Defining the Faculty Role in Student Success
Building ownership for student progression among individual faculty and distributed academic units
This academic affairs study will help you clarify how faculty and academic units can support campus-wide student success initiatives. Download the complete publication or explore the table of contents above to discover 16 best practices for engaging faculty members and academic units in student success initiatives.
Executive summary
No one unit, office, or individual can truly “own” student retention and completion, given the incredible complexity of students’ experiences on campus. From enrollment management and student affairs to advising offices and undergraduate colleges, dozens of organizational units on campus can (and should) stake a claim to student success. Making a meaningful improvement in retention and graduation rates requires extensive coordination among all of these stakeholders.
Academic administrators should provide comprehensive data tools to academic units to allow for self-study, but conduct separate analyses to inform curricular changes. Providing easy-to-use data on enrollment and progression removes the lag time associated with one-off institutional research requests. Instead of relying on self-regulation, however, the provost’s office should evaluate curricular changes or policies independently (with their impact on students in mind).
The most important responsibility of individual faculty members is to enhance the student learning experience. Pedagogical innovations shown to improve student success are abundant on many campuses, but instructors often lack the training or the support needed to replicate those innovations in their particular context. Administrators should reduce the opportunity costs of experimentation in the classroom and leverage faculty leaders to expand effective teaching techniques across departments.
Introduction: The student success silo problem
“If it’s everyone’s job, it’s not one’s job.” This sentiment is all too common among academic leaders struggling to build a clear, coherent student success strategy on campus.
Given the hundreds (if not thousands) of variables that impact students’ likelihood to graduate, however, responsibility for their ultimate success is necessarily diffuse. Each of the leaders and organizational units depicted on the right have important roles to play, and an effective institutional approach to student success must involve coordination among each constituency.
To that end, administrators with “student success” in their title are beginning to emerge, helping to bring academic units, undergraduate education, enrollment strategy, and student affairs efforts into alignment. While most of these newly appointed leaders lack significant decision-making authority or purse strings, their growing presence in higher education signals an increasing desire among provosts for accountability beyond mere rhetoric.
While no one person or office on campus can claim total responsibility for retention and completion outcomes, little progress can be made without delineating the specific roles that each leader plays in impacting the student experience.
Self-reported activity suggests nearly universal adoption of high-impact practices
- System campuses compile list of 113 known best practices
- Chancellors asked to select those already existing on campus
- Self-audit results in nearly complete compliance with list
As the number of leaders sharing responsibility for student success grows, so do the number of initiatives, policies, and practices designed to assist students on campus. Most institutions can list dozens of ongoing efforts in this area, drawing from decades of literature on high impact interventions known to improve student persistence.
One state university system recently conducted a thorough audit of 113 known best practices (several of which are included on the right) on each of their campuses, with the hope of helping each institution improve on sub-par graduation rates. By identifying gaps in implementation on each campus, they thought, the system could prioritize areas for investment.
What the system found, however, was that each campus claimed near-universal compliance with the list, despite its length and comprehensiveness.
No shortage of best practice programs in place, but little to show for it
If each institution could report adoption of nearly 100 high impact practices, what could explain the campuses’ poor performance on student success in comparison with peer institutions serving similar populations?
As system leaders lamented, the answer likely lies in the critical difference between the mere existence of a practice or policy on campus, and the effectiveness of that effort as executed by the faculty and staff held responsible for it.
Our understanding of the current state of student success strategies in higher education revolves around this fundamental disconnect. On any college campus, widespread awareness of both the root causes of attrition and the interventions known to work is common. What is less common, however, is the collective will to prioritize those interventions over competing demands, and to sustain them over time.
Without a culture that actively places student success at the center, most initiatives will live on only in file cabinets and institutional compliance reports such as this one.
A similar story nationwide
This phenomenon—greater investment “on paper,” but limited results on campus—is not limited to isolated campuses or even systems. It is reflected across the higher education landscape, as evidenced by the data shown to the right.
While these data notably fail to account for transfer students and the growing population of non-traditional students entering higher education, they provide a clear picture of how difficult it can be to maintain student outcomes over time, much less improve them.
Many administrators report feeling as though they need to “run faster to stay in place,” as each entering class is comprised in larger parts by first-generation college students, students in need of financial support, and students balancing coursework with employment and familial responsibilities.
