Commercial Music
2022-2023 Program Review

First, a brief bit of context. This is my 2^nd semester as the commercial music program director, having taken over the position in August of 2022 from Merlyn Van Regenmorter who had been in the position for 30 years. As such, I was not part of the previous planning units. Additionally, I was informed that I would not be required to create a new annual plan this particular year, as I would normally have to do. Due to these two factors, I must rely on the unit plan created by Dr. Van Regenmorter from 2021, as it is the most recent available. There are certainly items that I will want to include on future plans, and I may very well allude to some of those specifics even though they are not yet included on an active plan.

That being said, the previous planning unit had a very common focus: To increase student enrollment, increase productivity, serve disproportionately impacted students, technology upgrades, Fulltime faculty procurement, and connecting students to available services.

The common thread here is to provide all possible facets of service to student through education opportunities and support that will enable them to succeed not only academically, but also in the workplace since this is. CTE program.

The unit plan aligns very directly with the stated mission statement of American River College. It speaks directly to providing a rich environment aimed at student success, providing substantial opportunities for all students to excel in an safe and inclusive environment. The program plan to continually update and evolve the facility, equipment, and curriculum speaks directly to preparing students to earn a degree or certificate, and transfer to a 4-year institution, as well as prepare them for a relevant career in commercial music.

a)    Enrollment-While the commercial music department had been enjoying growth over quite a few years since the last report, two factors greatly impacted the enrollment for this program. Much like most other departments, the pandemic greatly affected enrollment. Since MUSM is primarily a lab-based program, the emergency implementation online severely affected our ability to drawn in and maintain students. Many chose to not enroll, and possibly come back when classes returned on ground. Additionally, the previously imposed vaccine mandate caused an estimated 28% decline in enrollment, as not every student wanted to get the vaccine. That being said, we had seen 18% increases in the intro and second class enrollments this spring semester and have indications that the fall 2023 enrollment should see another double digit increase. We have significantly increased our online and social media presence with the implementation of a full department publicity person in the form of our adjunct music business professor. Additionally, we have greatly increased our direct marketing to relevant local high school programs by visiting their campuses for recruiting, as well as bringing their students to our campus for individualized tours and projects. All of this is making potential students more aware of what we have to offer. I feel we will quickly overcome the enrollment deficits of the last few years in the next 18 months.

b)   Increase productivity-Commercial music is a constantly and rapidly evolving area in the professional world. In order to keep students engaged and involved through degree completion, we need to continually analyze our educational approach and evolve our program and curriculum to reflect the needs of the students. To that end, the fall of 2023 will see a significantly re-written AA degree and certificate program that has added three new, modernized classes while dropping a capstone class that is no longer serving student needs adequately. MUSM 361 (advanced studio techniques), MUSM 362 (mixing and mastering), and MUSM 367 (audio for video/sound design) have been added while MUSM 352(4^th level studio techniques) has been dropped. Additionally, the required and elective classes have been restructured to allow students to focus more directly on their specific area of interest within the degree program to fine tune and dive deeper on their chosen skill set.

c)    Students First- In commercial music, we are doing fairly well in engaging disproportionally impacted students. Regardless of race, students can sometimes get overwhelmed and discouraged when faced with the steep technical learning curve involved. We have designed our in-class activities to step students through the knowledge and skill sets so they are continually building on small areas of learning within a context that will enable them to evolve their understanding piece by piece. Additionally, we are providing multiple out-of-class labs that allow students to revisit and practice skills they might be struggling with in a relaxed and low-pressure environment. The latest data shows that our program is made of about 52% non-white students, which is up 4% over the previous period. Our female student percentage has risen from 17% to 25% since the last program review.

d)   Technology Upgrades-This is a continuing effort. The technology evolves and changes constantly. We endeavor to make forward-thinking purchase plans that will supply relevant and appropriate hardware and software tools that will stay relevant for years, trying to avoid “trendy” purchases that need replacement after 5 years. We are just implementing a major upgrade to the recording console in studio B that will offer students a new opportunity to experience a large scale analog console full integrated with a digital control setup, making this room fully functional for both analog and digital recording. Additionally, we will be pursuing a major upgrade to our smaller studio C that will be what’s called a “hybrid” mix room. This will not only provide another full-featured room for increased “hands on” time for students, but will also provide student experience on the newest approach in modern control room design, the hybrid mix room.

e)    Full time faculty to administer the program-With the retirement of bot Eric Chun and Dr. Merlyn Van Regenmorter as full-time faculty, there was a dire need to replace at least one position as a program lead. Other Los Rios colleges have attempted to run the CTE commercial music program without a full-time program lead and it has not been successful. Therefore, Kirt Shearer was hired in the fall of 2022 as the full-time program lead. There is not a current plan to replace Eric Chun’s position as full-time, as there is a freeze on positions at the moment. Also, currently the department needs are being well met with one full-time position and three adjunct positions.

f)    Connecting Students to available services-We have had great interaction with the available campus resources such as Starfish and Homebase. We are fortunate that we have a very effective Homebase program in Fine Arts. We have made students very aware of the available resources in these programs. It is part of our beginning of the semester introduction and orientation for all classes in the program.

