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NASH TS3Our Recent Blog Posts
Freddie Silverman, and Who Drives Change
If you’ve been attending the NASH series on the Big Re-Think over the last few weeks, then you’ve enjoyed some mind-expanding conversations about where public systems of higher education might want to go, and how we’d get there. The initiative isn’t timid: topics have included overturning the budget model, how accreditation would need to change, and who leads the transformation. A recent session delved into complex adaptive systems theory, and how a sprawling ecosystem like ours can intentionally create space for its own evolution.
College Completion and Attainment: What We Have Learned, What We Still Need to Know
It has been twelve years since former President Barack Obama proposed a national “moon-shot” for college completion so that the United States could again be “first in the world” in the share of adults with college degrees. Although the President’s American Graduation Initiative (AGI) was not fully enacted, his words accelerated national interest in the completion agenda, leading to pledges by higher education leaders as well as new and expanded initiatives by foundations to improve graduation rates and reduce racial, ethnic, and economic inequalities.
Institutional Readiness
In 2016, Tia Brown McNair and colleagues published Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success as a response to national conversations regarding postsecondary success. I’m sure many readers of this blog have already read this thought-provoking book.
The main point McNair and her coauthors make is that there needs to be a mindset shift away from the college readiness (most often framed as the under-preparedness) of students, to the student readiness or institutional readiness of universities and institutions.
Complexity
Many of us in public higher education have learned the hard way that a message can be powerful and go far, or it can be sophisticated and precise, but not both.
This limitation is the bane of system offices. By definition our state institutions are in the complexity business, pushing ahead with knowledge on messy frontiers, and driving social equity and upward mobility one student at a time. But try explaining that with any nuance to say, your regents, or your state’s higher ed legislative committee – or for that matter, your first gen applicant pool.
Applying Universal Design Thinking to Opportunity Gap Closure
With roots in psychology and disability studies, Universal Design (UD) has been rarely applied to the work of student success at scale. Amanda Kraus defines UD as “the design of products and environments to be useable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for modifications or specialized design.” What would it look and feel like to apply this thinking as we design and implement educational environments and cultures in the service of equity and opportunity gap closure?
Building a Systemwide Approach to Address Behavioral Health – Lessons from the University of Wisconsin System
When senior student affairs officers (SSAOs) in the University of Wisconsin System convened with system leadership in the summer of 2018 to brainstorm collective initiatives to enhance student success, one common topic kept emerging—behavioral health. SSAOs had long been trying to address the rising influence of behavioral health issues on the personal and academic success of students—a national trend that has been well-documented over the past few decades.
What Students Can Do
For a few years now, we have been a small research team, consisting of 2-4 students and one faculty member, looking at data from our First-Year Experience (FYE) program at California State University Chico. The students who worked for the Research and Assessment “arm” of our FYE program fell in love with the theories of student success.
Transfer Student Success: Four Most Common Legislative Actions taken by State Legislature
Prior to the pandemic transfer student mobility had been on the rise and so were the anecdotes of students who had lost credits, were misadvised, or were not able to complete their degree after transferring. The result has led several state officials to pursue legislation or regulation as a means to “fix” these problems and this legislation directly impacts how systems implement their own transfer policies and practices.
Toward Equitable and Ethical AI in Higher Education
As the higher education sector grapples with the ‘new normal’ of the post-pandemic, the structural issues of the recent past not only remain problematic, but have been exacerbated by COVID-related disruptions throughout the education pipeline. Navigating the complexity of higher education has always been challenging for students, particularly at under-resourced institutions which lack the advising capacity to provide guidance and support. Areas such as transfer and financial aid are notorious black boxes of complexity, where students lacking financial resources and ‘college knowledge’ are too often left on their own to make decisions which may prove costly and damaging down the line.
Recognizing Advisors and Advising in the UT System
The UT System’s student success framework includes Advising as one of its three student success pillars, along with Finances and Belonging. The framework has been in place since 2017, developed collaboratively with our institutions, and we articulate our pillars as commitments to students. The Advising pillar reads: All UT students will receive the advising they need to help them discover clear pathways to degree completion and beyond.