2020 Community College Student Success Case Study Compendium

Challenge: Prior to partnering with EAB, Arapahoe struggled to gain traction with other early alert systems and faculty were wary of new student success technology. Departments and offices operated in silos, which led to uncoordinated and overwhelming communication to students. Advising appointments were also difficulty to manage and track, and advisors found it challenging to maintain their caseloads.

Solution: Arapahoe introduced Navigate’s early alert feature to streamline the process for faculty and ensure all student cases are properly triaged and addressed. Additionally, email and text message campaigns encourage students to schedule and attend advising appointments, lowering the no-show rate.

Impact: The volume of early alerts increased 225% with Navigate compared to the previous system, which led to increased distribution of much-needed emergency funds. Following the outreach campaigns, the no-show/cancellation rate for advising appointments was just 7%.

Challenge: Prior to 2016, Pueblo found it extremely difficult to achieve coordinated care on their campus. Despite their best efforts, advisors, faculty and staff were unable to collaborate effectively and ended up working in silos. TRIO program administrators received low faculty response rates to progress reports, a key measure of student performance. In addition, TRIO program enrollment was not as high as expected.

Solution: After partnering with EAB, Pueblo implemented a student success management system that met the needs of their campus. Staff used student data from Navigate ‘Topics’ to make referrals to the TRIO program and Progress Reports were used to solicit early alerts. In order to achieve maximum participation from faculty, Pueblo provided robust training and set clear expectations from the outset.

Impact: As a result of these changes, Pueblo saw a 72% jump in their faculty response rate to TRIO progress reports and nearly doubled their TRIO enrollment. Students also reported a high level of satisfaction after working with enrollment services staff.

Challenge: In several surveys, students were expressing dissatisfaction with the college due to the high number of cancelled classes. The applicant conversion rate was below 45%, and students who enrolled favored online classes over in-person classes.

Solution: Cerro Coso leadership launched a college-wide initiative for pathway redesign and long-term scheduling. Navigate set the transition in motion and enabled the college to complete critical pathway components before launching the technology to students.

Impact: The improvements helped Cerro Coso achieve a 16% increase in applicant conversion, resulting in $524k in additional enrollment fees in fall 2017.

Challenge: Prior to the Virginia Community College System’s system-wide implementation of EAB’s Navigate, Germanna Community College (GCC) struggled with a muddled onboarding process that left students confused and inefficient advising that didn’t focus on long-term academic planning. In the words of GCC’s Assistant Dean of Student Development, “Students were more confused than they were educated.”

Solution: GCC automatically provides all student applicants with access to Navigate as a checklist for onboarding. GCC also integrated Navigate’s Academic Planning tool into its freshman orientation course, allowing students and advisors to easily collaborate on academic plans across students’ first term and beyond.

Impact: GCC’s applicant-to-enrollee rate increased by 14.5% in one year. Additionally, students with an academic plan in Navigate enroll in 3.4 more credit hours per semester on average and are 12.7 percentage points more likely to persist, equating to a combined $507,770 in additional and preserved tuition revenue each semester.

Challenge: At Danville Community College (DCC), full-time teaching faculty handle all academic advising but have limited time to devote to it and lack logistical support. Additionally, an inconvenient scheduling process required students to sign up for advising appointments in person. Students also lacked information on course requirements, so appointments focused on course planning without time for more holistic conversations.

Solution: DCC partnered with EAB and integrated the Academic Planning (AP) tool in Navigate into their required Student Development course (SDV 100), giving students deeper insight into course requirements and empowering them to plan their own schedules, saving advisor time and effort.

Impact: Students who completed an Academic Plan in Navigate retained at 25 percentage-point higher rate than those who did not. After integrating AP into SDV 100, DCC saw Navigate adoption increase by a factor of six.

Challenge: Prior to fall 2017, 68% of students were lost between application and registration. This high attrition rate was due to a number of outdated workflows. The college’s admission process was manual, tedious, and lacked coordinated processing, which resulted in delayed application review and student ID generation.

Solution: In 2015, Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) leadership cleared up an IT backlog and transitioned new leadership into key roles. A year later, MHCC partnered with EAB to address their admission workflow, automate their enrollment process, and instill a student success culture across campus.

Impact: As a result, the turnaround time for acceptance dropped to less than two hours, and MHCC saw a 3% increase in percentage of applicants who registered within three days.

