Student Success 2.0

One of the things that we see is just students not engaging with us even when offering help until like the end of class. And then all of a sudden they open up with all these big things that are happening in their life. And so we're, what we're seeing is just not asking questions, not necessarily talking in class and so or necessarily engaging with one another. It's really interesting. So in teaching a hybrid course, I'll watch robust conversation happen in a discussion forum, but then when we're together, it's quiet.

That was Randy Harris at Portland State University. But it's also a familiar refrain we're hearing from faculty administrators on campuses of all kinds and sizes right now. How do you engage learners in this post Pandemic age.

And so today we're joined by two leaders of the student success movement. They'll talk with us about what's changed in students since the pandemic and what needs to change on campuses going forward to ensure student success. On this episode of Future youe.

This episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information policy, and institutional transformation.

I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. So what Randy at Portland State said at the top, Michael, really reminded me of a post on that site formerly known as Twitter. There was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Sammy Schalk, and the post went viral with 88,000 likes and nearly 10,000 reposts in which she said that quote, this has been the worst semester in terms of students ability to get work in on time. I've never seen anything like it. And it was really amazing because the responses from faculty everywhere were like, yes, we know.

And then, Jeff, you combine that with the recent report, of course, from the National Student Clearinghouse, which found that the share of students who earn a college credential within six years of enrolling get this installed at the same rate for a third straight year. About 62% of students who started college in 2017 have since earned a degree or certificate is what that means.

Yeah. And as the Clearinghouse noted, students aren't just taking longer to complete college, they're just leaving. Of the nearly 2 1/2 million students who started college in 2017, nearly 1/3 left without a credential.

Now, we've also noted on the show a few times that enrollment is also down among first year students. So with fewer students at the top of the funnel for a college, it's really that Much more important for them to hold on to the students who are enrolled, if they can.

Yeah, Michael. And you know, it's not like student success hasn't been a thing in higher ed. The pressure has been on colleges to build, better, engage students, retain them and graduate them for more than a decade, decade plus in terms of thinking about this as a movement. But it seems that many of the student success efforts from last decade are kind of showing their age, that they were perhaps designed for a different era of students. And especially now as students who came through middle school and high school during the pandemic are arriving on campuses and, and also the value of higher ed is being questioned by students of all generations that there is a need to rethink how colleges approach student success. And so today to discuss what are the problems higher ed now needs to solve with students and what does perhaps what we might call Student Success 2.0, what does that look like? We're going to be talking with Randy Harris, who you already heard from. She's the director of the Transfer and Returning Student Resource center at Portland State University in Oregon. And also with us is Carrie Bartek, who is executive director of Institutional Effectiveness and Research at Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina.

Randy and Kerry, welcome to future you.

So glad to be here.

Yeah, it's wonderful to be here.

So I want to jump right in here, Randy, because during COVID higher ed lost more than 1.3 million students in enrollment and there was hope that many would return after the pandemic, but they clearly haven't. So can you give us a sense of what happened at each of your institutions during the pandemic in terms of enrollment and why and who enrolled and who didn't, who left and who returned if they did and why or why not?

We definitely have seen an enrollment decline across both our first time first year students and our transfer students, but I would say a significant decrease in our transfer students. A lot of that was because roughly 60% of our degree seeking undergrads at Portland State are actually transfer students. And so when enrollment declined at the community colleges, we're now seeing that sort of cascading effect of enrollment decline. I think many of our students, when we've talked to them, have left or paused their education. If they weren't local, if they weren't from Portland, we saw those students pause their education during the pandemic. We're starting to see them come back re enrolling students, particularly our first year students. Enrollment is increasing at a great pace. Our transfer students is slower to increase but we are starting to see more students enrolling, particularly as community college enrollment is increasing. And I think the other thing that we've heard from students is we saw students who it was their first year when the pandemic hit, particularly they just didn't have experience in college. So it was really challenging. And so they left and then paused. Students who were initially starting at our institution when the pandemic hit, took time off but then didn't go anywhere.

