Student Success in a Changing World

As the fall 2020 term begins, higher education faces a number of headwinds, including issues of cost and safety:

• The continually rising cost of tuition has both students and parents reexamining the value of a college degree.
• Continued fears about a resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall have many concerned about returning to a crowded, not socially distanced, campus environment.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics and NBC News, in 2012, 10.3 million students were enrolled in four-year institutions, paying an average of $23,871 in tuition, but only 62% of students entering a four-year institution received a degree within six years.¹ This represents billions of dollars of lost tuition revenue. Although financial concerns may not be at the forefront of every institution's concerns, institutions must nonetheless remain financially viable. Additionally, these figures do not include the financial impact (i.e., lost opportunity) for students who start but do not finish a college degree.

The COVID-19 pandemic has far-reaching implications for the future of higher education delivery models and student success. With the abrupt shift to online and remote learning in March 2020, higher education demonstrated that viable alternatives exist to the model of 100% on-campus education (and its accompanying price tag), suggesting ways that colleges and universities might proceed in thinking about the future of enrollment and student success.

William Tierney, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, recently wrote in Inside Higher Ed that these headwinds might shrink overall enrollment by fifteen percent, and this decline could threaten the closure of more than five percent of colleges and universities.²

Meanwhile, EDUCAUSE data from May revealed that most colleges and universities are taking the following steps to deal with fallout from the pandemic:

• Preparing for IT cost cuts in a variety of areas, though very few anticipate cuts for online learning and academic support
• Shifting resources to digital alternatives
• Anticipating lower enrollments
• Remaining flexible for fall 2020 learning scenarios (e.g., remote/online, on campus, hybrid)³

Colleges and universities are prioritizing institutional and IT budgets for student success and enrollment targets. The key question, though, is how to understand all that is going on and make sense of their data and drive student success.

As administrators oversee a continuum of online, hybrid, and in-person education delivery models, significant amounts of data will be generated about students' academic performance, financial status with the institution, and engagement with campus life (in some form or fashion). We believe that now, more than ever, colleges and universities should put in place a student success initiative aimed at exploring and understanding this data to align programs, policies, and institutional spending in areas that will drive student success.

Driving Student Success

We developed a low-cost/high-impact model that is generally applicable but we believe can also be applied to online and remote learning to drive student success. The Student Success Improvement Iteration Model (SSII Model) is a four-step, data-informed process model (see figure 1). We are in the process of applying it to data at our own institutions to identify lessons learned and enable us to adapt in fall 2020 and beyond.

Step 1: Context

The intent of this step is to provide your student success team with a foundational understanding of the contextual situation at your Institution to inform their purpose and direction. This step does not need to take a long time, but it is a foundational component of the process.

This step involves reflecting on and gaining an understanding of your institution's mission, objectives, and current situation. The mission and objectives are likely documented somewhere (and glanced at occasionally). The student success team should take the time to read and discuss these resources, ensuring that all team members have a common understanding. Additionally, the student success team members should familiarize themselves with an understanding of key issues around equity, systematic change, and accountability (see sidebar "Contextual Issues") to round out the contextual situation.

Step 2: Environment

This step involves defining what student success means at your institution. It involves both qualitative and quantitative definitions of success. Qualitatively, you need to define what and why you are aiming to achieve. As Amelia Parnell, vice president for research and policy at NASPA – Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, writes about student success:⁴

1. A successful student knows when and how to adapt to or attempt to change their environment.
2. A successful student understands their own needs and the needs of others and knows how to balance competing individual and community priorities.
3. A successful student knows how to manage resources, both those for which they are individually responsible and those they share responsibility for with others.
4. A successful student realizes their unique contributions to the world and is prepared to leverage their abilities to improve the conditions around them.

Quantitatively, define the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that you will use to measure progress against your goals. Each institution will have its own definitions, based on where it chooses to focus.

Step 3: Analysis

Once you have established the direction you intend to head in Step 2, set up a program to track, monitor, and analyze data to understand the true root causes of what is negatively impacting student success. We met as we were both working with SynGlyphX, data visualization software tool that we used to help analyze student success data. Through these efforts, and informed by our experience with student success, we established a framework that examines data across three categories:

• Academic: How is the student performing academically?
• Financial: Are there issues with tuition/fee payments?
• Engagement: Is the student engaged with the institution, participating in campus life and extracurricular activities?

This framework is useful but not complete. Also needed is an understanding of the "whole student." For example, at Gannon University, for a number of years we had faced a first-year attrition rate of 20%. Our working hypothesis was that this was an issue of affordability and academic success. We launched a series of programs around aid, scholarship, and academic support for students yet saw only marginal improvement.

When we began to layer additional data about the student into SynGlyphX's 3D analysis tool, we could discern additional risk factors, particularly in our commuter population. Although commuter students generally work more hours than on-campus students, the cause of their attrition was not an ability to pay but, rather, opportunities for engagement.

A holistic evaluation of the macro data (academic, financial, and engagement) with the micro data (individual student demographic data) enabled us to see the macro attributes of why students were leaving school and the granular attributes of those students who were leaving school. These insights allowed us to define and execute a more targeted intervention plan.

Step 4: Intervention and Action

As a result of our findings at Gannon University, we repurposed a few areas on campus to serve as student lounges so that commuter students had easy access to a place where they could get their work done between classes. This, along with several other data-driven targeted approaches, led to an average improvement of three percentage points in first-year student retention. This has generated over $5 million of additional tuition revenue over a four-year period. More importantly, it has positively impacted the lives of those students who have gone on to finish their education.

At John Carroll University, we followed a similar analytical approach. A key finding at John Carroll concerned student perception of affordability. Our students did not fully understand the programs and aid available to them. This finding suggests a need to consider revamping our communication to students to better help them appreciate the true cost of a college education and understand all of their financing options.

Looking Ahead

Given the uncertainty of the context and environment(s) for learning in the next few months, it becomes even more important to identify and understand the data and information that drive decision-making about the student experience. What new factors will emerge that influence how student success is defined on our campuses? How will the relationship between student engagement, academic performance, and financial data help in planning and implementing interventions and actions that lead to a renewed focus on student success? The uncertainty of the moment also provides a window of opportunity to explore these data to align programs and spending to bolster our efforts to create stronger links between academic affairs, student affairs, and our faculty colleagues.

Notes

1. Susan Aud, William Hussar, Frank Johnson, Grace Kena, Erin Roth, Eileen Manning, Xiaolei Wang, and Jijun Zhang, "The Condition of Education," U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2012. ↩
2. William G. Tierney, "Preventing the Collapse of Higher Education," Inside Higher Ed, May 11, 2020. ↩
3. Susan Grajek, "EDUCAUSE COVID-19 QuickPoll Results: IT Budgets, 2020–2021," EDUCAUSE Review, May 6, 2020. ↩
4. Amelia Parnell, "It's Time for a Real Definition of Student Success," Higher Learning Advocates, August 23, 2018. ↩

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Steven Mauro is Vice President for Academic Administration at Gannon University.

Terry Mills is Assistant Provost for At-Risk Success at John Carroll University.