Dear Colleagues:

In today's update, I am focusing on the work of our Completion Commission, which represents the collective efforts of our A-State community to support the continued and new approaches to improve our student success rates. Based on our preliminary review, these efforts appear to be making an impact.

An important benchmark in retention and graduation rates, for example, is the enrollment patterns of the first-year cohort. The fall-to-spring retention rates for the FA17 first-year cohort was 92%, which was just shy of our all-time record, but up significantly from last year’s cohort, where only 87% of our FA16 first-year students returned for the SP17 semester. In addition, the FA17 first-year cohort is currently far ahead of last year’s pace for fall-to-fall registration. About 70% of the FA17 cohort is already registered for next fall. You may recall that only about 73% of the FA16 first-year cohort returned for their second year.

You may be asking yourself what we are doing differently to see these significant advances. These positive results are largely the result of the tireless efforts of the members of our Chancellor’s Commission on Completion (CCC). For the past year, the CCC has been meeting weekly to examine retention patterns from the past and recommending changes that can increase student success. It spent the better part of the FA17 semester exploring data-driven best practices on a national level, in addition to current A-State efforts to help guide our future retention strategies. Two of the major campus retention trends that emerged over that time were increased focus on academic advising and financial assistance. These two key strategies, when employed well, have resulted in big changes in completion rates at other institutions.

The CCC also held several listening sessions throughout the year with faculty and students from across campus. One of the overarching themes from the faculty listening sessions was the keen interest that our faculty members have on their students’ success. While not surprising, this passion is vital for our success in this area because we know that faculty members are an intricate part of the retention puzzle. I was inspired to see so many of my faculty colleagues show their commitment to being involved in our completion solutions. The CCC will continue to host faculty and student listening sessions every semester, because their voices matter. More importantly, we are forming a faculty subgroup as an extension of the CCC, which will be charged to explore critical issues in classroom pedagogy that promote long-term successes of A-State students.

One of the key takeaways from the student listening forums was a need for students to have an opportunity to recoup institutional scholarships. In the past, if students lost their scholarship because their GPA dipped below a certain threshold, they could never recover the scholarship, even if their cumulative GPA rose above the threshold. This policy led to increased student hardship, decreased student morale, and incentivized students to leave A-State. As a result of this finding, we revised the A-State institutional scholarship renewal policies. Students now have the entire summer term to improve their academic progress so that they can maintain their scholarship. Students who lose a scholarship now have one year to improve their academic progress, providing the possibility of earning back their institutional scholarship. Along with these efforts, the CCC is exploring need-based awards to help students who need assistance in order to complete.

We also want to empower our students to take ownership of their destiny by providing them with meaningful extracurricular opportunities. For example, we know that many of our students struggle with finances, so we have developed a new financial literacy program called “Scarlet to Black” for the FA18 incoming cohort of first-year students. This new financial literacy program is being led by Dr. Philip Tew, Associate Professor of Finance and Director of Economic Education and Financial Literacy. In time, we will expand this program to provide much-needed learning opportunities for our juniors and seniors to prepare them for “Life After A-State.”

Academic advising came up repeatedly as an area in need of additional support, so the CCC is examining how we can improve that experience for our students. There is a difference between the transactional function of advising (helping students create class schedules for the coming semester) and the mentoring function of advising (e.g, preparing students for graduate school, internships, or entry into the job market, etc.). Faculty members have told us that they much prefer to focus on the mentoring aspect and sometimes feel overwhelmed by the pressures of the transactional aspect. The pressure is real because our advisers know that mis-advising students can result in their having to extend their college career by a semester or more. To address this issue, we are exploring the expansion of professional advisers within the colleges so that faculty members are freed up to focus on mentoring our students. Also, our A-State professional advisers have dramatically increased their efforts to personally reach out to currently enrolled students and encourage timely advisement and registration for the coming semester.

The recent Huron report highlighted something that our CCC discovered through the course of our first year – we do not have access to good predictive data. Many institutions use such data to learn where students are struggling (e.g., identifying first-year classes with large failure rates) or to identify students who are at risk for dropping out. The CCC recommended that A-State adopt Civitas Learning, an analytics software that is used by many of our aspirational peers to help us better understand our student retention and graduation patterns at a much higher level of precision. Civitas is currently building our database and we will start using it fully next academic year.

Finally, the CCC is exploring every administrative process that directly influences student success to be sure that we are not inadvertently creating barriers to student progress. For example, we are evaluating how registration holds by Student Accounts affect student enrollment and considering best practices from other institutions to ensure that our students register for the FA18 semester before the end of the SP18 semester.

These are just some of the highlights from the past year. Other changes that our Commission members have suggested include:

Special Populations

• Redesigning programs for conditionally admitted A-State students. Increasing outreach and retention initiatives for adult learners.
• Establishing a system-wide and A-State transfer student team to reduce barriers frequently encountered by prospective transfer students. The team includes representatives from recruitment, admissions, transcript evaluation, financial aid, and academic advising.

Registration Ramp-Up

• Reviewing and removing unnecessary registration holds.
• Creating a Call Management System to help professional advisers manage and track registration progress. This system has reporting features to review self-reported reasons for student attrition.
• Developing a PR campaign to help promote timely registration.
• Hosting evening call-a-thons to target non-registered students.

Focus on Early Process and Academic Engagement

• Developing a data tracking system for admissions.
• Examining early correspondence and processing of prospective students from time of recruitment to admission.
• Refocusing New Student Orientation to offer more one-on-one academic and financial aid counseling.
• Finding avenues to include academic units earlier in the recruitment process.
• Redesigning FYE to focus on mentoring and retention.

Financial Assistance

• Revising institutional scholarship renewal policies.
• Developing needs-based emergency and completion grants.
• Piloting low cost instructional material (OER).

Intensive Retention Practives

• Developing PackSupport@AState.edu as a one-stop email to allow students to reach out to campus for support.
• Identifying a Student Outreach Coordinator to serve as a triage manager for Starfish, PackSupport, and other campus resources to centralize referral services.
• Developing a cross-campus PackSupport team to examine situations for students who are most at risk of leaving.
• Starting outreach efforts for students with excessive credit hours (over 120+ hours and no “Intent to Graduate” on file).

Academics

• Exploring expansion of professional advisers within the colleges.
• Providing additional support for high challenge courses (high DFW rates).

Student Engagement

• Adopting the new student mobile app for online student engagement opportunities and management.

What I love about the work of the CCC is that is really encapsulates every single area of campus. Because of that, people across campus are helping our students realize the truth behind the statement: “Every Red Wolf Counts.” In this case, every Red Wolf faculty/staff member is working together to ensure that every Red Wolf student has the opportunity to graduate from A-State. What you do in your corner of our campus echoes across our community and makes us all better. Your efforts matter. Thank you.

April is our busiest month with Create@State, Convocation of Scholars banquets and awards, and recognition of achievements by all – students, faculty and staff. I want to add my appreciation for the efforts by all that go into these events. I look forward to seeing you at Commencement next month.

Finally, today marks National Administrative Assistants Day. It is a great reminder of the many staff member across campus who often work behind the scenes to make sure that the rest of us are able to be successful. If you see one of our administrative assistants today, join me in thanking them for a job well done.

Kelly