When you look at who is coming back and who did not come back, we are seeing a great increase in our duly enrolled high school students. Our college aged 18 to 24 year old students, but our 25 to 44 year old students are not, and our female enrollment has declined. Some of the factors that may be unique to where we are, we're in Wake county, we are experiencing a tremendous amount of growth and a very robust labor market and return to the labor market for community colleges. Our enrollment is very much linked to the health of the labor market. So when the labor market's strong, people go back to work and sometimes they don't enroll in school.

So fascinating. So let's rewind. Before the pandemic, how would you both describe your efforts to support student success back then? What was working, what wasn't and why behind those?

Well, back in 2015, we made a strategic investment in digital learning. It was part of our quality enhancement plan for our accreditation. We just decided that's what we needed to do. That's where the learning gaps were the greatest. And so we invested in faculty professional development as well as US student development. And how are you successful in online courses? And so we had already had implemented that in 2015, so that by the time Covid hit or all of our faculty were certified in online learning, it was just getting our support services online, which we were able to do very quickly because we had already gone through some of the instructional professional development that we needed to do it. So that was a success as far as being able to retain students and get them through their courses when the pandemic first hit.

Yeah. So at Portland State University, prior to the pandemic, one of our big focuses was using human centered design to really build the best student experience. So we were focusing on the experience of students and how we could improve access to learning and services in the best way. And so we used human centered design to problem pose with our students, our faculty and our staff and then co created solutions and really focused on a complete redesign of our academic and career advising system as well as self service Models for students to find answers to questions, navigate the institution and do that in real time via digital tools, as well as increasing flexible degree options. So students who weren't fully online or fully in person, but ways they could have a flexible degree, a hybrid experience in that way. And having more coordinated systems on the back end for student services. So our registrar's office, financial services advising ways in which we could coordinate on the back end so students would have a seamless experience.

What did you learn during the pandemic about your student success efforts that have stuck and what are you finding in some of those early results?

It sounds simple, but meeting students where they are, we had to. The proactive outreach to our students had to be exponentially grown in terms of they weren't reaching out to us for help. So we reached out to them. What do you need? How can we support you? And we did it in the moment of like, do we need to send you a wifi hotspot? Right? Do you need a laptop? How can we get that to you? And I think what stuck is again, finding different ways to reach out. So, you know, we engaged the use of a chatbot now to work with students. So it's. It texts them and then they can tell us what they need and then we follow up, which is really great. We now have a team of folks, it's called our progression team, who does outreach to students who are likely to have holds or aren't registered or doing things. So we can identify what they need, get them connected to a service, and then help them move forward on their degree. And I think that's been really helpful.

So what we did is we now we developed care teams for advisors for students and they are made up of teams of people. When you can't do one on one, you have to figure out a way to network. You have to figure out a way to do a team approach to care of students. So we have now advisors, success coaches and support people on a team by 13 meta majors. That was part of our strategic plan. And now every student has a care team and every student knows their advisor. And the care teams reach out to the students. That was a change that we made during COVID 19 and it's based on this idea that when you can't do the high touch one on one, you can do on a team what you can't do one on one. So that was a big takeaway for us of what worked as far as keeping students retained.

So I'm really curious, Randy and Carrie, about something that I saw recently on Twitter from a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin who noted that the fall semester was one of the toughest that she ever had as a faculty member. And there was so much agreement by faculty members everywhere to that statement, mainly because students weren't handing in things. They weren't showing up to classes. They had kind of unreasonable expectations about what the classroom would be like. And there was a lot of sense that this is kind of the long tail of COVID and just kind of interested in your take on that.

One of the things that we see is just students not engaging with us, even when offering help, until like, the end of class. And then all of a sudden, they open up with all these big things that are happening in their life. So what we're seeing is just not asking questions, not necessarily talking in class and so. Or necessarily engaging with one another. It's really interesting. So in teaching a hybrid course, I'll watch robust conversation happen in a discussion forum, but then when we're together, it's quiet. And it's not like that everywhere. But I think there are students who had a significant time of their life was in online learning in high school or even in college to start, and now they're trying to get back together. We've, like, I've heard someone coin the term, like the great awkward. And I feel that. And how to relate with. Even with their instructors and with each other. And they're trying to do that again and learn those skills while also navigating working mental health challenges. All those things.

