While some people spend their Sunday afternoons watching football, napping or preparing for the week ahead, more than 700 students at the Community College of Rhode Island are attending class at the college’s Liston Campus on Hilton Street in Providence. This fall marks the inaugural semester of the Weekend College and according to college officials, offering classes on Friday, Saturday and Sunday has been “a smashing success” with students.
”I anticipated between 400 and 500 students, but I never anticipated that the response would be so great,” said Philip Sisson, assistant dean of Academic Affairs.
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Though the college has traditionally offered classes on both Friday nights and Saturday mornings, Sisson said the additional classes on Saturday afternoon and Sundays seemed like a natural progression.
”It fits with our mission to provide access in a variety of non-traditional sort of ways,” he said. “We were trying to reach out to students not necessarily able to get here during the week. People are working longer hours today and just can’t get here at night, and others may work strange hours and not have access to child care.”
According to Sisson, the college has not only reached out to new students, but has helped a lot of current students expand their schedules.
”We have a wide variety of students,” Sisson said. “We are still trying to get a feel for what their needs are. Our goal was to provide a weekend opportunity to complete a degree program and we think we are on our way.”
Debbie Baker, president of the Liston Campus Student Government agreed.
“During the week it’s a lot of younger students, but at weekend college the students are all ages and it’s wonderful,” she said. “Some are here working on degrees and others just to get new knowledge. So many students tell me that Weekend College is the best thing that could have happened to them.”
In fact, the average age of a Community College of Rhode Island student, is 28, according to the school’s president, Thomas Sepe.
What makes the idea of the weekend classes unique, Sisson said, is that the college has also opened up many of its offices, such as the registrar’s office, the bursar’s office, and the counseling office, that were traditionally opened only Monday through Friday.
”We scrambled to put the services together for our students, but what we are finding is that people are coming to access the campus and take advantage of those services,” he said. “We are tapping into a population of people who really couldn’t get to us during the week.”
But getting faculty and staff to teach classes and work at these offices at those hours was at first difficult, Sisson said
”It was a challenge to get the institution to think out of the box,” he said “Finding professional staff to open the admission’s office, financial aid and the bursar was hard. But we have a facility and administration that is very willing to make a commitment to the academic success of our students.”
This semester the college offered 34 courses, and already there are plans to nearly double that number in the spring. In addition, Sisson said the Weekend College also includes non-credit courses such as Building Self-Esteem, Commercial Driver’s License, crafts classes and Food Manager Certification.
CCRI isn’t the only local college to adopt a weekend program. Earlier this year Roger Williams University created its Metropolitan College, an academic branch specifically aimed at meeting the needs of “non-traditional” students.
David A. Gingerella, dean of the Metropolitan College said the school’s programming is designed to make college courses attractive to the state’s current workforce by offering them outside of traditional classrooms hours.
Sisson said what makes programs like these so attractive is the ability of students to create a schedule that works for them.
”It’s about timing, the flexibility of scheduling, and an affordable price,” he said.
