Let’s make what could be a generous assumption about your college or university: you’ve done all the hard work. You’ve created a leadership structure and an institutional culture that is ready to collaboratively tackle student success. Your institution knows itself and is ready to act. Now what?
Institutions quickly discover that there is no shortage of opportunities to improve student success. But pursuing a fragmented, uneven, or haphazard effort—a problem we see all too often—can subdue institutional will very quickly. Despite their best intentions, many schools enact a broad array of programs and interventions but never achieve the progress they hoped for. They discover, the hard way, that there is a critical difference between doing a lot of things and doing the right things.
To capitalize on institutional will and momentum, it is imperative to choose a coherent student success strategy that utilizes the main levers that your institution can push to effect change. If you prioritize the strategies that are most important for you, and create programs and interventions that serve these strategies well, you’ll soon find yourself on the path to improvement.
Along with collaborative control over the process, this is absolutely the key ingredient to sustained improvement in student success. Your students will benefit, but you’ll also create a cycle of positive feedback that continuously grows your institution’s commitment to this critical effort.
We’ve organized the myriad possibilities for programs and interventions that improve student success into seven overarching strategies. They are based on surveys and interviews with top performers identified in Eduventures 2016 Student Success Ratings. These strategies are listed here in order of importance. Top-performers–like University of South Florida, Duquesne University, Texas A&M–Commerce, and Georgetown, have found a configuration of these strategies that was right for their specific student success problem areas.