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Lone Star College System celebrated for student outcomes with 2025 Star Award

Star Award 2025
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board awarded Lone Star College System with the 2025 Star Award, highlighting recent achievements in student outcomes.

Lone Star College System is one of six institutions of higher education to receive the 2025 Star Award from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which recognizes institutions that are advancing the state’s postsecondary goals across three categories: student success, workforce education, and career development and transitions.

LSCS was the only community college recognized in the student success category, highlighting extensive efforts and measurable progress in student outcomes.

This award comes after several years of strategic, data-driven initiatives that have increased student persistence and credential attainment, narrowed equity gaps, and helped students advance their career goals—all while removing barriers to education.

“Over the past eight years, Lone Star College System has transformed the student experience through intentional, data-informed strategies that have delivered extraordinary outcomes,” said Mario K. Castillo, J.D., LSCS chancellor. “These outcomes reflect a culture of continuous improvement, where data dashboards, technology, professional development, and holistic student support are systematically used to remove barriers, close equity gaps, and keep students on track.”

Credential attainment at LSCS has increased nearly 12% since 2017 as the college system has focused on developing clear pathways to credential attainment, ensuring students complete their degrees in less time and at a lower cost. Such initiatives include:

    • Making every student’s journey to credential completion clear, efficient and affordable through the Pathways initiative, introduced in 2016.

    • Aligning all degree and certificate programs to a streamlined 60-credit framework, minimizing excess coursework and saving students money.

    • Automatically graduating students who are identified to be eligible for stackable credentials or who have completed all program requirements but have not applied to graduate.

    • Launching the Student Completion Trends Report in 2018 to highlight equity gaps, course success patterns and barriers to completion.

    • Facilitating high-impact advising practices and implementing a case management advising model, furthering the effort to increase student persistence and completion.

    • Alerting students when they attempt to register for courses outside their plan, guiding them toward degree-aligned coursework.

    • Introducing a Metrics Dashboard in 2024, enabling LSCS leadership to monitor early momentum, course success, persistence, transfer and completion metrics in real time.

    • Supporting thousands of LSCS students through the CARE for Completion program, connecting them to food, child care, housing and other resources to ensure life circumstances do not derail their academic progress.

“These achievements reflect the hard work and dedication of our faculty, staff and leadership teams, as well as the strength of our students,” said Gerald F. Napoles, Ph.D., LSCS vice chancellor, Student Success. “They also reflect a culture of continuous improvement—where we use data dashboards, technology, professional development and comprehensive supports to remove barriers, close equity gaps and keep students on track.”

The theme for this year’s Star Award is “From Classroom to Career: A Future-Ready Texas.” Star Award recipients will be recognized at the Higher EDge: Texas Higher Education Leadership Conference in Austin this December.

To learn more about student success initiatives at Lone Star College System, visit LoneStar.edu/Student-Success.

Lone Star College System enrolls over 90,000 students each semester providing high-quality, low-cost academic transfer and career training education. LSCS is training tomorrow’s workforce today and redefining the community college experience to support student success. Mario K. Castillo, J.D., serves as Chancellor of LSCS, the largest institution of higher education in the Houston area and has been named a 2025 Great Colleges to Work For® institution by the Chronicle of Higher Education. LSCS consists of eight colleges, seven centers, eight Workforce Centers of Excellence and Lone Star Corporate College. To learn more, visit LoneStar.edu.

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