Resource Center

Student Success Best Practices Library

Supporting students in today’s changing environment can sometimes feel like an overwhelming challenge for those accountable for student success. To help our partners navigate this shifting terrain, we’ve cataloged more than 360 best practices from across our research forums. This library of research continues to influence the development of our technologies and informs how we support both our community college and our four-year partners.

We invite you to explore our student success library, which is organized into the eight categories and problem areas our partners ask us about most. Some of the resources below are exclusive for our partners. To access them, we recommend you create a site profile and log in.

Featured Resources

The Student Success Strategy Playbook

American higher education has enjoyed a multidecade-long enrollment expansion that may soon come to an end. The recommendations in this report aim to help you and your leadership team reshape your student success strategy in preparation for the anticipated enrollment downturn of the 2020s.

Defining the Faculty Role in Student Success

Making a meaningful improvement in retention and graduation rates requires extensive coordination among stakeholders across colleges and universities. This study will help you clarify how faculty and academic units can support campus-wide student success initiatives.

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Infographic: What Really Happens to Our Students?

Colleges and universities face seemingly constant scrutiny from external stakeholders questioning the value of a postsecondary education. Is this criticism warranted? Explore this infographic to learn more about the fate of our students.

Never miss a student success insight

Want to stay in the know whenever our experts publish new student success content? Subscribe to our blog alerts receive our latest research and insights to help tackle your toughest challenges in student persistence and retention.

Next-Generation Advising

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Re-enrolling America’s College Stopouts

Learn how to more effectively find, re-recruit, support, and re-enroll college stopouts at your institution in this interactive white paper.

What Can Health Care Teach Us about Student Success?

This white paper explores how PHM works and how it could serve as a new blueprint for improved student outcomes.

Develop a Student-Centered Academic Advising Model

Learn how advisors can use population health management and coordinated care to prioritize their time toward students with rising risk instead of only focusing on those with urgent, critical needs.

Hardwiring Student Success

At the majority of schools, students receiving help are those self-aware and tenacious enough to ask for it, rather than those who need it most. This study profiles innovators’ efforts to elevate student success initiatives from the current patchwork of support services to an actively managed enterprise process.

Paving the Path to Transfer

Access best practices on how enrollment managers are growing transfer enrollment by eliminating barriers to entry posed by standard outreach and admissions procedures.

A Student-Centered Approach to Advising

This webinar provides a blueprint for a student-entered advising model by discussing two critical imperatives: structuring advising to enable consistency and accountability & targeting intervention strategies based on student risk.

Building a Scalable Support Model

Complex student populations and limited advisor capacity make improving outcomes a challenge. This infographic outlines four key elements of a population health management approach to student success, including strategies you can implement today to begin the shift toward population-based student support.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice

The DEIJ Resource Center

Discover a curated list of resources from EAB experts to guide your diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice initiatives on campus.

Improve Student Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Learn best practices to solve the persistent problem of demographic disparities by evaluating policies to improve student equity and inclusion.

Dr. Tim Renick Shares GSU’s Playbook for Eliminating Equity Gaps

Student success guru Tim Renick discusses GSU’s journey to eliminating equity gaps and shares scalable, replicable best practices other institutions can follow to do the same.

How can I become an anti-racist leader?

See seven questions college leaders should ask to identify and dismantle racist practices on their campus to promote equity.

Mitigate the Pandemic’s Impact on Equity Gaps this Fall and Beyond

EAB’s Meacie Fairfax and Ed Venit discuss equity gaps in higher education and ways the pandemic and recent social unrest threaten to widen those gaps unless universities take swift action.

Barriers to Equity in Student Success

Our infographic outlines 116 leading indicators of demographic disparities in student success metrics like retention, academic performance, graduation, and career outcomes.

Organization and Accountability

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. Read this Roadmap to learn how the right policies, processes, and financial supports form the foundation for a broader student success strategy.

Priority Data Analyses to Promote Student Success

Student success is a foundational mission of all higher education institutions, and is therefore a prime focus area to build consensus around the need for data governance. Use these priority data analyses for student success to determine strategic focus areas for data governance work at the enterprise level.

Infographic: Measuring Student Success

The adage “it takes a village” is often applied to challenging but worthy missions, and no initiative on your campus is more important than ensuring that students succeed. Read these representative results from EAB members to learn how diverse stakeholders are making an impact.