That's so interesting. Let's level up a little bit and look more broadly. As you know, at the recent National Student Clearinghouse Research center, numbers on completion as a nation, we seem to be stuck right now. As the Clearinghouse notes, students are just. They're taking longer, they're not completing at all. Adding to the already 39 million Americans who have some college credit but no degree. Obviously, the reasons for this are many. They're complex. They're multifaceted. But from your vantage point, what do you think is happening here?

I think people are looking at what value they're getting. Students and families are thinking about the cost and value of a college degree. They're thinking about the return on their investment and trying to make more strategic decisions about debt and what they'll do with their degrees when they leave. I think that fundamentally, as a conversation happening in our country, it's also a conversation that we're having here.

I would absolutely agree with what Kerry said around the value of higher education in relationship to the cost. So when we talk to students who are struggling or thinking about taking time off, they'll list a whole variety of reasons. But financial is always a part of it, right? So it is that investment. And then what am I seeing? And particularly for many of our students who've been historically underserved, there is not wealth parity when it comes to the value of a college degree. And so what does it mean? And people are challenging that. And I think it's really important that we face that head on and think how we can undo these inequitable systems and create higher education that works for all students. And so I do feel hopeful and that things are turning, are moving in the right direction. And I think it's related to a lot of what we've talked about, is we are finally, we've been faced with, we have to do things different. And we're starting to think about our students different, differently and engaging with them differently. And I think it is truly making a difference. And I am hopeful that we'll see more college completion rates. But students know they see the cost, they see the likelihood of finishing, and they need to see that finish line and how they're going to get there and know that they have the support to do that so that they can actually see that return on investment in the degree.

It makes a lot of sense what both of you are saying. As I reflect on it, it seems both. There's a societal shift, Carrie, that you're arguing in terms of how people even think of college in the first place. And then, Randy, to your point, if you can really show them success, it sort of breeds on itself. And there's ways, if you really meet the student first, to drive those numbers. I guess I'm just curious for both of you, if we think nationally for a moment, right. As a prescription, what kind of transformation do we need on a larger scale to move this needle on retention and completion? And maybe a large part of it is the steps that you all have been taking in describing. But I'm also curious. Is part of this rethinking how we structure college and how we think of success and how we credit that success to meet students who maybe to your point, Carrie, they come into the station, they jump off to a great point, and maybe they come back to the station a few years later and that's a broader restructuring than maybe just some steps in the student success equation? I'd love both of your thoughts.

Yeah, I mean, we have to remember that we were asking for transformation for a long time. We were working on it for a long time. We got it with COVID 19. COVID 19 was a disruptive transformation. We had to pivot very, very quickly and we transformed. We transformed our structures, our processes, and our attitudes about students changed. So we know it can happen. And some of those changes are lasting.

Our students also want to make a difference and they want to know that they're making a difference. And I think that's something that we can add to the conversation around value. And what I think is really important, particularly right now in our society, is the development of critical thinking and the ability to engage with others and move really important work forward in solving some of the problems that that exist today, but that are also coming. So asking that question, what does the future need from us? Right. And how are we developing skills around that and experiences to support students to feel like they truly are making a difference while supporting their career goals and all of that?

Randy Carey, terrific set of insights. Thank you so much for coming on Future youe and sharing them with us.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity.

You bet. And we'll be right back. This episode is being brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They are workers, parents and caregivers and neighbors. And colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the Foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student centered at US program. Welcome back to Future. You off that conversation with Randy and Kerry about what Student Success 2.0 might look like. And Jeff, I'd love to know, just as when any sector is struggling, it's important to spend time properly diagnosing the problem before you jump into solutions. So, Jeff, what is going on with student success? Why has the needle been essentially stuck for three years now?