Challenge: After discovering that 93% of non-enrolled applicants did not go on to enroll at another institution, college leadership decided to survey lost applicants. Student responses revealed numerous communication breakdowns, including long turnaround times, unclear messaging, and inflexible practices.

Solution: Once clear about the challenges that applicants were facing, Pikes Peak utilized Navigate to streamline their onboarding process. Key services, such as advising and placement testing, were also redesigned to be more applicant-friendly.

Impact: Through its partnership with EAB, Pikes Peak was able to increase their applicant yield, resulting in $72k in additional tuition revenue. Pikes Peak also saw a marked uptick in advising appointments for new students; 7% increase from 2016 to 2017.

Challenge: Georgia Piedmont Technical College (GPTC) was losing a significant number of students between application and enrollment, with many non-enrolled applicants enrolling at others colleges. Feedback from the call center revealed that students were confused and frustrated with the onboarding process.

Solution: With EABs help, GPTC reevaluated their onboarding experience from the student perspective and identified three key areas where they could make improvement: acceptance communication, orientation, and faculty and professional advising.

Impact: As a result of this work, students now have a clear understanding of how to transition from admission to enrollment. From 2016-2017, GPTC saw a 26% increase in summer enrollment, and received $48k in additional tuition revenue.

$48K

increase in tuition revenue (2016-2017) at Georgia Piedmont Technical College

Challenge: Faced with several years of stagnant persistence and completion rates, York Tech undertook a large-scale approach to improving student success utilizing a Guided Pathways framework. They focused on addressing their fragmented onboarding process and inconsistent advising experience that failed to provide adequate support to undecided students, a population with higher attrition.

Solution: York Tech partnered with EAB in 2017 and launched Navigate to empower and better guide students inside and outside the classroom. York Tech leveraged Navigate’s Academic Planning module to help students craft better plans. They also streamlined onboarding, implementing the Navigate Student app to engage students in their first year.

Impact: The implementation of various improvement efforts to onboarding, major exploration and pathways, and academic planning in conjunction with other initiatives contributed to a 4.4% increase in the overall graduation rate across two years, as well as $1.39M in preserved tuition revenue.

Challenge: Despite transitioning to a centralized advising model and assigning advisors to specific pathways, Broward College (BC) was still experiencing challenges with their advising process. Inefficient case management and manual data tracking absorbed a great deal of advisors’ time and students continued to make appointments with non-assigned advisors. BC was particularity concerned about their First Time In College (FTIC) students, as this population is tied to critical state funding.

Solution: Through the use of technology and guided by a diverse advising council, BC was able to reset their advising expectations and increase the efficiency of their entire staff. Advisors began running targeted appointment campaigns for critical student populations and students were able to easily identify and access their assigned advisor.

Impact: In just over a year, BC was able to see wide-spread adoption of Navigate by both students and staff and saw a 5% increase in completion rate for their Fall 2015 FTIC Cohort.

Challenge: Trident Technical College’s (TTC) faculty advising model was increasingly strained due to high student demand. The recent introduction of a compressed minisemester schedule further reduced faculty availability. Many students indicated via survey that they were either unable to schedule appointments or their interactions didn’t further their academic goals.

Solution: In 2016, TTC partnered with EAB Navigate to improve the student onboarding experience, which included replacing their traditional orientation with Navigate MyPath. Navigate also supported TTC’s transition to a shared advising model, which allows students to readily access Navigators (onboarding and enrollment experts) and schedule appointments with faculty advisors (program experts).

Impact: With the help of Navigate, student satisfaction increased. Additionally, 87% of students used MyPath, and student usage of the HUB doubled, allowing advisers to provide guidance and support.

Challenge: With staff spread across four campuses, communication between departments was inconsistent and uncoordinated. This led to students making repeated, unnecessary office visits for common tasks like changing majors. In addition, limited support for students during the registration process prevented Wiregrass from reaching their enrollment and retention rate goals.

Solution: Wiregrass partnered with EAB and integrated Navigate into several essential processes on campus, allowing them to more efficiently process student applications and major changes. Additionally, Navigate registration campaigns ensured hundreds of students returned for the next semester.

Impact: Overall fall-to-fall retention increased 10 percentage points in two years. Total enrollment increased 15 percentage points in one year and applicant-to- enrollee conversion increased 8 percentage points in the same time period.