Improving Student Success Rates: Eliminating Performance Gaps

As performance-based funding models have become the new norm for allocating state funds, universities have begun to focus more on meeting and exceeding persistence and graduation metrics. For those universities that have already made substantial gains in these metrics by implementing changes that address large populations of students, attaining critical benchmarks may prove even more difficult. An organized approach that identified, addressed, and resolved individual student cases in a timely and efficient manner was critical in making the incremental gains to reach desired metrics at the University of South Florida (USF). In the last five years, USF has made significant gains in its four- and six-year graduation rates. In addition, USF broke its first-year retention rate plateau to reach its aspirational goal of 90 percent. This paper highlights the specific initiatives USF implemented in order to realize these gains.