OVERVIEW

As open enrollment institutions, community colleges struggle to create retention practices that serve the diverse students that attend. Improving student success at community colleges requires examining institution-specific data to implement strategies that will work. However, often times, these strategies are narrowly focused rather than comprehensive in nature.

Join Academic Impressions to begin to create a system of intervention strategies for students that increase their success. Participants will examine various types of support institutions can provide at various stages of the student lifecycle. At each stage, student success strategies and practices will be examined through unique frameworks:

• The role of the student
• The role played by the institution in supporting the student
• The role of partnering with the the wider community

At the end of the event, participants will be able to craft a specific plan of action to take back to their institutions and begin to implement immediately.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

We encourage you to bring a team of professionals to brainstorm new ways to retain students of all types. The multi-faceted approach to student success and retention presented here lends itself to groups including faculty, academic support services, student services, leaders in Centers for Teaching and Learning, chief academic officers, chief student affairs officers, institutional researchers, and grant writers.

PRE-INSTITUTE HOMEWORK

To ensure that each institution gets the most possible value from each working session, participants will be asked to gather various information about their institutions prior to the event.

ADDITIONAL LEARNING OPPORTUNITY

Optional Post-Institute Workshop:
Preparing your Retention Plan for Grant Proposals

Join Academic Impressions in this full-day workshop as we lead you through a process to turn your retention/success plans into grant proposals. You will:

• Learn basic components of grant writing
• Understand some of the government and private grants available to increase student retention and success
• Shape parts of the retention/success plan that you developed in the institute into components of grant proposals