’s formation the same way you invest in the student’s pathway. The return is the same. Seven thousand students told us what works. Now the question is whether we will build the conditions that let the people who serve them keep doing it. The post From data to doing: The productive urgency of what students told us first appeared on Community College Daily .

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