In February 2020, Colleen Arrey, Associate Vice President for Partner Success and Steve Ast, Senior Vice President for Partner Success at InsideTrack, embarked on a weeklong Listening Tour in South Carolina to learn more about unique approaches to student success in the state. They met with higher education administrators, faculty and staff at six institutions, including private liberal arts universities, regional state universities and flagship research universities. Participants in the interviews shared information about their strategies for recruitment and enrollment, student engagement, and retention, persistence, and timely program completion. They also discussed the values that motivate their work and the challenges that they, their institutions and their students face. Several common themes emerged throughout these conversations. In particular, we were struck by a deep dedication to helping students complete their education and the connection of this work to broader goals such as:

• Supporting regional economic development
• Providing equitable access to education
• Fostering social mobility
• Driving institutional innovation and excellence 

We have organized our learning, observations and recommendations into three broad categories below, as well as a final section on additional themes that surfaced throughout our conversations.

Student Engagement 

Challenges and Strategies

Attracting and retaining students is often about helping students to engage and feel as though they belong. This sense of belonging may be layered. Does the student feel that she belongs at your institution? How about in her program/major? And does she feel that she actually belongs in higher education — that she is “college material?” All three of those questions matter if you want to keep the student engaged and successful. The institutions we visited were focusing on student engagement in the following ways, which include new twists on proven approaches:

• Embracing demographic shifts
• Changing demographics may require several kinds of adjustments to support student engagement. Are you offering the right academic programs and student activities for the new demographic make-up at your institution? Sometimes the physical space and the culture of an institution no longer aligns with the student population, which can diminish students’ belief that they are welcome. Does the university have images of all types of students in their literature, on the website and in photos and art on campus? Is language inclusive of the population that you serve? It may be time to make very intentional updates to the physical, print and digital campus environment.
• Leadership development and academic success programs
• Creating leadership development and academic success resources that appeal to students who may not have accessed these activities in previous educational settings can increase the engagement of students who are “under the radar.” One institution provides bespoke leadership training programs to underserved students during a summer bridge program and finds that those students consistently emerged as successful campus leaders during their time at the university.
• Learning communities
• If certain student populations have higher needs or greater risk of disengagement, learning communities can be a powerful way to increase their connection to the value of their education. Sometimes students can feel stigmatized if they are identified as “at-risk” or somehow “other” by inclusion in a learning community, so the structure of and communication about the community should focus on strengths and connection rather than remediation or differences.
• One university allowed students to take ownership of their learning communities and help staff shape the courses and events that support the community.
• Multiple learning communities tailored to the unique needs of smaller populations of students may be the best approach. However, scaling those communities can present challenges, especially when staff is limited.
• Peer mentors
• Half of the universities we visited had a peer mentoring program that assigned lower division students to upper division students for help with social engagement and academic success. The strongest programs also provided training in coaching skills and a faculty or staff member who mentored the student mentors.
• Expanded programming
• One institution used student engagement data to guide an expansion of their new student engagement programming. At the beginning of the term, they now offer a full six weeks of activities to support social connection, early career exploration, and goal setting exercises for students.
• Cross unit collaboration
• Intentional communication and collaboration among academic affairs, student affairs and enrollment management teams can provide deeper insight into trends and accelerate the success of student engagement practices.
• Including students in the conversation
• Surveys, focus groups and informal feedback from students can be a valuable source of information about how they would like to be engaged and supported.
• Online student engagement
• Online students often find themselves left out of student engagement efforts. Some institutions are designing engagement activities that allow online students to have leadership roles within their programs. Others are actively establishing online learning communities by enrolling students in structured cohorts and creating opportunities for students to collaborate and support each other online.

More Resources

Questions? We are here to help.

Have a question? Want to unpack some of these insights in more detail? Reach out directly to me at colleen.arrey@insidetrack.com or you can fill out the form below and I will get back to you shortly. Thanks and look forwarding to connecting.