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The right and wrong ways to hold departments accountable for student success
Academic leaders need the support of departments and their faculty to improve institutional graduation rates. But if you measure departments on the time from their majors’ matriculation to graduation, you have probably heard at least one of these common objections: Departments may not even have contact with their majors until they have completed first- and…
4 program design mistakes to avoid
How to Build an Experiential Major Map
Students often struggle to navigate and connect institutions’ siloed, disparate academic and cocurricular opportunities. Faculty, academic leaders, and student services leaders can guide students in their decision-making by clearly articulating how academic and nonacademic opportunities fit together. To enable this articulation, leading institutions provide experiential major maps that help students make informed coursework decisions, encourage…
Why–and how–to build a sense of belonging on campus
A growing body of research, including EAB’s own this past year, tells us that students’ sense of belonging on campus is crucial not only for student success and persistence, but for student equity. Feeling respected, welcomed, and valued is correlated with outcomes like higher grades, retention, and engagement. Yet demographic disparities in these outcomes remain,…
Six roles for faculty in student success
Faculty play a critical role in shaping the student experience, but they’re surprisingly absent from student success strategies. This means that academic leaders may be missing key allies.
From local manager to strategic partner: Evolve and elevate the department chair role
Academic unit leaders have a uniquely challenging dual role on campus, as both an institutional leader and a representative of their particular discipline. On the one hand, provosts need chairs to align decisions with a budget model or strategic plan they have little authority over. On the other, chairs are charged by the faculty who…
5 surprising leading indicators of student success disparities
As part of our recent research on Overcoming Barriers to Equity in Student Success, EAB catalogued leading indicators of persisting gaps in student outcomes between underrepresented students and majority students. We uncovered over 100 barriers to equitable student outcomes through literature review, research interviews, and analysis of student success data. Some of the disparities were…
8 questions to ask when evaluating the impact of student success programs
Most academic affairs leaders can readily name dozens of student retention and support initiatives in place on their campus. But which of these initiatives (many of them expensive to maintain) are truly effective? In an environment where nearly everything affects a student’s likelihood to persist, how can we know which particular program or intervention made…
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Three Strategies to Promote On-Time Graduation
About the Webconference As institutions seek to keep students on-track for timely graduation, summer session and accelerated regular-term courses have emerged as an underutilized opportunity to advance students. However, rigid policies and schedules offer limited options for students to course-correct to remain on track for timely graduation. In this webconference we will discuss key strategies…
Envisioning a Post-Departmental Structure for the University
About the Webconference A small, but growing number of universities has reorganized academic departments into new interdisciplinary structures, often called divisions. With the right leadership structures and delineation of responsibilities, divisional models of governance can lead to completely interdisciplinary modes of teaching, conducting research, and sharing resources. This webconference covers the six key components of…
