In this episode, we engage one of the issues that higher education has never solved: what to do when students' academic failure is rooted in their life circumstances outside of the classroom. As an open enrollment college with neither dorms nor on-campus food service, we don't provide a baseline of basic needs support that residential colleges do. Also, we serve a broad sampling of the community so our students have a broad range of financial and social stability.

Here, we talk with Muffy Allison, a licensed social worker and member of Counseling Services here at the college. Muffy serves on the Strategic Planning Committee for Students' Basic Needs. Her committee looked into the actual data about students' basic needs at the college in order to better serve that need. Muffy and I talk about what that data and her experience in Counseling Services tells us about our students' needs and how those needs are connected to failure at the college.