Description:

The Achieving Collegiate Excellence and Success (ACES) program is a collaboration between MCPS, Montgomery College (MC), and the Universities at Shady Grove to create a seamless pathway from high school to college completion; it targets students who are underrepresented in higher education, the first in their family to attend college, or both. As one of a series of reports about ACES, this document focuses on the first year (2014-2015) of participants at MC. Specifically, it describes the first group of ACES students at MC (who graduated from MCPS in 2014), the extent of implementation of ACES program processes and activities at MC, student participation in ACES activities and offerings at MC, and perceptions of the program by ACES students and ACES coaches at MC.

Recommendations:

Make ACES workshops accessible to more students.

Increase efforts to motivate students to participate in the ACES program.

Ensure that all MC coaches send group e-mails regularly with reminders and timely information.

Put more emphasis on transferring to a four-year college after MC and on communicating to students that coaches are tracking their academic progress.

Fully develop and deploy the database for collecting information about ACES activities.

Increase support to MC coaches by implementing their suggestions.

File Name: FINAL Formative Evaluation of ACES_First Year at MC.pdf (629KB PDF)