At two community colleges, the first question to the student was the same: What is your student identification number? She did not have one. She was still trying to determine whether she belonged there. She enrolled briefly, then left.
At a third college, an employee greeted her differently. “I know you,” the employee said. “You’re going to be a student here.” The student stayed, completed her degree, and eventually earned a master’s degree, according to Brad C. Phillips, founder and former president and CEO of the Institute for Evidence-Based Change (IEBC). That greeting changed what the student believed was possible in that moment.
That is the premise behind Caring Campus, a culture-change model developed and administered by IEBC. It asks faculty, staff, and administrators to adopt observable behaviors that communicate care throughout the student experience. Phillips calls the principle “every interaction matters.” Yet the larger responsibility is institutional. A caring campus is not one where kind employees occasionally rescue students. It is one where systems, expectations, and working conditions make helpful treatment predictable.
“Every campus is a caring campus,” Phillips says. “The issue is, how do you consistently show care so that students feel welcome and a sense of belonging, no matter who they talk with or where they go?”
Making Care Visible
Caring Campus emerged partially from Phillips’ work with Odessa College in Texas through Achieving the Dream. Odessa examined instructors whose courses had strong retention and success rates and identified behaviors they used to connect with students. The college incorporated relationship-building into a broader student success strategy. In 2019, the Aspen Institute recognized Odessa with a Rising Star Award. Over five years, its graduation and transfer rate increased from 15% to 36%, while its course withdrawal rate fell to 1.8%. The improvements occurred alongside multiple reforms, making it difficult to isolate the effect of relationship-building alone.
Faculty commitments include learning students’ preferred names, creating a welcoming first day, explaining courses clearly, assessing students’ needs early and often, and meeting with them individually. Phillips encourages replacing “office hours” with “student hours” because new students may interpret the traditional phrase as time when faculty should not be disturbed.
The model also promotes “situational fairness,” which asks faculty to consider circumstances rather than automatically treating every missed deadline as evidence of irresponsibility. Standards remain, but instructors recognize that employment, illness, caregiving, and transportation problems shape students’ ability to meet them.
For staff, the commitments address moments when bureaucracy becomes most visible. Employees wear name tags so students know whom they can approach. They develop cross-departmental knowledge, initiate contact when someone appears lost, and make warm referrals by calling ahead or directing students to the correct office. Nonacademic employees are often the people students seek when they cannot pay a bill, understand a policy, or register for a course.
In a 2022 study, Community College Research Center (CCRC) researchers Elisabeth A. Barnett and Susan Bickerstaff examined Caring Campus through site visits, interviews, surveys, and program materials. Staff reported stronger institutional knowledge, collaboration, leadership skills, and student interactions. The researchers cautioned that effects on student outcomes required further study.
The research captured what a warm referral can prevent. At one college, staff tried to tell a student’s story to the receiving office so the student would not have to repeatedly explain the problem. Another employee described the limits of relational service in an understaffed office: “You can’t build a relationship in 15 minutes. And students feel that; students know when you’re rushing them through the process.”
Care Cannot Compensate for Broken Systems
That warning exposes the central tension. Warmth cannot pay an unaffordable bill, staff an understaffed advising office, or change a policy that sends students between different departments. Institutions cannot solve structural problems by asking exhausted employees to perform cheerfulness.
The CCRC study identified turnover, shortages, burnout, and weak supervisory support as barriers. Employees could not always spend additional time with students or leave their posts for warm handoffs. At one college, nearly half of the original Caring Campus team had departed less than two years after beginning coaching.
Leaders must pair behavioral expectations with adequate staffing, clear processes, training, and authority to resolve problems. They should also examine who performs the institution’s relational labor. If the same advisers, adjunct faculty members, women, or employees of color repeatedly absorb students’ distress, care can become another inequitable part of their workload. Institutions should track that burden, compensate substantial additional work, and redesign policies that might generate confusion.
The goal is not to deliver bad news with a better smile. It is to reduce the number of unnecessary barriers while treating students with care when a problem cannot be eliminated.
From Initiative to Expectation
Culture change fails when care remains a poster on the wall, Phillips says. To endure, the behaviors must become “who you are and what you do.”
A 2023 CCRC report based on interviews with nine community college presidents and four Caring Campus coaches identified seven leadership strategies. Define and communicate expected behaviors, model them, align them with existing reforms, embed them in human resources practices, create an accountable structure, monitor employees’ and students’ experiences, and recognize progress.
Phillips considers middle managers pivotal. Deans, directors, and supervisors determine whether employees have permission to spend an extra few minutes with a student. If they greet students, support warm referrals, and reward collaborative problem-solving, employees see that the work is real. If senior leaders invoke belonging only in speeches, staff learn that it is just branding.
Institutions can reinforce expectations through hiring, orientation, job descriptions, evaluation, governance, and recognition. Hinds Community College in Mississippi offers Caring Campus training and recognizes employees “caught in the act of caring.” One honor went to a campus police chief who changed a student’s tire, walked her to class, and explained her delay to the instructor.
Texas A&M University-Kingsville, the first university to implement the model, publicly recognizes “Caring Campus Champions.” Its examples include a financial aid adviser who helps students navigate balances and an admissions employee who walked to another office to locate someone for a caller. The university is also collaborating with nearby community colleges to create more consistent transfer experiences across South Texas.
Measure What Students Experience
The evidence remains encouraging but is still developing. A CCRC evaluation conducted from 2019 to 2023 found that the faculty model showed potential to support persistence, faculty leadership, and a more positive climate. It relied on interviews, surveys, observations, and institutional data, and not a randomized causal design.
Oakton College in Illinois reports that first-time students who took at least one fall 2024 course with a faculty member participating in its Persistence Project returned the following semester at a rate of 77.4%, compared with 59.6% among their peers. The comparison is promising, but it does not establish that the behaviors caused the difference or control for every variation among students, courses, and instructors.
Institutions should track persistence and course success, but accountability shouldn’t stop there. Leaders should ask whose experience improved, where students still encounter friction, whether employees have the time and authority to help, and how consistently the behaviors occur. Students themselves should help evaluate whether an interaction felt respectful, useful, and caring.
The point is not to find the exceptionally patient adviser, attentive professor, or receptionist willing to leave the desk. Care becomes culture only when students can expect it wherever they enter the institution. One welcoming employee gave a future student a reason to take the next step. The responsibility of a caring institution is to ensure that all students do not have to depend on luck to receive that invitation.