Faculty at the center of student success
By any definition of student success—from blunt retention metrics to life-long fulfillment—research has demonstrated a strong link between faculty activity and student outcomes.
Umbach and Wawrzynski, in “Faculty Do Matter: The Role of College Faculty in Student Learning and Engagement,” suggest that faculty-student interaction is frequently among the best predictors of both learning outcomes and term-to-term persistence.
Research emerging from Gallup and Purdue University’s collaboration on long-term student outcomes underlines that message, showing that close faculty-student relationships result in significantly greater levels of happiness and engagement later in students’ careers.
Part 1: Faculty as collective decision makers
When faculty determine major requirements, elective course offerings, and class schedules, their decisions primarily reflect disciplinary concerns. Their well-intentioned desire to ensure the rigor and fidelity of programmatic curricula can come at the cost of access and degree progress, however, as is often the case with overly restrictive admissions criteria or transfer credit articulation standards.
Practice 1: DIY enrollment analysis platform
As a result, committees and taskforces are often formed by administrations hoping to overcome silo-based thinking. These groups typically engage in robust debate, but suffer from a lack of direction and authority. Inclusion and comprehensiveness comes at the cost of execution, leading to relatively weak recommendations that falter over time.
Too often, units rely on institutional research staff (who are often busy with internal and external reporting requirements) for one-off data requests. It may take months for faculty to receive the information they need to propose a new course, revise program requirements, or add supplementary instruction to a class, for example.
Practice 2: Enrollment impact audits
Some institutions have found success in building a role within the central administration to independently evaluate changes to curricula or academic policies. In addition to encouraging units to conduct their own analyses and providing them with the necessary information, academic leaders should check the underlying assumptions behind proposed changes before allowing them to proceed toward approval.
At Virginia Commonwealth University, this role is played by the Vice Provost for Strategic Enrollment Management and his staff, who provide historical enrollment data (for example, retention and graduation rates of particular student segments by major), and project the impact that new rules or curricular reforms might have on recruitment, enrollment, retention, and graduation.
While faculty maintain ultimate authority over the curriculum, each decision is now informed by rigorous analysis and made with the entire institution in mind, rather than one or two academic units.
Practice 3: Task-based retention teams
Creating a high-functioning central student success committee or taskforce can drive faster and more impactful change across campus than the previously-discussed checks on decentralized curricular decision-making. But too often, these groups devolve into forums for debate, rather than action.
Auburn University at Montgomery has implemented a creative solution to this problem by distributing the work of their 37-member retention committee among task-based teams—a “Campus Response” team focused on setting the agenda and making substantive recommendations, a “Data Management” team focused on gathering and cleaning relevant data for analysis, and a “Data Investigation” team focused on interpreting that data.
By placing faculty who are both interested in and qualified for their designed tasks on these teams, this committee has been able to make significant progress in generating data driven solutions to the campus’s biggest curricular bottlenecks, from high-failure “gatekeeper” courses to achievement gaps between traditional and non-traditional students. Most importantly, it places faculty in direct ownership over the investigation of these barriers and over their resolution.
Practice 4: Guided project management
Seed funding initiatives can augment or even supplant the work of central student success committees when conducted effectively, but small-scale pilots led by faculty members rarely drive institution-wide change. Pilots often lack three key ingredients: a detailed work plan, support for technical and logistical needs, and sufficient capital from the administration to grow into permanence.
Portland State University’s “Provost’s Challenge” initiative allocated $3 million across 24 faculty- and staff-led projects, beginning in 2013, carefully addressing each of these potential limitations along the way. Using a rigorous project management structure with dedicated staff support, and insisting that each funded project demonstrate full-scale implementation by an 18- month deadline, Portland State’s leadership was able to complete an astonishing number of curricular, technological, and administrative reforms over a short period of time.
Practice 5: Faculty-led advisor training
When Mercy College moved from a decentralized approach to advising to a new, central advising organization staffed by dozens of professional “student mentors” (each managing a caseload of students across their academic careers), they took care to ensure the faculty had a clear and regular forum through which to engage with new hires.
After creating degree maps for their programs, faculty train centrally-hired but college deployed advising staff through a series of face-to-face meetings, discussing program requirements, frequently-asked questions, and any additional contextual items that they feel advisors should be familiar with.
Practice 6: Advising career ladder
The best way to mitigate concerns about the quality of professional advising is to recruit and retain high performing advising staff. At most institutions, the lack of a viable career ladder in distributed professional advising organizations has severely limited their ability to do so.
