Welcome to the inaugural post of the Student Success Collaborative blog, Student Success Insights. As the leader of the consulting team that serves you every day, I’m excited to have another medium through which to communicate with you.
This blog is all about delivering on our brand promise of collaboration. We want your relationship with the Student Success Collaborative to be truly collaborative, existing far beyond the typical confines of client-vendor interactions.
There is no doubt that technology can lead to great things—but technology itself won’t solve all of higher education’s student success problems. Without the right ideas, even the best technologies can prove ineffective. By bringing together some of the brightest, most motivated minds in higher education, we can combine the power of ideas with technology to help solve today’s toughest challenges, including one we are all dedicated to: helping more students succeed.
We’ll use this blog to share reflections, recommendations, best practices, and insights to inspire and complement your daily work.
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Where is the Collaborative today?
We currently partner with 90+ member institutions, and through these partnerships we serve 1.5 million students across 32 states. Our growth is a testament to the growing national imperative to find new ways to impact student success.
Though we’ve grown tremendously, both in the size and scope of our vision, what hasn’t changed is our approach to growth. We look first inside, to our membership. We continue to ask:
- What keeps you up at night?
- What are your daily struggles?
- What pains can technology and insight together help to solve?
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More resources on student success
Interested in how institutions are redesigning academic programs and developing new advising and student support models to raise student success rates? Check out the resources available in our Student Success Best Practices Library.
Why does it matter?
We’re migrating from a world of clear institutional goals—retaining and graduating more students—to one where the word “success” means different things to different people. We often ask ourselves, which graduation rate matters most? What does this data really say about our institution?
Higher education is no longer just about intellectual pursuit (though we sometimes wish it were). In our increasingly complicated world, we must consider the intersection of practicality (employment after school) and academic passion. We define success as helping our students find—and seek—that delicate balance when they make critical decisions.
We want to provide innovative solutions to help you and your students navigate these changes.
Where do we start?
Based on feedback you’ve shared in the last year, we know one of your primary concerns is accountability. Without the proper mechanisms in place to help you successfully implement change, your plans are bound to crumble. So how do you avoid a collapse? How do you lead a cross-functional, mixed-level team through a mind shift? How do you create a culture where numbers matter?
These are the types of issues that we will dissect moving forward on this blog. We look forward to your thoughts and feedback—and to a breakthrough 2014.
Next, Check Out
Our related study profiles innovators’ efforts to elevate student success by developing a comprehensive network to identify early signs of attrition or graduation delays.