Student Success Champions 2022 Cohort

We know that first generation college students often face different obstacles to success than those with college-educated parents, but these challenges vary at different institutions. At Rollins College, our goal will be to design programming and marshal resources to make our campus a place where first gens feel a sense of belonging and pride, and are able to meet their potential. These efforts may include support resources for students, faculty and staff development, and developing ways to celebrate first gens on campus.

My initial steps will be to recruit interested faculty and staff for the effort, facilitate the establishment of a First Gen Student Group on campus, and organize the first National First Gen Day event in November 2022. Throughout the first year, I will also gather information to understand the particular challenges and opportunities that first gen students experience at our college, by analyzing institutional data about retention/success outcomes for first generation students, conducting focus groups with our current first gen students, and reviewing research literature and programs from other colleges. After this first year, my goal will be to design and pilot programming for faculty, staff, and first gen students in the Fall of 2023.

Harvey Mudd College has a long-standing history of excellence in academics, graduation and retention rates, and student outcomes in career placement and graduate school admission. In recent years, the college has refocused efforts on student support and well-being, including the creation of a new position, Associate Dean for Academic Resources and Student Success, to serve as a bridge between academic and student affairs and to provide connection to resources and more holistic support.

The initial phase of this project is to examine key areas of student support and identify unmet needs through data analysis, gathering student feedback, and reviewing best practices. I expect to be focusing on particular student populations, including neurodivergent students and those with documented disabilities, students taking a leave of absence due to health-related issues, students who identify as LGBTQIA+, and students from historically excluded communities in STEM, including Black and Latinx students.

Following the needs analysis, I expect to develop programming and resources in partnership with others, to address the unmet needs. The overall goal is to refocus our student success efforts and continue our work in creating an environment where every student has the opportunity to thrive.

Seattle Pacific University has experienced a demographic shift with an increasingly diverse undergraduate student population. Over the past fifteen years, the University implemented intentional strategies to better recruit and retain a diverse student body. The result of these strategies implores us to reevaluate the effectiveness of our student success programs. Programs for traditionally underserved groups of students have shown promise in improving student success. However, these programs largely exist under specific departmental oversight and lack a central coordination effort.

To better serve the needs of all students, with a particular emphasis on those from underserved groups, in 2021 SPU created an Assistant Provost position, who oversees student services and coordinates all student success efforts. The Assistant Provost for Student Success will partner with the Assistant Provost for Institutional Effectiveness to establish the foundation for continued strategic and sustainable student success efforts. The project includes forming a cross-divisional advisory group that will provide strategy for student success efforts, developing a data strategy, and investing in the campus’ digital transformation efforts.

Westminster is launching the Westminster Signature Student Experience, a campus-wide initiative that will provide all Westminster students with opportunities to become career-ready, able to apply their academic coursework in a variety of diverse and meaningful contexts, and prepared to step into leadership roles ethically, effectively, and responsibly.

Part of this initiative includes a revamping of our advising approach with the launch of Griffin Guides and academic exploration. Under this initiative, every student at Westminster gets an advising team composed of staff and faculty who support the student’s academic journey. The goals of that team are:
• To introduce students to their faculty and staff advisor support team;
• To encourage students to engage in exploration;
• To connect students to on-campus engagement opportunities early and consistently.

This team-based approach will also more effectively connect students to resources throughout their time at Westminster and, we believe, lead to increased student satisfaction, success, and graduation.

Presently at Hollins, students have a formal academic advisor, who is a teaching faculty member. The barriers students face to success are myriad: financial, mental health, physical health, career needs, family concerns, and more. While faculty academic advisors care deeply and do their best to help students, often the needs transcend the faculty advisor’s expertise. Yet currently, this is the person the institution puts forward as the primary resource for students.

This project will address student needs by exploring an advising & support team for each student – consisting of faculty, staff and peers, organized in a way to best serve the student. We hope to provide ready assistance from someone well-positioned to provide it. This will require clarity in team members’ roles, and transparency and simplicity for the student, particularly for students who are new to the university. Students’ agency in forming the team will be part of the model, as the best support is built on trusting relationships chosen by the student. We hope to build the team early and include admissions staff, as they often build supportive relationships well before matriculation. A central focus of the effort will address the diverse identities and experiences of students, and how an advising and support team will be culturally responsive to those identities and experiences.

Over the last seven years, Whitman College has run a pre-orientation program that focuses on providing an early view of the college, its resources and what to expect for those who are the first in their family to go to college. The program has been successful, by measure of retention rates and persistence and graduation rates at the college. The focus in this program has been on the first two years of college.

The current HEDS project seeks to extend that work by focusing on the last three years of college (the third year being the year after graduation), that is post Whitman outcomes. One of the strategic imperatives at Whitman College is “Life After Whitman”, in keeping with that imperative, I want to focus on what resources and service students in this program have access to. Taking a closer look at career preparation, and first destination job upon graduation or graduate school. We will explore the question: are first generation students having comparable outcomes with their peers? Depending on the findings, we will work to maximize gains and improve where there are deficits in ensuring that all students are indeed prepared for “Life After Whitman”.

As part of a renewed institutional focus on student success and flourishing, Belmont has formed a campus-wide student success working group consisting of faculty and staff with expertise ranging from student development theory to data warehouse design. The work of this team will result in a cohesive, comprehensive, and data-informed student success ecosystem. Disparate data systems will be integrated, empowering appropriate university personnel to provide just-in-time interventions to support students in overcoming obstacles when they are needed most.