In conjunction with their transition to a centralized professional advising model, Mercy College created a four-tier career ladder for student mentors, who could be promoted to Assistant Director, Associate Director, and Director within their college advising center units. Mentors are evaluated annually, based on student performance, engagement, collaboration with faculty members, professional development, and financial aid counseling.
Practice 7: Unit liaison roles
At Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), each college has an advising center that is overseen by an advising manager. Advising managers spend half of their time working with students and the other half aligning strategy between the different stakeholders on campus.
These advising managers are the primary conduit through which the central administration can inflect and standardize advising policies across academic units. They also serve as liaisons to the departments within their college, giving the chairs and faculty leaders one senior contact to update on new requirements or programs and protecting faculty from having to micromanage a growing advising staff.
Finally, these positions offer the administration a way to assess and improve the performance of advisors. When MTSU’s Vice Provost for Student Success notices poorly performing student caseloads or a lack of appointments and outreach, the advising managers assist with professional development and trainings to improve advisor performance.
Practice 8: Distributed support balancing
The best way to overcome resource constraints associated with broad, widely varying advisor responsibilities is to perform a unit-by-unit task inventory.
When the New School shifted their academic advising model to a centrally-owned (but college-deployed) structure, academic affairs staff met with each college to inventory the tasks that distributed advisors were performing. Those tasks tended to fall into four categories, and reveal areas for shared service streamlining:
- Duplicate activities
- Potential automation
- Academic advising
- Administrative support
Part 2: Faculty as individual contributors
In clarifying how individual faculty members can support their institution’s student success goals, the first important activity to consider is teaching. The classroom comprises the biggest opportunity for faculty to impact, inspire, and engage students.
Critics of higher education often lament a perceived lack of innovation in the classroom, leading, they say, to stagnant student learning outcomes, outdated curricula, and ultimately poor completion rates.
The challenge for college and university leaders is not, then, in creating innovation from scratch; instead, they must focus on identifying innovative faculty members, supporting and rewarding their efforts, encouraging others to emulate their practices, and channeling those practices toward institutional priorities—with student retention and completion at the forefront.
Practice 9: Early warning design requirements
Building momentum during the early development and deployment of an early warning system requires attention to the basic design principles featured on the right.
The system should be simple— giving faculty a single referral point for any student concern (not a list of a dozen support offices and contacts to memorize), ensuring that teaching assistants and contingent faculty are trained on its use, and deployed primarily in high-risk courses taken by first-year students.
Alerts should also be handled in a way that is sensitive to both student and faculty concerns about privacy, tone, and intervention triggers.
The most effective systems limit full access to alert records, but encourage broad utilization of the flag system. Student support staff and advisors should also ensure that faculty are notified both of an alert’s receipt, and of the resulting action taken.
Practice 10: Adjustable alert parameters
To move beyond the initial deployment of an early warning system and build broader faculty engagement, consider allowing for flexibility in its application. Student success staff at West Virginia University (WVU) found that the ability to customize aspects of their alert process was central to garnering faculty buy-in.
First, rather than insisting on one particular week during the term to collect midterm or early exam grades, WVU allows each instructor to determine when, between weeks three and six, to report whether students are at risk for failure. Second, rather than having one grade threshold by which to assess all student risk, WVU allows faculty to determine what constitutes “on track” or “off track” for their students. This approach avoids a lengthy debate about whether a “C,” for example, is cause for alarm on each particular assessment in each specific course.
Finally, faculty can select and rank the kinds of resources or referrals they think are appropriate for a given student. Faculty can recommend tutoring, supplemental instruction, additional office hours, or leave the decision up to the early warning office, for example.
Practice 11: Effectiveness-focused feedback
Understandably, faculty members often view these systems as yet another reporting process they’re meant to comply with, as opposed to a critical tool that can make the difference in whether a student completes their degree or drops out of college.
To change that perception, messaging about early alerts should come from the provost or other academic leaders that faculty feel accountable to rather than a central student success office or staff member.
It is no surprise that the institutions enjoying the highest participation rates among faculty tend to send introductory and reminder notices about the systems through the provost. Department chairs and deans then follow up with individual instructors that have not reported early academic alerts or midterm grades.
