CINCINNATI — A staff member at Cincinnati State shouts: “Four minutes!”
The text messages are about to go out, and Nozina Eshkobilova looks at her computer. She smiles because her message includes an emoji.
“Are you ready?”
At 10:15 a.m. on Wednesday, there is laughter in the old classroom recently converted into an office. Soon, there’s excitement.
“Somebody responded already,” a student says.
This is all part of a new program at the college designed to help former students who were only a semester or two away from graduating but never did.
Almost one in 11 people in Ohio start college but never finish, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Those stats are even worse for community colleges, where almost half of the students who start classes never get a degree or complete a certification.
On Wednesday, Eshkobilova is working to change that. She sends a flurry of messages to try to connect with former students. And within a minute, multiple people respond.
“We don’t ask, ‘Are you coming back?’” Eshkobilova said. “We ask, ‘How was your experience?’”
The idea is simple: People don’t want to talk to college administrators, but they might listen to peers. Cincinnati State piloted a program like this in 2021, and they say it worked. They used it to get a $2.1 million federal grant, allowing them to hire staff and students to work on this project on a larger scale.
Eshkobilova, an international student from Uzbekistan, is happy at the responses she gets — but she knows it’s only the first step.
“The mission is not complete yet,” she said.
That mission is to connect those students with resources they need to finish — resources they often don’t know about. And with the new grant, resources allow officials to forgive up to $1,000 of student debt.
“You think your story is the craziest, you think you have the most difficult situation,” said Hasti Vaezian, another student worker. “But when you talk to other people, sometimes you’re like wow, people are really going through bad things.”
Vaezian said she’s spoken to former students who told her about deaths in their families, car crashes, medical issues, new houses and lost jobs. People who didn’t know how college works. People who didn’t even know they had an outstanding bill.
Don Pollock helps run this team of students. He graduated from Cincinnati State in his 40s, and his job now is to help returning students navigate their issues.
“I get to swoop in and be the hero,” Pollock said. “Watch them go to class and then cry when they graduate.”
So far, almost half of the former students his team has reached out to have responded. They only started in June, but officials say five students are going to graduate this semester as a result.
“It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” said Pollock.
