I have spoken with a number of college and university leaders in the last weeks, and their anxiety levels are heightened to new degrees. They face cultural challenges, emerging financial threats, and a big question about the value of their “product”.
How do leaders defend the value of higher education in an atmosphere such as this? They do so by keeping the main thing, the main thing: students and their success.
What Vibrant Student Success Culture Looks Like
We know what drives student success: belonging, mentoring, problem-based learning, and timely support. But on too many campuses, these practices remain isolated rather than systemic. Presidents play a vital role in aligning strategy, resources, and accountability around this core outcome. When students thrive, institutions thrive. Our challenge is to scale how we achieve student success with intention.
Here’s what campus leaders committed to student success should focus on:
Take a Campus-wide Approach
Student success is often assumed as an aggregate outcome of all the work we do across the campus. This is the business we are in, right? We have campus-wide strategic plans, campus-wide facility management, and campus-wide financial plans. But most of the time, we do not build campus-wide student success plans.
Improving student success and building audience awareness of the value of higher education requires high-level visibility and ownership. Presidents, boards, and senior teams must lead a visible strategy that focuses on students, their needs, and their success. Building a common agenda is a prerequisite for solving problems.
Use Data To Optimize Processes
We live in a world outside of higher education where our personal patterns, behaviors, and preferences are continuously monitored and leveraged. This kind of data can help us understand who our students are—their potential, their needs, and particularly, their motivations.
Studying the data and cohort trends can uncover both where we’re succeeding and falling short. It can help us continually improve and adapt our strategies, making the systems we use more efficient and enrich the human-to-human support we provide.
Empower the Middle
Student Success is a campus-wide effort. On thriving campuses, leaders in the middle are decision-makers practiced in collaboration across divisions. It’s their expertise and understanding of the student experience that can make a huge difference.
In our “Moving the Needle” partnerships with campuses, these are the leaders we empower to work collaboratively and make change. This web of true collaboration builds an infrastructure that can withstand shifts in personnel turnover, even at the top. If you want to improve student success, empower key stakeholders as the backbone of your student success plan.
Innovate Learning Experiences
Higher education serves a lot of purposes, but its biggest purpose is in the name—education. If graduating educated students is the goal, this should be the focal point of innovation. Exceptional learning experiences are linked to increased student motivation and curiosity. This engine cannot be fueled without resources and accountability.
With few exceptions, faculty have not been trained in the science of learning from within their own disciplines. Institutions should invest in training, support, and constant improvement in the teaching and learning systems. Without these investments, our learning environments will feel static and disconnected to today’s students.
Strengthen Your Institution’s Student Success Strategy
The debate over the “value” of higher education is not going away. The best response is not rhetoric—it’s results. While we ring our collective hands about the challenges we are facing (and they are real), many of our students are slipping through the proverbial cracks of our systems. Institutions must visibly recommit to improving student success, and that commitment has to be built campus-wide, starting at the top.
Credo offers solutions and services designed to help institutions revitalize and strengthen their student success plans. Reach out and start a conversation.