Month: April 2020

College Completion Summit 2019 – Panel 4

April 6, 2020

College Completion Summit Audio Recap
University Marketing & Communications


Data and technology contributions to completion

UMC: This is an audio recap of the College Completion Summit hosted by the University of Utah and the Lumina Foundation.

On September 30 and October 1, 2019, the College Completion Summit brought together presidents and senior leaders from public universities that have significantly advanced their college completion rates.

Vistasp Karbhari, president of the University of Texas at Arlington, delivered the keynote for the panel discussion titled “Data and Technology Contributions to Completion.”

Vistasp Karbhari:  Maybe technology can help us do a lot more in terms of supplemental material, and to allow us the use of simulation, virtual reality and augmented reality. But more important than that, technology allows us that constant encouragement and contact 24-7.

This is where I’ll be the first one to tell something this afternoon that might go across the grain. We’re talking about technology and data, and I’m going to make a very clear statement. If we automate everything we will fail. Because at the end of the day what we need is that human touch.

So, we could automate things, but we always have to be able to go back to the student and tell them why. For example, why are we sending them texts? Sending them 15 texts to remind them to do something is great, and it helps. But there’s a large percentage of the population that looks at it and says, “Why? Why am I being told to do this?” And if we forget that part about it, we’re not going to be doing very well. But we also have to provide teaching and mentorship as the student needs it, rather than as we think we should be able to give it.

I don’t know about all of you, but when I used to teach, I thought I knew how my students would think. I thought that just as I, multitasking was not a good thing. So, if someone was listening to music, simultaneously eating, simultaneously doing something on a computer, talking on the phone, and trying to do their homework, that was a recipe for disaster.

However, we look at students today, their brains are wired in a very, very different way. And if we really look at how they play computer games, you’ll actually find out that they’re taking in far more information and retaining it than we ever could. Which also means that our way of reaching out to them has to be different.

UMC: Frank Dooley, senior vice provost for teaching and learning at Purdue University, leads the discussion.

Frank Dooley: The first question I ask then, we’ll be hearing about everyone’s schools and as they do their introduction of themselves, what I’m asking them to do is define for you or give you an example of one key technology that they’ve put in place on their campus that they believe is helping college completion.

UMC: Here’s Fredrick Corey, vice provost for undergraduate education at Arizona State University.

Frederick Corey: In 2007 we started this whole cultural transformation at the university to organize around the student rather than the faculty or the university itself. And we created this whole suite of tools that we continued to develop called E-Advisor.

The idea is that students get the information they need about their degree programs when they want it via technology. So, they’re able to get their degree mappings, their degree progress, where they’re off track, where they’re on track. Transfer students are able to see exactly which courses are going to apply to their degree program. All of this stuff can be done using technology and this saves the face time for other pressing issues like: “What am I doing here?” or “I feel like I’m lost in the world.” And that’s where that human interaction can occur.

UMC: Here’s Shelley Germana, associate provost for undergraduate education at Stony Brook University.

Shelley Germana:  So, in 2014, our then president actually had a meeting at the White House under the Obama administration about increasing graduation rates. And so he made a commitment at that meeting to increase our graduation rate to 60% by 2018. That was in four years. And then we actually found out about that at the White House press release.

So, at the time that was a pretty big stretch for us. Actually, over the last six years we’ve been able to increase our graduation rate by 17 percentage points. And really our equity gaps, with the exception of one, ours have been closed, which I can actually talk about. I probably will talk about later. But what I want to say about that just related to how we’ve done that is really been largely through what we call a full-court press.

And that’s really a combination of high tech and high touch. And I think that was really emphasized before that it really has to be people driven.

So where did the technology kind of come into that? Well this technology, we actually use the EAB Navigate platform, as I know many people do. We were part of actually the foundation, a group with EAB, and continued on into Navigate. But the way that the technology sort of features into that is related to the vocalization of that full-court press. We like to look at it really as a mobilization of the full-court press.

So, through progress reports, through directed outreach, strategic outreach, strategic campaigns. Really putting the information in front of advisors as well as other units for a real coordinated care approach.

UMC: Here’s Paul Dosal, vice president for student success at University of South Florida.

Paul Dosal:  I want to tell you about one innovation we developed to help out with our student success efforts. A tool that we built to help our care team provide care to our students in a timely way.