Michael, let's start with the pandemic. I know people are tired of talking about it, and that's probably one of the reasons why we just moved on when things started to return to normal. And I think that's part of the problem. Students kind of needed a break and they didn't get one. We just seemed to jump right back into college like it was 2019 all over again. And so we have this combination of learning loss and social loss and students are ending up in college from the way I'm talking to faculty and administrators and seeing students, and they're just not ready for it. It's like we probably needed a giant gap year paid for by somebody, of course, for a lot of These students right after we started to go back to normal after the pandemic. Now, I think that answers what's happening with those already in college who probably have left or maybe they didn't even go in the first place when they graduated from high school in 2020 or 2021 or even 2022. But I think what's also interesting is what Carrie told us is happening at Wake, and we're also hearing from other community colleges, too. And that's what's driving enrollment, is dual enrollment. In other words, it's high school students at community colleges, not, you know, traditional 25 to 44 year olds who, as Kerry noted, are not coming back. And Michael, I'm really curious on what your take on this is because, as Kerry said, well, you know, it's because the economy is good in Wake County, North Carolina, where they're located. And that has long been the line that community colleges have used, that when the economy is good, our enrollment goes down and when the economy is bad, our enrollment goes up as people can't get a job and so they go back to school. But it seems now there is more of a resetting about who's going to college and when. And in some ways it seems that community colleges are essentially becoming outposts of, you know, something, maybe that's almost like early college for high school students through these dual enrollment programs. Now, I want to note here we're actually going to have an episode coming up on dual enrollment specifically. So I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I thought it was really interesting in what Carrie noted in that we're losing all these 25 to 44 year olds while gaining all these high school students.

Yeah, Jeff. Well, first it'll be interesting to see if what Carrie talked about holds because as you know, the pattern of good economy, bad economy, you know, down enrollment, up enrollment was broken during COVID That's not what happened to community colleges when the economy tanked. Be really interesting if that's indeed what we're seeing, the restoration of that pattern. But I think your other observation is right. It certainly seems like we're having a resetting of who goes to community college. Now, you and I, not only are we doing a future show in this topic, but we've also talked about this before in our show. We've betrayed some of our own biases and concerns about it. But I think it seems undeniable, particularly when the economy is good, that it almost feels like we're undergoing this structural shift, perhaps in the country whereby grades 11 and grades 12 are almost like the new grade 13, if you will, as in dual enrollment in community colleges becomes so pervasive in grades 11 and 12, which is definitely a trend, that maybe we even should start talking about it as the new start of college. And if that's the case, how do we think about all that when that enrollment is still taking place in our nation's high schools? And then I think what's exciting, Jeff, is we can ask some big questions like what else can we do with that time? For example, could more students take, you know, the community college classes, but also pair that with internships and externships to gain working experience and knowledge about careers and build purpose, one of your favorite topics. Could we pair that with the clubs and sports and other activities and rites of passage, like, yep, prom. Right. And really still keep the core of the high school experience, but make it more interesting and exciting to students. No more senior year burnout. Right. And then maybe that further un bundles high school and we actually see more students doing. And I'm going to use this reference because I'm speaking, you know, we're speaking to people focused on higher ed, but sort of a Tim Tebow type move, hybrid homeschooling. Right. That's a trend that is on the rise right now in K12 education. But I kind of wonder, you know, if rather than take the college courses taught by high school teachers, as many of these dual enrollment programs are currently structured, maybe they take the online courses taught by the college faculty themselves. Anyway, we could stretch this a little bit further, but you get the idea. It seems like if we're intentional about using this shift to innovate more, we could create a lot more opportunities and knowledge for students in grades 11 and 12. But it's obviously going to have massive downstream implications for how we start thinking about measuring student success. Jeff. And so my question back to you, I think, is if we start to think about Student Success 2.0 and what it's comprised of, how do you think institutions need to start building a new student success playbook if they're going to have, you know, students coming in with a much more unbundled, varied set of experiences, maybe from high school?

