Eliminate Administrative and Financial Barriers to Success
While most academic leaders think of advising, academics, or student affairs when thinking about student success, the administrative infrastructure of a campus has an equally key role to play. Many students will struggle even more if they must overcome a multitude of administrative and financial hurdles to progress toward graduation. The right policies, processes, and financial supports form the foundation for a broader student success strategy.
Audit student-facing policies to discover hidden barriers to student success
Nearly every academic policy, no matter how minor, can have an impact on student success. But most policies emerge from shared governance committees without careful analysis of their effects on student persistence or equity.
Overly strict registration hold policies, for example, can needlessly discourage students from reenrolling, while overly lenient course repeat policies might lead some students to repeat the same course without making progress toward their degrees. Just revising bursar holds alone led to an 8% increase in retention at one university.
Create a policy audit committee (or charge an existing policy committee) to review existing policies all at once, consider their cumulative impact on student success, and revise policies that create unintentional roadblocks to graduation.
Create degree maps that chart a path to four-year graduation
Degree maps improve students’ ability to self-advise, acting as a proxy for in-person advising when resources are scarce. Without this guidance, many students will delay taking gateway and general education courses and potentially extend their time to degree. The longer a student spends in college, the more likely it is that frustration, course availability, or life events will prevent degree completion.
These problems are avoidable if the university helps students understand the importance of taking a critical concentration of requirements in their initial semesters, when graduation may be far from their minds. The best degree maps identify key ‘milestone’ courses and corresponding grades, allow students to create individualized degree plans, and provide ‘what-if’ functionality so students can test how a proposed degree plan would affect their time to graduation.
Now that you’re familiar with best practices in degree planning
Revise course and institutional withdrawal policies
There are good reasons to withdraw from a course—when genuinely overwhelmed by its difficulty, erroneously enrolled in the wrong section, or very likely to receive a failing grade, for example. But many students withdraw from courses or leave college entirely for reasons that might have been questioned and remedied in a simple advising conversation.
Without good advice, avoidable withdrawals can easily lead to severe delays on degree progress. Some institutions are developing web-based withdrawal survey modules to replace what had initially been a one-click transaction.
Now that you’ve seen the case study profile
Use micro-grants and other forms of need-based support to encourage persistence
More experts and leaders in the field are questioning the graduation rate and equity benefits of traditional merit aid or graduation rebate programs. As research shows many states spending more on merit-based aid than need-based aid, some institutions are looking to award more aid at critical moments in the student lifecycle to boost persistence and graduation rates.
Several institutions have created behavior-based scholarships that target students with greater need and incentivize students to make choices that help them make progress toward graduation, while offering fallback support to continuing students who might otherwise lose their aid or need emergency support. Learn more about these new incentive-based scholarships in EAB’s whitepaper on deploying financial aid.
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