We formed a persistence committee back in 2016 to utilize predictive analytics to identify students who would benefit from some kind of intervention. And this is cross-functional team of 20-plus people found themselves over time basically developing and applying a case management approach to promote student success. Eventually our VP of IT found out about what we were doing and what we needed. I had a team of people basically using spreadsheets and Microsoft Outlook and whatever they could to communicate with each other and the students. And so he came to me and said, “Look, I understand you want to develop a case management approach. You need some technology for it. I’ve got a solution for you.” He came from USF Health. They had an understanding of what we needed to do. As I mentioned, he says, “Look, I can develop a platform for you in a low-code platform, working with a company called Appian. And we can deploy it within 12 weeks.” I said, “Do it!”

It’s a tool developed by end-users to help them communicate with each other and students and deploy what we’re now calling a care management team to promote student success. It shows the value of breaking down silos. We’ve heard a whole lot about breaking down silos, between academics and students. The other one we need to work on is the silos that prevent collaborations between IT and IR offices along with ours. It’s done wonders for us at USF.

UMC: The panel gives their closing statements. Vistasp Karbhari, University of Texas at Arlington.

Vistasp Karbhari:  If I may, just one thing for us all. We have a lot of data. We have a lot of technology. I would encourage us to see what we could do to use it to increase our reach, rather than decrease it. We have the ability to have more students attend our universities and I know as a president, that every time I say that, it causes everyone to jump up and down, not in joy, but in fear. Because it says, “We can’t do it with 10,000 students” or in my case, 60,000. How are we now going to do it with 80,000?” That’s our responsibility and if we use that data and technology correctly, we should be able to increase access rather than decrease it.

UMC: Fredrick Corey, Arizona State University

Fredrick Corey: I would add to that that universities have long used data in order to decide who to admit. I mean this is what elite universities have done in this country for years, is they use data to decide who is likely to succeed, and they admit those students and don’t admit the rest. And I think that our collective mission is to resist that trend. Right? And to use the data not to decide who to exclude, but who to include and how we’re going to help those individual students succeed.

UMC: Shelley Germana, Stony Brook University

Shelley Germana: You don’t get to choose the data that you have. So, you have, in other words, and I think if I had more time, I would be able to talk a little bit about our male completion issue. But part of it is also that we have to really address what the data tell us. But if it’s telling us something about the student population and a particular student group that requires attention, then we should think about it or we should study it, we should act on it and then we should evaluate and apply kind of an intervention in the treatment. But you don’t get to choose what the data tell us all the time and we really do have to act on it, if there are students that require our support.

UMC: Paul Dosal, University of South Florida

Paul Dosal: These days I’m not sure we have a choice but to use data analytics and technology to promote student success. It’s on us. We have to do it. We have the power. We have the capability. I think it’s a matter of figuring out how best to use the tools that are available to us or that could be available to us. But we owe it to our students to do this and so we’ll continue the work.

UMC: Thank you for listening. Find the audio recap of the next panel discussion, “Public Perceptions in Higher Education,” and other summit proceedings at collegecompletion.utah.edu.

College Completion Summit 2019 – Panel 1

April 6, 2020

College Completion Summit Audio Recap
University Marketing & Communications
Supporting and Engaging the Student panel discussion

 

UMC:

This is an audio recap of the College Completion Summit hosted by the University of Utah and the Lumina Foundation.

On September 30 and October 1, 2019, the College Completion Summit brought together presidents and senior leaders from public universities that have significantly advanced their college completion rates.

Kim Wilcox, chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, led a panel discussion titled “Supporting and Engaging the Student.”

 Kim Wilcox:

Now, people say you can’t raise your graduation rates 20 points in seven years. We did. People say you can’t increase your research funding $80 million in five years. We did. More importantly, we did it at the same time.

Now a lot of people said, what’s your secret sauce? We’ve decided these are the three pieces: culture, people, and programs. We tend to, in earnest, want to make programs to move things ahead, and that’s crucial. You have to have programs, you have to be focused, you have to do things. But the two prior pieces, the culture and the people, we believe to be more important—fundamental in a sense.

We have a culture and a tradition now that recruits other people to the culture. If you come to apply for a job, even the chancellor, vice chancellor, dean, provost, assistant professor, we will interrogate you about your commitment to students. It’s just part of the deal. We don’t have to put it on the list of required stuff and check all the boxes. We want to make sure that you come with the same values that everybody else has. This is groundspeople, this is people in our food service, this is everybody having this same commitment to what we believe to be important.

