Category: Uncategorized

Safety and Risk Management Training for Faculty Leading Study Abroad: Part 2

Recent international crises have prompted evacuations of American and Canadian students studying abroad, and have lent some urgency to reviewing risk management for study abroad programs. One area needing particular attention is the role of faculty who are on the ground leading study abroad programs overseas. Trained in scholarship and pedagogy, these program leaders may be unaware of what additional safety and risk management training they may need in order to lead students overseas — and many institutions offer little clarity of faculty members’ roles while abroad. This week, we turned to Margaret Wiedenhoeft, associate director of the Center for International Programs at Kalamazoo College (who manages study abroad programs in China, France, India, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Thailand), to ask for a checklist of questions faculty leading study abroad need to have answers to, informed by lessons learned from recent overseas crises. Checklist of Safety Questions Wiedenhoeft advises that faculty leaders of study abroad programs need to be equipped with ready answers to a series of safety and risk management questions: What is the faculty member’s role while overseas, and what specific responsibilities do they have beyond delivery of the academic content of the program? “Make expectations explicit,” Wiedenhoeft […]

Recruiting Students: Five Tips for Making the Most of Facebook

April 14, 2011. In our January – February 2011 edition of Higher Ed Impact: Monthly Diagnostic, which identified opportunities for using social media to move the needle on key objectives in student recruitment, student engagement, and fundraising, we highlighted the ethnographic research of danah boyd (sic), a social media researcher with Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Among other findings, boyd noted that young adults use Facebook not to build or expand their personal or professional network (as, for example, adults in their 20s and 30s use LinkedIn), but to connect with their pre-existing network of friends and social contacts. This has implications for how institutions leverage Facebook for recruiting. A lot of institutions have invested in posting large amounts of content to Facebook pages that are designed to interest prospective students in the campus community, invite them to subscribe, and build networks of prospects and applicants. More efficient and effective uses of Facebook, however, use smaller amounts of very targeted content to get prospects conversing with their current network about the institution, sharing information, or completing specific tasks. To learn more about how institutions can make the most out of Facebook for recruiting students, […]

Helping Veteran Students Succeed

April 14, 2011. Veteran students represent a growing demographic of college students, and that demographic is likely to grow further as more military members return to the states from the overseas wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan, seeking college degrees and transitions into the civilian workforce. Yet veterans (and military students in general) face unique challenges in the transition from combat to the classroom, and colleges and universities face continuing challenges in supporting veteran students and integrating them effectively into the campus community. Two challenges in particular stand out: Many veterans continue to feel isolated on college campuses Many veterans face confusion over their GI Bill benefits Both of these challenges impact the likelihood of retention and degree completion. The first is an obstacle to securing peer support that would improve academic performance, and the second is a barrier to the financial viability of degree completion. An article in USA Today this week highlighted some of the measures colleges are taking to make their campuses “military-friendly” — measures such as peer mentoring programs, special orientation sessions, and establishing veterans centers on campus. To learn more about where colleges can see the greatest impact on academic performance and retention for veteran students, we […]

Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience

  In this issue: Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students To what extent is your institution defining what it means to be a student enrolled there? Is your institution’s leadership engaged in conversations about what your particular student experience (curricular and co-curricular) looks like, and how the promise of that experience shapes your recruitment strategy? Or how you incentivize your staff to deliver on that promise? Driven by the mission, your institution needs to be clear about what it stands for and what value its student experience offers. Creating a distinct, cohesive experience that is played out through your institution’s academic, residential, co-curricular, service, career, and global experiences is the first step to ensuring alignment of your resources to support student success. We asked Jon McGee, vice president for planning and public affairs at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, for his tips on achieving this aim. Defining the Promise “If you read the typical guidebook, you’d know how much and how […]

Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short

  In this issue: Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students This year is seeing increased public and federal pressure on colleges and universities to improve completion rates, raising pressing questions of both policy (Will pressure on completion coinciding with cuts in state funding force public institutions to increase their selectivity and decrease access?) and practice (What efforts will move the needle on degree attainment? Who should lead them? How should they be funded?). Yet despite the increased attention to the issue, relatively few institutions have adopted a campus-wide and adequately resourced initiative to improve student success and student persistence. Two factors appear to be holding institutions back from seeing significant gains in retention: Under-investment in retention efforts, often due to uncertainty over the scope of the initiatives needed and over how best to allocate funds to them; and Driven in part by that uncertainty, a reliance on one-off programs (often housed within one department and isolated from other offices) What’s needed now is a […]

Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students

  In this issue: Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students Even with a clearly defined student experience; close alignment of people, practice, and policy; and a concentrated effort to remove barriers to a student’s momentum in pursuing educational goals, some students will remain unlikely to persist. With a well-coordinated early warning system, an institution can intervene and provide or refer the necessary support to ensure more students stay enrolled and ultimately graduate. Identifying At-Risk Students: What Data Are You Looking At? The earlier an academically at-risk student is identified, the better the prognosis for their success in college. Early alert systems, implemented within the first four to eight weeks of a term, can be instrumental in beginning an intervention that can help facilitate students’ success and increase retention. However, faced with frequent studies offering multitudinous data on factors influencing student attrition, it can be challenging to sort through the information available to determine what indicators deserve most attention, both to proactively identify students who may […]

Tackling the Retention Challenge: Defining and Delivering a Unique Student Experience

by Amit Mrig

In this report: April 2011. Large organizations in any industry often suffer from a misalignment of people, policies, and practice. Colleges and universities are no different. And the issue of student retention is a prime example of when good intentions, money, and technology aren’t enough to overcome policies, structures, and incentives that work at odds with one another. Amid the increased public pressure on completion rates, many colleges are pursuing one-off programs whose impact is sometimes difficult to measure. Less focus has been paid to the need for a broader conversation of organizational alignment as a means of tackling the root causes which contribute to student attrition, increased costs, and external demands for accountability. The first step in promoting student success is to define the specific educational experience and value an institution offers to students — and then align recruitment strategy, organizational structures, student support initiatives, academic policies, and incentives to support that experience and ensure that the institution delivers on its promise. That’s why we’ve convened a cadre of experts in higher education policy, research, and practice to present an integrated, strategic view of the challenges and opportunities for addressing student success. We hope their insights and advice will be […]

Student Success: A Team Effort

Our Member Exclusive report Tackling the Retention Challenge: Defining and Delivering a Unique Student Experience emphasizes the importance of achieving a broad alignment of academic and student support services, rather than trusting to isolated, one-off retention initiatives. Yet there are often organizational and cultural barriers that keep efforts within student affairs and academic affairs separated and siloed. This week, we asked James Cook, co-editor (with Christopher Lewis) of the book Student and Academic Affairs Collaboration: The Divine Comity (NASPA, 2007) and past vice president of student services at Laramie County Community College, to identify some of the most difficult and pervasive barriers to effective partnerships across these divisions. Cook also suggests some tips for breaking down those barriers. What Gets in the Way Cook notes five barriers that represent the most significant — and difficult to address — obstacles to effective coordination of academic and student support services: Organizational structure — these functions typically report to separate vice presidents Residual antipathy between some student services professionals and some faculty (there are still faculty who view student services professionals as “the party people” who hold pizza events for students; there are still some student services professionals who stereotype faculty, seeing them as too […]

Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success

  In this issue: Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students In a recent interview with Academic Impressions, Dennis Pruitt, vice president for student affairs at the University of South Carolina, suggested that one of the most critical factors in ensuring student success is ensuring momentum toward the degree: “Historically, many have assumed that if students get over their homesickness, if they have a good affinity group, if they feel good on campus, they’ll persist. But the two factors that truly help students persist are academic progress toward a degree (having a goal and gaining momentum toward it) and maintaining maximum eligibility for the maximum amount of financial aid (to ensure non-interruption in their courses).” Dennis Pruitt, U of South Carolina This suggests that more than anything else, supporting student success is about empowering students to build momentum toward their goals, and removing barriers to their momentum. To learn more, we turned to Kevin Pollock, the president of St. Clair County Community College, and Don […]

Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs

  In this issue: Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students If your institution opts not to “be all things to all people,” but to offer a specific, defined student experience that it is uniquely positioned to design and deliver (a single experience for a private liberal arts college; a cluster of linked, cohort-based experiences for a regional public university), the next step is to consider how you will align the various academic, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities your campus has to offer in support of that experience — and how you will align academic and student support services to ensure student success. Kim O’Halloran, associate dean for the college of education and human services at Montclair State University, offers a few scenarios to illustrate. SCENARIO A Institution A provides a unique residential experience marked by a seamless learning experience in and out of the classroom. The experience this institution has designed might include residential colleges, living-learning communities, classrooms located in the residence halls, student leaders and club […]