March 29, 2024

Higher Ed

Valencia College President Sandy Shugart – He's a poet, a picker and a prophet

Jason Garcia | 5/29/2018

Shugart is also a data evangelist. After he arrived, he had the school begin examining years of student transcripts, which revealed that the success students had in their first five courses had a huge impact on how they fared through the rest of their college career. A student who withdrew, failed or earned a D in one of those first five classes saw his or her chances of graduation decline by almost 50%. So Valencia implemented strict application deadlines — once again sacrificing enrollment in exchange for ensuring that all students had enough time to be assessed, advised and oriented and that they showed up ready to learn on the first day of class.

One of the metrics Shugart pays the most attention to is the “college-going rate” — the share of students in any given area that pursue higher education. A few years ago, school leaders discovered that there was a pocket of Osceola County where the college-going rate was only about 35%, which was well below the countywide average of about 48%. Valencia built a campus in the area. College-going rates are now almost 50%.

“They do a great job of looking at data to drive their analyses and to evaluate their impact,” says Josh Wyner, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program. “A lot of colleges will review their programs every three to five years. Valencia will review them every year. And in their meetings, they’re looking at data, good and bad — they’re looking at completion rates, they’re looking at job placement rates, wage rates.”

After years of navigating the North Carolina Legislature, Shugart has also proven a shrewd student of Florida politics who has managed to avoid controversy while keeping the college’s many stakeholders happy. When there has been conflict, Shugart has always won.

In 2013, Shugart clashed with a Valencia trustee — a local political fundraiser appointed to the board first by former Gov. Charlie Crist and again by Gov. Rick Scott — who criticized Shugart’s management of the school. The Florida Senate, led at the time by an Orlando Republican and Shugart ally, responded by refusing to confirm the trustee’s appointment, forcing her off the board.

The next year, Shugart and Valencia’s trustees angered Scott by raising tuition to avoid a budget deficit. Shugart says Scott’s staff responded with subtle threats of budget vetoes and trustee reprisals. But the governor’s office never followed through and Scott, who is now running for U.S. Senate, has continued to use Valencia as a backdrop for public events.

“Sandy is brilliant,” says Ann McGee, longtime president of neighboring Seminole State College.

DirectConnect

Ask just about anyone in Orlando about Shugart’s most important legacy at Valencia and one subject always comes up: Valencia’s “DirectConnect” partnership with the University of Central Florida, which guarantees admission to UCF to any student who earns an associate’s degree from Valencia.

Shugart had been studying performance figures at UCF, which showed that Valencia transfers who had finished their associate’s degree were far more likely to earn their bachelor’s at UCF than students who took courses at Valencia but transferred to UCF without first obtaining a degree. So he made an offer to UCF President John Hitt: If UCF was willing to guarantee admission to any Valencia graduate — no matter how rigorous the university’s admissions screening became — Valencia would agree not to pursue any bachelor’s degree programs of its own without UCF’s express blessing.

Hitt agreed to the deal. “If he tells you something, you can believe him,” says Hitt, who is retiring this summer after 26 years as UCF’s president. “And I value that enormously in anyone I work with. I need to know that I can count on the facts as they present them.”

The results have been profound. In the four years following the adoption of DirectConnect, Valencia’s enrollment grew about 17% — but the number of associate in arts degrees the college awarded soared 98%. UCF, meanwhile, has been able to become more selective with its freshman classes, helping the university climb in prestige and performance rankings while still preserving access to a much wider swath of students. And the two schools have avoided the bickering over bachelor’s degrees that has strained relationships between colleges and universities in other parts of the state. Other area colleges have also signed on to the program, including Seminole State, Lake-Sumter, Eastern Florida State, Daytona State and, most recently, Central Florida in Marion County.

“Prior to DirectConnect, you didn’t know what was going to happen to you down the line. There was another series of traumas, another series of applications,” says Lew Oliver, a longtime Valencia trustee. “Now there was light at the end of the tunnel for anyone who walked in the door at Valencia.”

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