Onboarding, Engagement, and First-Year Experience

Taking Action on Student Equity

Historically underserved and nontraditional students make up the majority of today’s community college population, yet their completion rates continue to lag behind those of traditional students. Improve student outcomes for at-risk populations with 21 strategies to promote equitable opportunities.

Is your enrollment process a game of Chutes and Ladders?

Instead of a linear path, many students experience enrollment as a convoluted series of steps, similar to a game of Chutes and Ladders. See our infographic to walk through today's multistep enrollment experience and understand the challenges students face.

Supporting First-Generation College Students

Learn how your institution can improve outcomes for first-generation college students, a group that typically must overcome a variety of social, academic, and administrative barriers to succeed in college.

Meeting the Escalating Demand for Mental Health Services

Maximize current campus and community resources to meet students’ mental health needs with these 23 practices.

Eliminating Enrollment Pain Points

More community college students are entering with remedial needs, applying for financial aid, and enrolling in college after years out of a formal educational setting. Learn to increase applicant conversion rates by streamlining the enrollment process.

Degree Planning and Progress

Facilitate Student-Centered Course Redesign

Large required courses with failure rates as high as 30-60% can create retention and time-to-degree issues for hundreds or even thousands of students at a single institution. Discover how to encourage highly effective, engaging pedagogy and give faculty knowledge of student-centered course redesign.

Achieving Pathways Goals with Student-Centered Design

A growing number of college students arrive on campus with a limited understanding of how to progress efficiently to completion. Use this study to unlock your institution’s capabilities within the Guided Pathways model and efficiently move toward student success goals.

Infographic: What "Hidden Motives" Could Lead Your Students to Poor Decisions?

You may find yourself scratching your head when students make choices that undermine their own self-interest, such as under-loading credit hours or delaying their major declaration. Discover the unseen cognitive biases that are keeping your students from succeeding—and nudges you can use to overcome them.

Overcome the Roadblocks on Your Route to Student-Centric Pathways

One of the hardest, but most critical, parts of developing student-centric pathways is constructing the program maps and meta-majors behind them. Learn more about the roadblocks that can slow your college’s design of Guided Pathways and how best to avoid them.

Building Pathways to Community College Success

In this publication, EAB experts share best practices to reduce jargon during onboarding, engage students in financial literacy training, and reimagine the traditional academic calendar to encourage reenrollment—to name just a few.

Early Intervention

How to bridge the gaps in your early-alert program

Uncover the five building blocks of successful early-alert programs and strategies to bridge the gaps.

Improve student success with just one minute

We’re all busy. Which means that many student success initiatives may often feel out of reach. But sometimes just a minute is enough time to make a difference in student success.

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. Our infographic outlines six ways that academic units and individual faculty members can help students successfully navigate their academic careers.

Defining the Faculty Role in Student Success

Career Development

Scale Experiential Learning and Career Development

Today’s universities are under increasing public pressure to provide career preparation and support economic mobility. Learn how to create more opportunities for applied learning and help students translate between an academic transcript and a career-ready resume.

Reimagining Experiential Learning

Competition for employment among recent graduates is fiercer than ever and expectations for new hires are high. This study explores opportunities for student affairs departments to help students develop workforce skills outside the classroom.

How to Prepare College Graduates to Succeed in a Tough Economy

Rob Sentz, Chief Innovation Officer at labor market data giant, Emsi, shares strategies for preparing college students to find their niche in an unsettled economy.

Is Your College Designed for Post-Traditional Learners?

Since the peak of the recession, community colleges have experienced steady declines in enrollment of adult learners. Our white paper outlines how community colleges can retain and engage post-traditional students.

Integrating Academic and Career Development

Growing public concern about the return on investment associated with higher education has created pressure for both public and private institutions to assume greater responsibility for students’ post-graduation outcomes. Explore our report for 34 best practices to incorporate meaningful career exploration into the academic curriculum.

Financial Wellness

Minimize Financial Attrition

Colleges and universities have both a moral and financial imperative to do everything in their power to ensure finances aren’t the primary cause of attrition for most students. Explore our Roadmap to learn how to identify students at risk of financial attrition and ensure they get the help they need.

Address Food and Housing Insecurity on Campus

Students can’t be expected to achieve academic success or personal wellness until their basic needs are met. Use this Roadmap to learn how student affairs officers can support food and housing security on campus.

Help More Students Graduate with Less Debt

In this podcast episode, EAB experts explain how to integrate financial aid services into the broader student support network to help more students graduate with less debt.

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