Student Success and Institutional Metrics: Recent Clearinghouse Research on Student Completions
President Obama’s proposal to create a new rating system for colleges will place institutional success at the forefront of the national discourse on higher education. As the current administration works to develop the metrics it will use to evaluate colleges and universities, it is important for the higher education community to look at how those outcomes take shape and what they actually measure.
Institutional success and student success are two very different things, Doug Shapiro, Executive Research Director at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, told attendees at this year’s Strategic Enrollment Management Conference. Institutions view students through a narrow window, defining success only as what happens on their own individual campuses. The federal government, as well, only looks at first-time, full-time students on individual campuses. But that is only a piece of the puzzle with regard to student success.
The current measures mislabel a lot of student successes as institutional failures. Students today are more mobile, viewing higher education as a pathway or career. According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, nearly one third of all students transfer or enroll in a different institution, accounting for one half of all enrollments.
Through a detailed overview of the center’s reports on national patterns of degree completion for both traditional and mobile students, Shapiro illustrated the real need to paint a more complete picture of institutional contributions to student success in order to help SEM practitioners serve students better. The data also serve to provide current and prospective students with more complete information about available pathways to student success and provide policy makers with a more realistic view of how the higher education system actually serves students.
Survey Says! What are the Top Five Student Advising Needs and How did a Community College go About Meeting Them?
Using the results from student satisfaction surveys, Winners of the 2013 SEM Award of Excellence Diane Walleser, Vice President of Enrollment Management, and Jennifer Hoege, Associate Vice President of Marketing and Enrollment at Madison Area Technical College, spearheaded efforts to assess institutional shortcomings and instituted a strategic plan to address the needs of the students.
The surveys garnered meaningful data on student satisfaction in 12 key areas: accuracy of information, connection to major, knowing how college works, academic career life goals, course selection, getting to know the student, empowering students to make own decisions, academic resources, degree choice, general education requirements, non-academic resources, and out-of-classroom resources. The results found significant gaps with advising and intake services and dropping yields at the community college despite recent improvements.
The campus’s enrollment managers worked with a cross-functional team to target issues contributing to these problem areas and developed recommendations to overhaul current practices. The team specifically focused on offering timely responses to students, providing consistent advising, creating a welcoming environment for student, providing staff development and training, engaging students with the college, improving student success and retention, closing the gap between a student’s application and matriculation.
Outside the Box: Applying SEM Principles to an Innovative Program
In an effort to address challenges of demand and access, the University of Florida created a signature program based on a spring/summer enrollment calendar with a central academic theme and where students from multiple majors collectively work toward the same minor.
Zina Evans, Tammy Aagard, and Stephen Pritz, of the University of Florida, presented the program at a best practice session at AACRAO’s 2013 SEM Conference titled “Outside the Box: Applying SEM Principles to an Innovative Program.”
The university’s “Innovation Academy” is in its second year and has created a strong academic experience that allows students to take courses during spring and summer semesters and use the fall semesters—which are at enrollment capacity— for internships, study abroad, practicums, coops, research and online courses. The Academy increases access and maximizes classroom space utilization without increasing the student/faculty ratio.
“Our whole infrastructure was based on the traditional approach of how we enroll students in our university, an approach had been improved over the years,” said Pritz during the presentation. “Now we have a program that is quite different.”
“You’re really going against that traditional model, not only for parents, but for students,” Aagard said. “There was a lot of effort in educating people why this is such a great opportunity for them.”
The university’s messaging focused on the concept of the Academy, particularly the opportunities in terms of entrepreneurship, creativity and partnerships. It promoted the program not as an alternative but as an extension of the university that offers a small college experience with the benefits of a large research institution. University staff hosted guidance counselor workshops and created a newsletter and other recruitment materials. Communication between prospective applicants was strong.
The Innovation Academy enrolled about 300 students from a pool of 2,347 applicants in its first year, and will welcome 377 additional students from a pool of 3,981 applicants in its second year. Students choose any major from across the university but are required to take a minor in innovation—developed by a faculty across disciplines, including those involved with the research and business community called Innovation Square. Students are enrolled as a cohort and live together in a designated housing community.
UF staff collaborated with financial aid to ensure gift aid would be available to the students, as well as with state legislators to ensure students could use Bright Futures scholarships.
Retention of first year students was strong; only 10 students left the university. Evans said some students are progressing through their degree programs more quickly because they are taking advantage of three, versus the typical two, semesters.
“We had to break out of a policy that had been a tradition for years and years,” Evans said. “The university is moving toward becoming a year-round institution, where students can choose any term they want to be there, and be on track, and have comprehensive choices.”