We hosted a webinar featuring colleagues from three institutions sharing their student success strategies and the results they are achieving (you can watch the recording here). The featured institutions—all very different from one another, but representative of our national higher education landscape—were Christopher Newport University (Virginia), Lorain County Community College (Ohio), and Maryville University (Missouri).
While these institutions are quite different from one another, their student success strategies had key factors in common.
- Over time, they’ve created a culture of support for their student success efforts—support both vertically (from the top down) and broadly (collaboration across divisions).
- They are always assessing and improving and they’re not afraid to try new things—sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t—but continuous improvement is part of their ethos.
- These institutions used data to drive their activities—data from the College Student Inventory, Mid-Year Student Assessment, Second-Year Student Assessment, and other sources—for individual student interactions as well as shaping their programming and outreach efforts.
- They set their sights on not just improving first-to-second year retention rates but their completion/graduation rates as well—building intentional and structured support across the student lifecycle.
Here are some highlights from each of the institution’s presentations.
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For many years, discussions of college student success focused on the first-year experience. However, college graduation rates (or completion rates) have become an increasingly hot topic in recent years, especially in light of discussions about student loan debt, college costs, and the employment advantages of having a college degree. I think this is a good move because it pushes the discourse toward a student’s academic career rather than just the first year. But what does the literature tell us about student behavior and college completion?
