Re-Envisioning ESL Programming from the Outside Looking in

Amid sea breezes and strawberry fields, Ventura College has been serving the community 60 miles north of Los Angeles for nearly a century.

As a Hispanic-Serving Institution in a diverse county, the college has long offered English as a Second Language (ESL) courses. In the early 2000s, Ventura College served around 2,000 ESL students per year. However, in 2020, the college was struggling to attract more than 300 ESL students a year, despite Ventura County being home to more than 300,000 limited-English language speakers.  

“We were having to cancel ESL classes because there were not enough students … It didn’t make sense: There were more and more English language learners in the community, but they weren’t coming to us. We knew we needed help taking a fresh look at the problem.” 

— Jennifer Kalfsbeek-Goetz, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Student Learning, Ventura College

Recognizing that the institution was missing an opportunity to meet the needs of more English-language learners (ELL), college administrators set out to identify any institutional barriers preventing Ventura’s ESL program from more effectively serving the community. Knowing an outside third party would bring a fresh lens to the problem — and be more successful in gathering candid community perceptions about the college — Ventura partnered with Hanover Research to investigate the issues and recommend improvements to turn the program around. 

The Challenge

In Ventura County, California, more than half of working-age adults speak a language other than English at home, 97% of whom are Spanish-speaking. With this large population, Ventura College has a significant opportunity to serve the ELL needs of the community.  

Yet Ventura College’s ESL class fill rates were regularly falling below 50%. This resulted in frequent class cancellations, which subsequently led to uncertainty about whether students could count on the college for their learning needs. From a revenue standpoint, it became increasingly harder for the college to justify the costs of running the program, despite Ventura’s best efforts to promote the classes. 

 The college leadership team wanted an approachable ESL program with robust support services and the ability to serve more Hispanic students in the Eastern part of the county. To achieve this, they realized they needed to approach their enrollment problem from a new angle — starting by looking at it through a new lens. 

“We knew we needed a qualitative research approach to understand why our ESL class fill rates were so low, and we knew we needed to conduct that field research in Spanish, with native Spanish speakers. Much to our delight, Hanover accepted the challenge.”  Jennifer Kalfsbeek-Goetz, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Student Learning, Ventura College 

 Hoping to benefit from an objective, outside perspective, the college hired Hanover Research to go into the local community and, through a series of focus groups and in-depth interviews, learn directly from internal and external stakeholders what was holding back the current program. To be effective, the college stressed that these conversations should be conducted in Spanish at locations that were familiar and convenient to the community. While taking on this work during the pandemic added further complications to engaging community members, Hanover Research gladly accepted the challenge. 

 A team of Hanover higher education researchers worked with college leaders to identify four primary research questions: 

• How should we adjust our curriculum to attract and retain English language learners? 
• How can we build an ESL program that will match our community’s needs? 
• What are best practices for creating a safe space for English language learners? 
• How can we more effectively communicate with the local Spanish speaking community?