The institution will develop a greater sense of the common barriers our students face and implement changes to reflect our commitment to being “Christ-centered, and student-focused”. This infrastructure will enable Belmont to develop more tailored programmatic offerings to support students throughout their academic career, enabling more students to graduate on time and better equipping our graduates to solve the world’s complex problems.

This project will focus on helping Earlham College as it moves forward with its signature program EPIC Journey. The goal of this program is to help students have an intentionally designed 4-year experience of curricular and co-curricular elements that prepare them for life after college. Through this, students will have a liberal arts education that simultaneously focuses on developing ‘the life of the mind’ and ‘skills that will help students pursue purposeful paths’. Purposeful paths include going to graduate school, professional school and entering the job market.

Several key aspects of this project will be strengthening our knowledge of the outcomes of our student and working with my colleagues to utilize this data to look at ways to strengthen those outcomes. My position in Institutional Effectiveness is uniquely positioned to help gather and analyze this data and to integrate with other data on campus to help understand student pathways, outcomes and their connections.

In 2019 Hanover College launched the Pell Promise to all Indiana students wherein tuition was free to all Pell eligible residents from Indiana. In 2021 we extended that offer to Pell eligible students from all 50 states. To support the journey of first-generation and Pell promise students and their families from orientation through to graduation and placement beyond Hanover, we will integrate wrap around support into campus services and our curriculum ensuring each student has a 1:1 connection to a faculty, staff or alumni mentor who knows their goals and intentions and can help them navigate obstacles and articulate steps to achieving their goals through curricular, co-curricular and meaningful social capital and career building experiences.

Peer Involvement Advising (PIA). This retention initiative is modeled after the academic advising concept of one on one advising. This project will be overseen by a university administrator and PIA advisors will be student leaders who work in a peer to peer model to provide one on one advising for co curricular programming.

The PIA advisor will work with students to develop a co curricular experience based on a series of questions and assessments with the goal to develop a personalized co curricular engagement plan from a menu of co curricular offerings (i.e. leadership, health, diversity). This is retention based initiative geared to first year and sophomore students. The goals of PIA are to: a) increase retention and engagement of first and second year students b) develop a two year model that aids in crease leadership, involvement and campus awareness of resources in the junior and senior years. 3) Increase peer to peer interaction.

This project aims to improve a sense of belonging and thriving during students’ first and second years at St. Olaf College through a three-pronged approach. We will identify and follow up with individual First-Years who are struggling to make connections and Sophomores who are not engaging in activities and events in order to connect them to people and resources on campus. We will examine current programs to assess whether they are able to reach students who are not thriving and whether reconfiguring programs could provide the same benefits while using less staff time. Finally, we will use pre-existing data to learn more about which students feel like they belong at St. Olaf and which students are thriving. By combining and utilizing information on our students and our resources, we hope to gain a better understanding of what First-Years and Sophomores need in order to feel like an integral part of the community, and do what we can to allow them to flourish within that community.

The Anchor Seminar (and corresponding Workshop) is a credited course every first year takes in their first fall semester as an introduction to their collegiate journey. Student Leaders instruct on the practical, everyday aspects of being a college student and specifically one at the University of Portland, such as how register for classes and how to navigate campus resources (the “in practice” development). Participating faculty instruct on the conceptual transition of what it means to learn at a liberal arts institution and how to approach their experience with the core curriculum (the “in theory” development). After the Seminar’s launch in Fall 2021 it is clear more work needs to be done to communicate the purpose of this course to first year students and strengthen collaboration between stakeholders. As a part of the HEDS Student Success Champions Project I hope to create cohesion between the session types, establish clear communicate with all stakeholders, and develop more effective partnerships between the student and faculty instructors.

In recent years, Linfield University has steadily increased its capacity to support students through challenges, including the establishment of the Office of Student Care & Support in July 2019. Director of Student Care & Support, Lainie Sowell, works side-by-side with students to problem-solve, connect to campus resources, and build in self-advocacy and resilience. In addition to supporting students through unexpected and existing challenges, Sowell aims to incorporate proactive measures to identify students who may not initially connect with one of the university’s many involvement opportunities or support structures – those at risk to “fall through the cracks.”

Through participation in the HEDS Student Success Champions cohort, Sowell will establish an early alert system at Linfield, aimed at proactively identifying and connecting these students to university supports right from the start of their Linfield career. As a result of Student Care & Support establishing early alert and outreach strategies, Linfield students will know who they can turn to and feel empowered to do so before their educational progress is interrupted. Additionally, the Linfield Care Team and student-facing departments will have an improved awareness of underserved students and an ability to target these students with proactive outreach, ultimately leading to improved student persistence and degree attainment.

Seattle Pacific University has experienced a demographic shift with an increasingly diverse undergraduate student population. Over the past fifteen years, the University implemented intentional strategies to better recruit and retain a diverse student body. The result of these strategies implores us to reevaluate the effectiveness of our student success programs. Programs for traditionally underserved groups of students have shown promise in improving student success. However, these programs largely exist under specific departmental oversight and lack a central coordination effort.

To better serve the needs of all students, with a particular emphasis on those from underserved groups, in 2021 SPU created an Assistant Provost position, who oversees student services and coordinates all student success efforts. The Assistant Provost for Student Success will partner with the Assistant Provost for Institutional Effectiveness to establish the foundation for continued strategic and sustainable student success efforts. The project includes forming a cross-divisional advisory group that will provide strategy for student success efforts, developing a data strategy, and investing in the campus’ digital transformation efforts.