Student Success Conference Reflections

Back in June I had the opportunity to serve as the keynote speaker for the SPARC (Student Persistence and Retention Collaborative) Conference attended by student success professionals from Philadelphia area colleges and universities.  For someone who worked at two Philadelphia institutions, who also engages in consulting work in the region, and is passionate about student success, the opportunity was both humbling, flattering, as well as exhilarating. 

I loved hearing and learning about the great work being done at different institutions.  Some of the student success models were incredibly unique while others involved tried and true best practices.  For instance, one institution implemented a class dean model where one individual championed and worked with each class cohort given the respective needs and interests pertaining to that class.  Think about one individual championing a Sophomore Experience, for example.  Another institution shared their successful story about implementing a new student success system that integrated with their admission system which streamlined student advising while also serving as a case management system.

As I listened to the different presentations, I reflected on how successful student persistence efforts involve the entire campus community but still need a champion.  While this should not be challenging, my experience at multiple institutions is that who spearheads student success efforts at an institution can be, sadly, incredibly political.  I’ve experienced institutions changing organizational structures not for strategic, but for purely political purposes.  I’ve even had professionals call out these practices as a “shell game” for the lack of strategic thinking.  In engaging in this practice, institutions have set back their persistence efforts at the expense of their students.  And then you wonder why, in part, higher education receives negative publicity because we cannot get out of our own way.

More positively, I’ve been blessed to work with two student success champions at two institutions who were nothing short of rock stars.   They each had the ability to pull different constituencies together to collaborate on behalf of students.  They were each incredibly creative and entrepreneurial individuals willing to try new practices to support student persistence.  For example, at one institution, our student success lead championed the creation of a task force that built an at-risk student identification tracking model.  She also created and launched an advising unit to help students transition to the institution.  At another institution, our student success lead created an academic recovery program for students who stumbled in their first semester while also streamlining the student withdraw process, so we better understood the factors influencing student attrition.  At each institution, we achieved institutional high first-year persistence rates and a reduction in student indebtedness at graduation because of their leadership.  I remember in my initial meetings with each individual they shared that they did not have quantitative skill sets.  My reply to them was, “no, but you have an analytic problem-solving skill set, and that is what we need.  You don’t have to know differential calculus.” 

The practices we implemented at one institution were so strong, I even poached them when I left to work at another institution proving the transferability of such best practices.  For example, the academic recovery program and student withdraw process were replicated at two institutions.  We also implemented a competitive micro-grant program for continuing students with unmet financial need to enhance student persistence. 

In my work now, trying to find the individual or individuals who champion student success at an institution can be tricky.  Sometimes the individual sits in the Academic or Student Affairs divisions.  Other times in the enrollment area.  From my perspective, as I shared in a podcast, “who cares?” what organizational space leads institutional efforts.  As long as the individual has the ability to work across structural lines (or silos) and pull people together in a collaborative manner working to advance the student experience – that is what matters.

As I have shared, ultimately, if you keep your eye on the student perspective and the institutional mission versus who owns what – magic can happen.