I have outlined much of the data and findings in the previous section, but to summarize:

·     We need to do a better job in drawing students back to campus. We need to make them aware of the skills and experiences that are only realized on-ground. Our recent efforts have shown indications of progress, but we won’t completely have a clear picture until we see the enrollment data for the fall. But we expect a double digit increase.

·     We have updated and evolved the curriculum to provide more modern and relevant classes. These will take affect in the fall. We can just our progress at that time.

·     We have made incremental progress in continually increasing our under-represented student population and increasing student productivity and completions. We will continue to address these issues.

·     We have been effective inn upgrading our hardware and software technology to remain current. I see no big gaps in what we offer, but it does take continual effort to not fall behind. Fortunately, we have the people in our department to make sure that doesn’t happen. I will be pursuing a Strong Workforce allocation for the next funding round to assist with our planning goal of redesigning studio C into an expanded student workspace.

·     We have succeeded in obtaining a full-time faculty position as a program lead.

·     We have several documented instances of successfully connecting students with appropriate campus services for assistance and will continue to make sure students are aware of what is available. This semester we have not lost any student enrollment due to a lack of available resources.

I am pleased that progress towards all of our department goals has been made. In the last section we discussed the student productivity and retention shortfalls and how we hope to address them. But as far as department upgrade goals, we have been on-target, even coming out of the pandemic. There are areas that I would like to increase our progress and our rate of improvement. The first if these areas would be enrollment. Many departments are struggling to get certain classes back up to pre-covid era enrollments. This is particularly true of lab or performance-based classes. Although we have begun ( as mentioned earlier) to address this, we need to be more creative and proactive in pursuing this goal. We will be implementing browser search placement purchases to raise our visibility for people searching for recording schools. We will also be increasing our community outreach further through special event days that directly bring people to the campus.

We again have made progress with serving underrepresented students, but we need to do better. Through evolving the curriculum and class structure, we hope to make students of any background feel safe, comfortable, and welcome.

Other than that, we have so far, met our goals in terms of curriculum development, facility upgrades, staffing, and student services.

The ideal future in my opinion, is a fully realized version of the direction we are currently heading. We have increased interaction, cooperation, and support between the departments so that both faculty, staff, and students are supporting each other across department lines in related areas. One example would be the music business class students creating a marketing plan for the entire music department, and not just commercial music. We have started to increase enrollment, marketing, and department visibility. We have starts to increase student retention and success. We have continued to evolve our curriculum and facilities to remain not only current and relevant, but forward thinking. All of our faculty and staff are working professionals in the industries they instruct, and continue their professional development.

All of this is desirable to ARC because the unit plan actions speak to the campus mission of providing a clear pathway of success to our students, creating an inclusive environment that serves a diverse student body.

We will support the mission and improve academic quality because as a department, we are constantly collectively discussion and evaluating what we are doing and identifying strengths and weaknesses in our approach, and discussing ways that we can fine tune our system to better serve the students. We have learned that student characteristics change over the years, so the approach we use needs to be constantly examined to ensure we are evolving along with the needs of our students.

I think our main objective is two-fold: First, continue to increase student enrollment to the point where a wait list for every class is commonplace. We need to make sure that anyone who wants an education in music production (without spending $80k) can get a quality skills-based education at community college rates.

Next, we need to make sure we are engaging and retaining students so that they leave our program with a degree and are either transferring to a four-year program or have secured employment in a related field.

The retention and success metrics are easily obtained through college data. The transfer and employment data is a little tougher to absolutely track. However, we are setting up a method to encourage students to stay in communication and keep us informed regarding employment data. This is further assisted by the fact that we have multiple businesses that are recruiting for employees right out of our classrooms. We are becoming know as the place to find qualified audio industry workers. In the spring semester of 2023, we had three businesses visit the campus and hire 7 of our students for jobs in the audio industry. These students are now earning an income and getting on the job training while finishing their degrees.

Our goal is to provide an inclusive, balanced educational degree program that gives maximum access to all students. We aim to offer as much academic support and guidance for students, and a very clear path for navigating the classes, curriculum, and degree and certificate program. Additionally, we aim to offer as much access to the specific studio tools as we can even outside of classwork so that students that may not have any access to personal computers and equipment have the ability to develop their skills as much as possible. This means that students have the opportunity to access and use our studios in a supervised environment outside of class to continue to develop their skills, even working on their own projects. This means that we are providing access to equipment that some students may not have available otherwise. Also, we provide employment opportunities for all interested students so that they might get their “first break” and an opportunity to continue their real-world training and start on a progressive career path. Our continued development of curriculum will hopefully ensure accessibility for all students.