Practice 12: Targeted first-year mentor matching
The CU Boulder Faculty Assembly strategically retargeted its faculty-student mentoring program with over 100 participating faculty members to reach students in the “engagement gap.”
About 50% of first-year students at the institution live in a living-learning community called a Residential Academic Program (RAP), which are designed to convene students around a common academic theme with faculty guidance. Assembly leaders decided to focus mentoring activities on the other 50 percent of first-year students, proactively reaching out during the summer and asking the residential advisors in their dormitories to refer students to the mentoring program during their first few weeks.
The program then matches students with faculty mentors based on a detailed sign-up form that includes students’ interests, major plans, and risk indicators (such as intent to work full-time or off-campus).
Practice 13: High-flyer transfer intervention
A significant share of attrition among colleges and universities occurs among students in good academic standing; many of these students are simply transferring to other institutions, rather than dropping or stopping out.
While it is in no institution’s best interest to prevent all transfer losses, few have made serious efforts to identify and attempt to retain students considering transfer due to a lack of engagement.
By surveying new students to gauge their interest in and commitment to the institution, connecting students at risk to transfer with faculty mentors in their area of interest, collecting data from students who leave to enroll elsewhere, and actively monitoring transcript requests, institutions can create a cohesive intervention strategy that helps to mitigate unnecessary attrition.
Part 3: Sustaining momentum through accountability
Creating accountability for student success among academic units relies on the establishment of meaningful metrics for evaluation—but what should we measure, and who should we hold accountable for students’ outcomes?
In developing key performance indicators for student success, it is important to address common concerns with measurement at the outset; for example, ensure that units are not penalized in retention or completion measurements when students are retained or complete elsewhere at the institution.
Further, consider adopting a “native junior” graduation rate that addresses concerns about unfairly punishing units for first- and second-year attrition.
Finally, metrics and performance incentives should focus on directly controllable outcomes. Unit leaders and individual faculty members need indicators that relate to their day-to-day and term-to term choices, not institution wide numbers that seem abstract and intractable.
Practice 14: Leadership scorecards
Accountability must begin with institutional leadership. When the president, provost, and senior cabinet members are publicly evaluated based on outcomes that align with institutional priorities, it is both easier to build a broader system of performance evaluation throughout staff and faculty ranks, and to signal the importance of those priorities to otherwise skeptical stakeholders.
The University of West Georgia, for example, has developed leadership scorecards for the president and each of his direct reports. These public performance grids include a number of specific targets for both student and operational success. Performance is assessed on a 1-5 scale based on preassigned improvement targets over the previous year.
Scorecards also include a number of tactical goals, which outline strategic objectives like “develop and institute a divisional professional development program.” While these goals do not have an attached metric, the scorecards allow everyone to measure progress towards the prior year’s strategic goals.
Goals and metrics should both align across the organization (ensuring that everyone is working toward the same ends) and become narrower for managerial and frontline leaders.
Practice 15: Performance-based bonus funding
At large, decentralized institutions, informal evaluation is often insufficient to change unit behavior. Instead, leaders at these campuses are increasingly exploring budgetary incentives related to student success, placing the specifics of the strategies in deans’ hands.
At the University of Kentucky, colleges can compete for a share of a large, central seed fund based on unit-level student success plans and improvement on outcomes. At the University of California – Riverside, leaders are constructing a new budget model that will incentivize improvement on four-year graduation rates.
Middle Tennessee State University’s approach to decanal engagement in student success exemplifies important lessons for any institutional incentive system: the president’s $250,000 annual seed fund is awarded to colleges after an annual review in which deans present promising retention and completion initiatives, report on progress toward previously agreed-upon goals, and develop formal plans for the next budget cycle. These reviews allow senior leaders to take stock of distributed activity and facilitate investment in strategies that are working.
Practice 16: Departmental performance dashboard
The University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire’s approach to unit level accountability for student success has set the standard for rigor and impact.
Their “Strategic Accountability Matrix,” or SAM, measures each of their 40+ academic departments on a range of 18 priorities according to the difference between their expected and actual performance. The resulting scores across all measures determine each department’s share of a $400,000 central fund, which provides much needed discretionary dollars for departments in a state budget climate that has been challenging over the last several years.
The most important feature of this matrix is the specificity of the column-level priorities. Departmental leaders and faculty are working toward concrete, accomplishable objectives, rather than abstract goals (such as “quality”) or institution-wide outcomes (such as graduation rates).
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