GHC’s priority areas involve Academic Advising (fuller schedules and providing better resources for undecided students), scaling our academic intervention initiatives, and connecting students to careers.
Academic Advising:
One strategy we feel has had a major impact on student success is our holistic advising model. Advising is designed to address purposeful choice and put students on the path towards graduation from acceptance. Advising begins prior to enrollment throughout Charger Orientation, which consists of required components focused on student engagement, as well as fostering inclusivity and a sense of belonging. Upon acceptance, students complete an asynchronous pre-orientation module that includes an introduction to GHC, tips on transitioning to college, and a detailed course schedule preference survey. Based on the information provided, advisors pre-register students for their first semester courses, and full-time students are registered for 15 credit hours. Survey results are also uploaded into our student success system, EAB Navigate, so advisors, faculty, and support staff have access in advance of future advising appointments and conversations. Next, students attend an on-campus orientation where they attend various breakout sessions on advising, academic program/pathways, GHC’s student clubs and organizations, college success strategies, student support services such as counseling and disability services, academic resources such as tutoring and library services, and paying for college. Students who have not yet declared a pathway or major attend a specific breakout session dedicated to helping them choose the program of study that aligns with their future career goals. During the first semester of enrollment, new students meet with their assigned professional advisor to formulate an individualized plan for success. In crafting a success plan, students will also learn to recognize factors that can impede progress toward their goals. Imbedded in this process are targeted activities to allow students to strengthen their purposeful choices and ensure that they have clear pathways to graduation and transfer. Advisors spend an hour with each student during these sessions discussing academic strengths and weaknesses, student success strategies, results from the major explorer inventory, career goals, course plans, and graduation. During the second semester of enrollment, students meet with an assigned faculty advisor to continue these discussions, modify academic and transfer plans, and build a relationship with a faculty mentor who can guide and support them through to graduation.
Now that we have been advising in this model throughout the last five years of our QEP, we have learned quite a lot about what works and what does not. Through this learning, we are currently exploring ways to build on the parts of this model that have the most impact and sunset the parts that have not had the impact we envisioned.
Fuller Schedules:
Research shows students who take fuller schedules are more likely to graduate, but many of our students struggle to manage a 15-hour course load as they are juggling family and work. As this is the case, we are having individual conversations through advising appointments about the benefits of completing 30 hours in the first year, whether that be 15 hours each in fall and spring or 12 in fall, 12 in spring, and 6 in summer. We also think that by having new freshmen start with full-time schedules through our pre-registration process, we are setting the expectation with new students that a full-time schedule is the norm.
We saw a decrease in the average hours for New Freshman from fall 2022 to fall 2021: 12.2% to 11.5%. Our next step is to explore causes for this decrease, and one area we need to look at is how our October start term is impacting the data. From fall 2022 to fall 2023, we doubled the number of New Freshmen who started at GHC for the first time during our October start term. When students begin the term halfway through, we encourage them to take 2-3 classes at most since this part of term sf only 8 weeks long. With this in mind, we will need to reassess how we capture data on fuller schedules to factor in New Freshmen who begin classes in October.
Undecided Students:
We have spent the last few years focused on activities that promote purposeful choice across the board, but realized we still had quite a large number of students declaring General Studies as their pathway. To decrease this percentage, we implemented strategies early in a student’s time at GHC designed to help students who are truly undecided move closer to a pathway choice. We are quite proud of our work around this and the resulting data showing a decrease in the percent of students in the General Studies pathway from 7.1% in the fall of 2022 to 4.8% fall 2023. We would like to look next at patterns around changing majors to see if students who change from General Studies change more often than those who initially declared a pathway other than General Studies.
Academic Intervention Initiatives
GHC's academic intervention initiatives are showing an impact on retention. We saw our one-year retention rate of first-time full-time students jump from 58.4% fall 2020 to 62.8% fall 2022. While we know these initiatives are not the only factor impacting retention, we do believe they play a strong role.
With our Early Alert program scaled to the entire student population, we are able to receive and act on any alert raised on a student when the alert is raised. Providing just-in-time support to students means students are able to get back on track to successfully complete a course.
Our revised full-withdrawal approach provides the retention team with 48 hours to contact students and inform them of their academic options, financial aid implications, and the withdrawal process. This effort aims to reduce the annual number of full stop-out withdrawals by enhancing student decision-making through communication and student intervention.
We have also started looking at students who move to academic warning or probation. The goal is to decrease the number of students on warning and probation, thereby increasing student retention. Students receive a call, text and email to make them aware or remind them of their current academic status. We track academic alert notifications, withdrawals requests, and tutoring usage to develop an engagement plan that includes advising and registration, tutoring services, and other student support services as needed.
Career Connections
The biggest success so far has been the Business Student Mixer at Cartersville. 65 students met with 40 businesses in speed-dating-style interviews, as well as learned interview and resume-writing skills and tips. One student received 3 job offers. The job fairs also saw an increase in employers, and our online job board is getting 5 new jobs added each week. We would like to see these headed towards mixers at each site (Marietta is planned) and getting our students more face time with potential employers and community partners.