UMC:

Here’s Carolyn Bassett, associate provost of student success at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Carolyn Bassett:

So, for instance, one of the programs that we do deliver at the university has to do with basic need support. And so that might be emergency funds, it could be emergency rent. It could be our senior completion program, helping students who are at the tail end of their requirements but at risk of not graduating. But, our dining services group came up with the idea that they were going to launch No Student Goes Hungry. So, here we are with our dining services colleagues fully invested in the student success model.

UMC:

Ann Bisantz, dean of undergraduate education at the University at Buffalo.

Ann Bisantz:

What was put into place in 2012 was a Finish in Four initiative. students engage directly in that program through a pledge that initially they took on pieces of paper when they entered the university with their parents at orientation or very early in the process. They pledge to do things like register on time, see an advisor, choose their major in a timely fashion, make sure that they’re following the curricular plan. And if they can’t get a course that is specified, they are supposed to let somebody know within a week of that registration window.

In the first year of the program, we added 10,000 seats in high demand courses. That’s a huge lift even for a campus of our size. If you want more kids in the seats, you’ve got to figure out where those seats are.

UMC:

Teri Longacre, vice provost and dean for undergraduate student success at the University of Houston.

Teri Longacre:

Students, we learned, were having very different advising experiences based on their college. Things were done very differently. Some colleges didn’t advise on Fridays. Crazy things like that, I’m sure you’ve experienced those things before.

Around the same time, we also started our own 15 to finish or finish in four program called UH in Four, doing almost exactly what my colleagues said. It was astounding to me how difficult it was to get four-year degree maps for every college. There was unexpected resistance, and I was told that this would kill our students. They couldn’t possibly take 15 hours a semester, 30 a year. They have and they are graduating at much higher rates so we didn’t kill them.

UMC:

Louis Hunt, senior vice provost of enrollment management at North Carolina State University.

Louis Hunt:

When we looked at our data, we found students weren’t leaving because they weren’t academically capable, they were leaving for a lot of other reasons. We had to figure out, how do we take care of the whole student, how do we identify problems that they might be having. In doing so, we took academic affairs and student affairs and we merged those together into a division of academic and student affairs. Difficult process and it worked out great. We are pretty far into that process; we’ve been doing it for quite a few years now.

UMC:

Michael Mardis, chief student affairs officer and vice provost for student affairs at the University of Louisville.

Michael Mardis:

We changed part of our student culture by really transforming the university from a commuter campus to a residential campus. We work with UPS, and we have what’s called the Metropolitan College Program. Any student who would like to come to the University of Louisville, who is a resident of the commonwealth, can work at UPS and graduate from the University of Louisville debt free, while also having enough money in their pocket to be able to go out on a date or to do some other things, so they are not there and are just poor and can’t move or do any other things.

UMC:

Question from the audience.

Audience:

First of all, I want to thank you guys so much for spending time on the idea of inclusion, because I always try to remind myself, my friends and people that I work with that we are all here because of somebody who loves us.

I feel like there’s one gap that I heard nobody talk about, and I’m really worried about it. I know that 70% of undergraduate students are employed, 30% of undergraduate students are employed for over 30 hours a week. How can we engaged with these students who are essentially never on campus because there is a need to work?

UMC:

Comments from the audience.

Audience:

At the University of Hawaii, we started a five-week course structured for our two-year campus, which has been hugely popular with our working adults especially. They can take one class at a time, five weeks and finish, and then take the next class.

Audience:

Last I’m a Graduate Assistant for the UB Curriculum Office, and last spring we piloted a program for our transfer students, which are often the non-traditional students. Single parents working full-time jobs. One of the things we found… we added mentors to those seminars. One of the things we found is those students have a hard time getting to campus as it is just for classes, let alone extra things like office hours. So the mentors were made available before and after class, so that way they didn’t have to come seek us out for advising at other times during the week around their schedule.

UMC:

Question from the audience.

Audience:

What are some strategies proven effective to convince first year students to start thinking about graduating in four years?

UMC:

Ann Bisantz, University of Buffalo.

Ann Bisantz:

There is a university promise that if the students do everything they say they are going to do, or that we ask them to do, and the students don’t graduate in four years, the university is on the hook to pay for what the students weren’t able to complete.

