| AASCU offers new service to study student success
Seventy-six of the 96 team members from the Graduation Rate Outcomes Project, which resulted in the publication Student Success in State Colleges and Universities,
volunteered to participate in individual campus study visits for AASCU member institutions.
The Graduation Rate Outcomes Project, conducted by study teams, identified why 12 institutions were reported high graduation rates. The final report offers strategies
for how colleges and universities can improve student success.
To request a study of your campus’ student success contact: John Hammang, AASCU’s Director
of Special Projects.
The president may indicate certain areas or programs for special attention in the area of student success and the visiting team will be built to bring appropriate
expertise to bear on those key items.
To participate a member president commits to:
> The institution will pay for all travel, local transportation and lodging for the team members.
> The institution will provide requested information about their institution, so far as it already exists, to the team leader at least two weeks before the
scheduled study visit.
> The institution will facilitate team access to students, faculty and staff during the visit window as well as in preparation for the visit.
> The institution will provide a workspace for the visiting team.
> The institution will provide an honorarium for the team leader (who will be responsible for planning, communication and coordination of the visit).
The visiting team pledges to:
> The visiting team members and report will respect the confidentiality of students, faculty, staff and the institution.
> The visiting team will produce and submit a report to the institution within a week following the end of the campus visit.
AASCU is offering this as a follow-up to the Graduation Rate Outcomes Study.
Publication
Student Success in State Colleges and Universities
All AASCU members will receive one copy of full report gratis. Additional copies are $10 and for nonmembers, $12.
Executive Summary
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities Graduation Rate Outcomes Study is a collaborative effort to understand the reasons why some public four-year
colleges and universities have an unusually good record of retaining and graduating students. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU),
The Education Trust (Ed Trust), and The National Association of System Heads (NASH) sponsored the study to help campuses improve graduation rates.
Twelve institutions participated in this study. Each campus was visited by a study team that submitted a campus report. The campus reports were analyzed and the
final report was written by Peter Ewell of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, with assistance and collaboration by team leaders, project
directors and others.
The study campuses were:
California State University Stanislaus
Clemson University, South Carolina
City University of New York John Jay College of Criminal Justic
Elizabeth City State University, North Carolina
Louisiana Tech University
Montclair State University, New Jersey
Murray State University, Kentucky
Northwest Missouri State University
Truman State University, Missouri
University of Northern Iowa
University of Wisconsin – La Crosse
Virginia State University
The stories told about these colleges and universities underscore the diversity of successful approaches to retaining and graduating students. Good performance
here is not just the province of small, selective institutions. With nurturing and care, it can be achieved at any AASCU campus. But these stories also suggest
that simply finding “best practices” somewhere and “plugging them in” is unlikely to be effective.
Results
While study campuses were all successful in retaining and graduating students, they were remarkably diverse in their institutional characteristics. They exhibited
an extraordinary variety of specific strategies to promote student success. What is distinctive among those institutions with high graduation rates is the overall
campus culture within which these practices are deployed, and the quality of presidential and administrative leadership that keep them moving and coordinated.
Unpacking Culture
At least three key elements of study campus culture could be distinguished at the twelve study campuses. The first is the pervasive attitude that all students can
succeed, reinforced by a wider culture that is not content to rest on past success. The second is a sense of inclusiveness on the part of all members of the campus
community frequently characterized as a “family.” And a third, somewhat more consciously crafted element of culture, is a strongly held sense of institutional
mission that recognizes the campus as “distinctive” or “special.”
High Expectations
Half of the study institutions had recently raised their admissions requirements—surely a factor in their success. But
the other six had not changed admissions practices appreciably and still earned high graduation rates. What really distinguishes many of these campuses is the pervasive
belief that demography is not destiny: all of the students they admit have the potential to graduate, and they should all be held to high levels of expectation.
A culture of high expectations is also a culture of mutual expectations. Study campuses do not just hold students to high standards. They do everything in their
power to provide them with the support they need to succeed and to build students’ sense of personal responsibility for their own achievement. Leaders set
targets that actually can be met, provide support and examples to meet them, then raise the bar another notch.
