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Students First continues our commitment to supporting student success across the multiple dimensions of Persistence, Academic Success, Affordability, and the Student Experience. This update provides a few highlights of work that has been done in the past few months that implements the commitments of Students First in supporting students to achieve their educational goals.

#WEBELONGINCOLLEGE

PSU students share their belonging story. Please see the highlight reel above. Several PSU students received a $1,000 scholarship through Get Schooled for sharing their #WeBelongInCollege story.

PROJECT UPDATES

Persistence Network

The Persistence Network is a team of staff, faculty, and students that meets weekly to identify and discuss ways to support specific students at risk of not persisting. This group of staff and faculty focuses on action that can be taken in the near term. This work will inform the overall strategy of the Persistence Pillar of Students First. The network launched in Fall term and will continue to meet weekly through the 2020-2021 academic year.

Focus areas in Fall term were:

Outreach to new first-generation students
Students who dropped their Fall 2020 courses
Resulted in a workgroup for discovery and recommendation on use of a “banner field” that is activated before a student drops their final credit (i.e. a way to identify when a student is about to leave so that we may intervene as appropriate and/or ask why they are leaving).
Registration Holds (Financial, Admissions, MMR, etc.)
Focus on improvement of processes within the Persistence Pillar
Student Success Advocate outreach and learning

Student Success Advocate Pilot

The Student Success Advocate (SSA) proactively identifies students (pilot population) throughout the academic year who are encountering barriers and connects them with resource centers and services. The SSA works in partnership with units and departments across campus in an effort to coordinate outreach and strategies for early intervention. The SSA collaborates with academic and student affairs professionals to strategize persistence efforts for the individual student. The SSA emphasizes the importance of the Success Team and is working toward normalizing interactions between the student, their faculty, mentors, advisors etc., in an effort to destigmatize asking for academic support or guidance. The SSA will be rolling out the Student Success Team Learning Circle this Winter term 2021. The Student Success Team Learning Circle will be tailored to students with similar attributes and aims to empower students and to bring more visibility and awareness to the role of their Success Team.

Navigator

To help our PSU community get the best and most up to date information possible, a cross-divisional team will develop and maintain a PSU Navigator training program and index of core campus resources. This training and index of campus resources, will orient service unit professionals, advisors, and faculty with guidance on providing supportive, timely, and accurate referrals to the wide range of resources available at PSU. A pilot workforce will be trained and connected to the existing PSU operator (503-725-3000) phone line to connect students to campus resources if they are unsure where to begin or have experienced challenges finding the right support or resource.

CircleIn Pilot

Beginning in Spring term 2021, we will pilot CircleIn. CircleIn is a student to student technology platform for students to connect and study together. Students and their classmates, within a peer-to-peer space can create study materials, communicate with peers, manage tasks, and share notes.

Full Withdrawl Workgroup

A workgroup, under the umbrella of the Persistence Network, is convening to explore possible options and make a process recommendation for students who are dropping their last credit hour. Work begins in January 2021.

Low Cost/No Cost Textbook Center

An ongoing challenge for PSU students is the cost of textbooks. Faculty report that the average book price for textbooks they require is around $97. Research also shows that 65% of students refrain from purchasing textbooks due to costs, even though they report they are aware that it will negatively impact their grade. Open educational resources (OER) and other forms of free course materials is a way to address this inequity. The proposal focuses on centralizing the University’s student textbook affordability effort through the creation of a zero-textbook-cost degree pathway that allows students to complete a degree entirely by taking courses that use only free instructional materials. OER course development is the primary cost of this proposal. To support the cost for this proposal, we are currently investigating University and grant funding to support the implementation and a fee structure to support the long-term sustainability and expansion of the zero-textbook-cost degree pathway programs.

Laptop Scholarship Pilot

The shift to fully remote classes and work has made personal technology, such as a reliable laptop and wi-fi access, paramount to student success. Because of the number of service sector jobs that have been eliminated during the COVID-19 outbreak, there is also an unprecedented level of student and student family unemployment, making the purchase of a new laptop unreachable for many of our students. Through the pilot program, 107 laptops were made available to our students. You can find the summary report here.

DATA

Term to Term Persistence

During the Fall term a new Tableau data source was created to allow faculty and staff to dive deeper into student retention by looking at term-by-term persistence of new undergraduate students.

In our initial review, we found that on average 10 percent of new undergraduate students starting in Fall term do not persist to Winter term. Winter to Spring term persistence falls an average of five percent.
For the Fall 2018 cohort, we found First-Time students and Transfer students persisted at similar rates during their first year at PSU, however, in their second year, First-Time students persisted at a rate seven percent lower than Transfer students.

This new data source also allows us to look at populations of students who do not persist between terms and identify patterns.

For example, a total of 434 new undergraduate students admitted in Fall 2019 were not retained to Winter 2020. Nearly 50% of these students not retained to Winter earned a 2.49 GPA or below during their first term at PSU.

In the coming weeks, a Term to Term Persistence dashboard will be available in Tableau for exploration.

Questions? Please email studentsfirstmetrics@pdx.edu.

Intersectionality Tool

With the guidance of the Using Evidence Pillar and Equity Task Force, we have created an Intersectionality Exploration Tool in Tableau which displays retention and graduation rates for new undergraduate students by the intersectionality of two or more student characteristics. One unique aspect of this tool is its ability to fully disaggregate race/ethnicity and no longer categorize students with more than one race/ethnicity as Multi-Race.

For example, when using the Federal definitions for race/ethnicity PSU had 39 Native American Transfer students in its Fall 2019 cohort. When you fully disaggregate the Fall 2019 Transfer cohort there are 105 students who selected Native American (39 indicated only Native American, 66 indicated Native American and another race or ethnicity).

Questions? Please email studentsfirstmetrics@pdx.edu.

*Please note that access requres a Tableau lisense.

EXPLORE THE TOOL

NSSE

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) offered a special fall survey (NSSE Pulse) in an effort to provide universities with data to inform campus actions in a timely manner. The Pulse survey included selected questions from the original NSSE survey that are most critical to understanding the undergraduate student experience. Between October 5 and November 23, more than 137,000 students from colleges across the U.S. and Canada responded to the survey. Among those who responded, some 1,064 were attending Portland State University (PSU).

SUMMARY FINDINGS

CUSTOM myPSU

Coming Soon

The vision for the custom myPSU initiative is that PSU students will experience online services and resources through a single point of entry to be mobile-friendly, easy to use, and useful. OIT in partnership with the OSS conducted 2 virtual student engagement sessions to solicit student input on the new custom internally built myPSU. Students were enthusiastic and excited about the new version of the mobile responsive web-only version of myPSU. There will be a soft launch this term before a full launch later this academic year.

VISIT THE NEW myPSU

EQUITY & STUDENT SUCCESS

Students First will partner with the Equity Task force to discuss how we might collaborate on our shared priorities. The Equity Taskforce expects to receive recommendations for its priorities from the committees on January 15, 2021. We’ll provide a summary of the discussion and next steps in a future Students First update.

OUR COMMITMENT IS STUDENTS FIRST

PSU believes that students succeed when caring faculty and staff connect them to the opportunity and support they need to experience the transformative power of a college education. We realize PSU’s commitment to student success when our students
achieve their goals.

Questions about Students First? Please email Andrea Garrity at agarrity@pdx.edu.

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