UMC:

Question from the audience.

Audience:

I heard a couple times that the finish in four program seemed to be pretty contingent on finding a major in a timely manner. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to particular initiatives to help students find that in a timely manner so that they are not delayed.

UMC:

Carolyn Bassett, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Carolyn Bassett:

We have a one-hour college success type course for these students that are taught by faculty and staff across the university that’s really focused on helping students find a good fit major.

We have increased the rate of students successfully declaring majors after that first year, at the end of 30 hours. Those students are also eligible for our four year graduation program as long as they do stay on track.

UMC:

Wilcox summarizes his takeaways from the discussion.

Wilcox:

There are only so many things you can do to assist in student success. The challenge that we’re all working at are twofold, I think. One is to find the right program set or the right types of programs for our institution and the second is to scale it up. There are 784,000 students at the universities represented in this room, so a small mentoring program isn’t sufficient. It’s gotta be something that plays to scale. And that’s what we heard a lot about today, was how individual schools had taken programs and initiatives and tailored them to their own situations, but then thought about all of the students at the university.

UMC:

Thank you for listening. Find the audio recap of the next panel discussion, “Innovative Financial and Affordability Solutions,” and other summit proceedings at collegecompletion.utah.edu.

 

College Completion Summit 2019 – Welcome

April 6, 2020

UMC:

This is an audio recap of the College Completion Summit hosted by the University of Utah and the Lumina Foundation.

On September 30 and October 1, 2019, the College Completion Summit brought together presidents and senior leaders from public universities that have significantly advanced their college completion rates.

University of Utah president Ruth Watkins opens the summit.

Ruth Watkins:

We are so glad to host you here at the University of Utah. This is an opportunity for us to learn about practices that have been effective at our institutions, and to think about how we can take the next steps in our journey of really transforming lives by ensuring that every student who comes to our institution leaves with the degree they came for.

Collectively, our institutions serve almost 800,000 students. So if we look over the last decade, the median graduation rate at our institutions was 51% six year graduation rate in 2008. The most recent snapshot, the median graduation rate, 70%. And if we want to talk about how do we make that number 80 percent? We ought to share information with each other about how to produce that kind of change. So that’s what we’re up to.

I think it has been a very consistent message that we wanted to help our students succeed. There are many people in this room that have been a key part of that change, but I want to actually credit everyone in this institution for joining in this important mission. I think the way you welcome students, greet students, whatever role you’re in, the way you help students see connections, possibilities, and the way they belong makes a difference in student success. Everybody is in. As an institution, we have been very much all in, in this effort.

I think beginning to simplify the signals for success, to begin to think about clusters of areas like engagement, like academic signals. To really simplify the signals for success will be a key to making this work. I hope we can talk a little bit about things that are emerging in your work about automating programs and interventions that have students participate, rather than waiting for people to elect them because I think we lose people along the way. And as I look at institutions that have driven change pretty successfully, there has been continuity in leadership in those institutions. People have come, stayed with this, because this is not a fast enterprise.

As we talk over today and tomorrow, I hope we see these signals for success and learn from each other about what you’re doing in these areas about producing change. Thank you very much for taking the time to be with us.

UMC:

Terri Taylor is a director of strategy for post-secondary education for the Lumina Foundation.

Terri Taylor:         

Do y’all know Lumina Foundation? Could you just raise your hand if you have a general sense. Great. We’re the biggest private national foundation solely focused on education after high school.

So, to why was Lumina wanting to support this? First of all, if you know Lumina, all of our work is around goal 2025, so trying to get to 60% of American adults having some kind of a post secondary education by 2025.

I think that particularly I was happy to see not only a focus on completion, but completion equity. I think everyone is focused on equity and trying to figure out how to close gaps. It’s something that’s very important to us as well.

Everyone who rode the shuttle this morning—if you were at the guest house you got two shuttles, if you were at the Marriott, there wasn’t a shuttle for you.

I actually think that’s a decent analogy for representing resources. Of course, students that have traditionally been well served by our institutions, they need resources, too. But it may be that they survey those that already have resources. We might forget the people on the Marriott. We can get people here and everyone is here and we’re still going on time.

UMC:          

Thank you for listening. Find the audio recap of the next panel discussion, “Supporting and Engaging the Student,” and other summit proceedings at collegecompletion.utah.edu.