Belonging
One of the most frequently mentioned success factors for selective small liberal arts colleges in the literature on student retention
is that their students are consistently involved in a close and mutually-reinforcing network of campus ties that include residence life, frequent student-faculty
contact and a rich range of extracurricular activities. AASCU institutions have a hard time duplicating the idyllic conditions of small, highly successful liberal
arts colleges. But the study institutions, in spite of these challenges, found many ways to build a similar sense of engagement. One of the most pervasive metaphors
found on the study campuses is that of “family.”
Institutional Mission
While “mission” is surely important at state colleges and universities, there has always been a tendency for its structural and governance aspects to
trump its values dimension. At study institutions, in contrast, visiting teams frequently reported that the institution’s “mission” was seen less
as a written document than as a shared belief system and a code of conduct embraced by faculty and staff. Central to both is a sense of purpose focused on fostering
student learning. And this sense of shared purpose, in turn, helps reinforce a culture that is comfortable with the mission of serving current students.
Unpacking Leadership
What tended to set leadership apart for visiting teams at these institutions were two qualities. First, “leadership” is a shared responsibility—occurring
at all levels and deeply embedded in the way the institution works as an organization on a day-to-day basis. Second, the particular presidential qualities needed
to build and sustain the culture and organizational processes observed at study campuses are more about listening than talking, and more about consistent personal
modeling of a particular collective vision than about spectacular public performances. At many study campuses, top leaders had been in place for a long time and
had been very consistent in their actions. Reflecting the idea of shared responsibility, boundary spanning has simply become part of the way the institution does
business and appears to operate without a great deal of visible organization or authority.
But not all of what the visiting teams found about organizational processes at study campuses was consistent with the literature on organizational effectiveness.
Although role crossovers and lateral patterns of communication are pervasive at study campuses, the presence and use of management information is decidedly mixed.
These observations suggest that information about performance may not be a necessary condition for promoting student success, so long as the requisite cultural
elements are present. That information was visible and pervasive at some of the larger campuses suggesting that information may prove increasingly necessary as
campuses get larger.
Programmatic practices played a very important role on the study campuses, but it is not just doing the right things that matter. How those things are done makes
all the difference. At the study campuses the facts of intentional, integrated, collaborative and academic programmatic activity were reported over and over.
Advantages of Policy and Place
Study campuses had some clear advantages that helped explain their high performances. Some of these advantages were natural, resulting from specific physical or
programmatic circumstances. Others were the result of deliberate policy.
These advantages are:
• Selectivity
• Homogeneity
• Limited Size
8 Physical Isolation or Configuration.
None of these natural advantages can be seen as decisive. Indeed, many campuses that lacked them did just as well in retaining and graduating students at higher-than-average
rates. Conversely, many institutions that share these features do not perform nearly as well and that helps highlight the reasons for distinctive success at study
campuses.
Clearly, the single most important lesson these cases reinforce is the importance of institutional culture in shaping the day-to-day behavior of faculty and staff
in their interactions with students. And it’s consistent behavior that builds retention—in the words of one visiting team report, “one student
at a time.”
Articulate a Collective Vision
University presidents can alter the way people look at their own institution. They can raise a topic like building a student-success-oriented culture, and keep
people talking about it long enough for a shared sense of ownership and understanding to evolve. The key to making the process work is to be as concrete and as
collective as possible. Concreteness demands that the process articulate the specifics of human interaction and behavior that really make them work. The emphasis
should be placed on what everybody wants to see happen for students.
Take Stock
Visioning provides the basis for taking stock of the current situation. A stocktaking exercise will have one of three likely outcomes. First, it might reveal a
healthy, student-centered culture. Second, and most likely, taking stock will reveal pockets of success in relatively unconnected programs or initiatives. Finally,
taking stock may reveal a campus culture that does not fundamentally value graduation as a goal. Depending on what is found, leaders will need to nurture and sustain
success, work to integrate the successful pockets, or promote the value of a culture of student success.
