Beyond the detailed account of the institutional progress in the Momentum Plan for 2024, it is important to highlight that the College’s strength with respect to student success is not centered around this subset of strategies and activities, but it is a cultural commitment to supporting every student, every time, which is a golden thread woven throughout all college operations.
The Student Success and Completion team continues to meet, now in the form of workgroups with detailed action plans around student success, engagement, and guidance. Other strategies and activities not included in this report continue to be adjusted and revised to maintain a proactive approach to supporting students, and include (among many others):
- Intrusive and proactive success monitoring campaigns:
- Course engagement monitoring during the first week of classes,
- Attendance monitoring during the second week,
- Early alert reports during weeks 3-4,
- Midterm course attendance and engagement evaluation during weeks 7-8,
- Academic risk assessment during weeks 9-10,
- Advising and registration support throughout the term, and
- Weekly “Always Alert” referrals.
- In Spring 2024, there were 32,477 points-of-contact between COMPASS advisors and students enrolled at the college.
- Through various communities of practice and engagements led by the Center for Teaching and Learning, faculty often engage in discussion and activities (like book groups and peer-led pedagogy seminars) to promote and celebrate best practices and identify opportunities to promote student success.
- We have fully implemented and integrated core IMPACTS into our classrooms and courses.
- Implementation of ePortfolios to help students collect and present works from across their college career that they can present to prospective employers. It also serves as a record and reminder to students of their own development.
- Administrative processes and procedures are regularly evaluated to ensure that they are not presenting roadblocks to students and are helping the institution deliver a seamless and supportive student experience.
- The COMPASS Center continues to monitor student progression as part of their yearly unit assessment.
- In the Fall 2023 cohort, 42% of continuously enrolled freshmen attempted 30+ hours by the end of Summer 2024.
- In the Fall 2022 cohort, 45% of continuously enrolled freshmen attempted 60+ hours by the end of Summer 2024. (This is 8% more than the comparable cohort from Fall 2021).
- Beyond Academics, our colleagues in Student Affairs have increased their work to develop and maintain stronger feelings of belonging among students, with new orientation activities and relationship-building events during welcome week on campus.
Observations and Next Steps
What strategies and activities have been most successful? What have been least effective? How has your institution made adjustments to your completion activities over the past year? Where would you want to see student success efforts shift in the coming year(s)?
Through the work of the Student Success and Completion Team, the College has adjusted numerous processes to improve the transition to college, by reducing barriers, providing guidance, and promoting a sense of belonging through more supportive language in all communications. Additionally, intrusive monitoring campaigns and protocols have been devised and implemented to keep students on track to progress and graduate. We are happy to report that our current fall-to-fall retention rate for First-time Full-time Freshman is now at 56.6% (Fall 2024), which is an improvement from the post-pandemic rate of 52.2% (Fall 2020). We continue to work towards the retention rate prior to the pandemic which was at 60.6% (Fall 2019).
The development of a post-admit checklist was intended to help guide students from admission to registration. For the Fall 2023, 28.2% of students admitted to the college registered for classes. In comparison, for Fall 2024, those numbers are 29.4%. While this is very preliminary data, we are hoping that it somewhat indicates that our post-admit checklist is helping ease our students’ navigation through admission and registration. We hope that the creation of a customized dynamic checklist will have even greater effects on the registration to admission rate.
Our work to promote and implement high-impact practices through the establishment of the Endeavor Center for High-Impact practices has proved fruitful. Faculty are participating, and more exciting, students are heavily motivated to obtain badges that they lack. The creation of a leaderboard has inspired students to seek out more opportunities to earn HIP badges. This program has been extremely successful, and participation continues to climb.
Last year, after the establishment of the First-Year Experience Course (DECK 1000), we were met with some unexpected data. However, the population of those students in the initial pilot was somewhat skewed. We are happy to report a more positive result from this year’s preliminary data and hope to see even more positive strides for the Fall-to-Fall retention rates as we continue to develop DECK 1000.
We briefly lost traction on our pursuit of determining the feasibility of adopting inclusive textbook access. However, we are back on track and will begin surveying the faculty this Fall 2024 semester. Our focus will always be student success, and we want to ensure that in adopting inclusive access we are not inadvertently creating a barrier for students. This could particularly be the case if a large number of courses have already adopted Open Educational Resources, thereby making inclusive textbook access unnecessary and an additional financial burden.
As we move forward, we will continue to carefully analyze proposed activities through the lens of student success. We will continue to make modifications to current processes and develop the programs and activities that seem to have the greatest impact on success as measured by enrollment, retention, and progression, and we will continue to seek input from stakeholders across campus to ensure we are analyzing our efforts from all angles. This work will have additional support and data from our engagement with NISS as our playbook is developed. We will work to merge our current work with the Playbook as it becomes available.