Act Strategically
Perhaps the most typical institutional response to a detected need or problem in any area is to add a new program or activity to address it. The resulting “additive
bias” affects many areas of college and university life, but perhaps most of all, programming directed at retention and student success. Acting strategically,
in contrast, means that institutional leaders must ask at least two questions about any proposed new program or activity before it is considered. The first is how
the initiative helps to build or reinforce the wider culture of student success the institution has to build and sustain. The second question that leaders must
ask is how the proposed initiative will position the institution to take the next step.
Another aspect is to build an information infrastructure capable of simultaneously monitoring progress and providing detailed feedback about what is working for
which student populations. While many study campuses were able to gradually evolve a culture of student success without developing a visible “culture of evidence,”
building such a culture intentionally requires attention to data and achievement.
Invest in the Culture
The stories of many study campuses appear so natural and ineffable that it is tempting for observers to conclude that culture is immutable. But there are many examples
of institutions that once had such a culture, but lost it. A handful of institutions may have evolved and internalized robust systems of values and behaviors that
are relentlessly focused on student success. But for most campuses, presidents must actively invest in the culture to nurture and reinforce it after it is built.
The report details the wide variety of ways this investment can be made.
An important way to sustain a culture is through the use of symbols and rituals. All campuses have slogans, mascots, images and ceremonies that serve as symbols
and rituals. The experience of study campuses makes it clear that carefully chosen symbols and rituals can be used to promote student success. Presidents should
always remember that academic communities—both individually and in the scholarly enterprise as a whole—often value recognition as much as monetary reward,
and should consciously use this potential to shape collective behavior.
Walk the Talk.
Presidents should above all recognize that their own personal rhetoric and behavior are among the most powerful influences on campus culture. Presidents seeking
to build or sustain a campus culture centered on student success need to regularly “look in the mirror” to examine their own day-to-day behavior. Presidents
need to remember that they are most effective when they can both shape and use the culture to send consistent messages, and when they can make visible strategic
decisions and investments to sustain it. And they should always remember that the symbolic, cultural dimensions of a presidential decision are just as important
as its direct operational consequences.
Document:
A Better Yardstick?:
Measuring Graduation Rates in an Age of Swirling Students
Estela López, Alan Sturtz and Germán Bermúdez
For the past few decades, college graduation rates have remained stable—and apparently low—throughout the United States. Policymakers, politicians,
the media and others want to know why more students are not completing their degrees within the traditional four- to six-year timeframe and why higher education
has not done more to improve graduation rates.
To better understand what is happening, institutional researchers have been collecting data that shows interesting patterns of student movement across colleges
and universities in the United States. These patterns do not suggest the failure of higher education. Rather, they demonstrate that the system works in new and
powerful ways to provide access and help students meet their educational goals and societal needs. But, to measure these effects, we need to focus on the new ways
that students progress through college.
>> Full Document
Document:
UW-Oshkosh “Graduation Project”
Project Status Report and Initial Findings
The longer a System-wide Graduation Project is in place, the fewer the number of additional students who will require its assistance. More students will complete
their degrees in a timely manner. Overall student satisfaction will improve. As a direct consequence of a System-wide Graduation Project, all students will be much
better served.
>> Full document
Document:
Student Success and the Construction of Inclusive Educational Communities
Vincent Tinto
Professor of Education and Sociology at Syracuse University and Associate Director of the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning and Assessment
Interest in the issue of student success, in particular student retention, has not waned. If anything it has grown over the years. So much so that we have witnessed
the growth of a new industry of retention firms, consultants, and retention-related products that offer the promise of a quick-fix to the "retention problem."
Though there is no doubt some value to the work of these firms, the root of institutional success does not lie in their employment. Nor does it lie, as so many
faculty believe, in retention programs per se or even in the dedicated staff that support those programs. Though their work is invaluable, their effort alone does
not account for institutional success. Instead it resides in the work of the faculty and in the institution's capacity to construct educational communities that
actively engage students in learning. It lies not in the retention of students but in their education. Successful education, not retention, is the secret of successful
retention programs.
>> Full Document
|