Well, Michael, I think it's interesting what you just said, right, to be intentional about using the shift to innovate more? And I don't think there's a lot of innovation that's intentional in higher ed. Sometimes we just kind of back into it or it happens by accident. And I think the pandemic's a great example of that, right. Where people did online education because they had no choice. But to answer your question about what does this playbook look like? I think there's a few things they should do. First is allow for flexibility in how students access education and how services are delivered in college. I think that institutions must be much more accommodating and really retain the mix of digital or hybrid that they actually adopted during the pandemic. And some colleges and universities have just gone back to what they used to do. You know, take Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, for example, where students now can choose to attend in person or virtual classes on any given day in about 10% of the college's courses. Carrie also mentioned the CARE teams they developed. And it's similar to what Purdue did during the pandemic with its academic case Manager program, in which student success advisors assisted students who had to be quarantined because they had Covid. And the university is really using the same approach now going forward for students with, you know, chronicle medical conditions, disabilities, or in other circumstances where they just can't attend classes on a regular basis. And, you know, data from that program suggested the quarantine students who use the service were more successful in terms of grades and staying enrolled in their courses compared to those who didn't participate. So I really like this idea of the CARE teams. Second, I think we need to build the structure and culture required to encourage students to connect with each other and faculty as well. So a lot of institutions, including places like the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, they've extended their orientation to essentially the entire year with programs around financial literacy and exams. And all these things are timed to coincide with. With those moments in the academic calendar, because, as you probably remember from your own freshman orientation, they just throw everything at you before you even start. And then six weeks or eight weeks later, when you actually need that information, you kind of forget about it. And so I like this idea of. Of this. Of extending freshman orientation. On top of that, Georgia State, which is really kind of ahead on so many fronts on student success. They. They operate this accelerator now during the summer for freshmen who drop courses, so. So then they could play catch up on the previous year. And then finally, I think that we really need to evaluate leaders for their commitment to putting students at the center of decisions. You know, as our friend Bridget Burns says, you know, who really gets fired if your student success numbers don't add up? And as she said, no one really gets fired, because at most institutions, there's no one person that's ultimately responsible for student success. And Michael, there's something else that goes beyond student success, and that's value. When we think about this, you know, we've talked a lot about the ROI of the degree on the show, and we're going to be doing a lot more about it this spring. But one thing that Randy said, you know, caught me. She said our students also want to make a difference. And I'm wondering how much that plays into student success. You know, I always say the two most important pieces for student success are belonging and purpose.

And.

And I'm wondering, how can colleges show prospective students that they can make a difference or is that just being too sentimental?

Oh, I don't know if I associate sentimental with you, Jeff, but it's a good question. And I think she's onto something. And for brevity, I'll just say if we're imagining this much more unbundled and flexible world which we've both, you know, outlined now, then if you can connect students into more opportunities where they can take on real projects, real work in their community, it can be community based organizations, it can be employers, whatever it looks like, then I think we can start to show students more directly how they can contribute to the broader world. And I think that has inherent value because it'll help students more clearly think about the question you just asked, which is, what's my purpose? Where do I want to plug in and contribute? And I think that will speak to the two pillars of belonging and purpose and. And not in a sentimental way, but. But I think a very straightforward and practical one. I'd love your thoughts on this because it's such an area of passion for you.

Yeah. You know, Michael, when I started my career, all I thought about, and I think a lot of students thought about were of possibilities. And I think this current generation thinks way more about limitations and threats to what they want to do. And I think AI is a great example.

Right.

How is it going to impact my choice of a career or a job? I think their degrees to them seem far more utilitarian than they did to me. You know, it will allow them to do the one thing that they want to do. You know, my degree in so many ways really felt like the ticket to a music festival where, you know, There might be 15 different stages and I can move around. You know, my degree was that ticket, and I could do many different things. Of course, you know, I ended up in journalism, but I've done many different things since then, including, you know, this great podcast and I don't think I ever imagined that, that, you know, 20 plus years ago. But, Michael, there's this one other question that I have about the data, because it was noted in the Chronicle after that clearinghouse data came out, that completion rates and perception of higher ed can be kind of a chicken and egg thing, right? Students who aren't sure a degree is worth the investment are more likely to leave, and that's contributing to the stuck completion rates, of course. And at the same time, higher ed's apparent inability to graduate more of its students helps fuel not only the student's perception, but also the public's perception about its value. So in an era of limited resources, where do you as a university put those resources? Do you put them in recruitment, in student success, in changing perceptions? In many ways, it seems like a game of whack a mole, right? Because every time I put resources somewhere, the issues somewhere else just don't improve, which hurt where I just put my resources.

Yeah, it's a great point, Jeff. And I think historically colleges have put those resources at the top of the funnel because their incentives have been around enrollment. And so they just wanted to get more students into the funnel, if you will. But what you've just captured is the downward spiral that I think we're in right now. And in my mind, that the first rule of getting out of holes is to stop digging them. And to me, in an era focused on value and ROI and outcomes, where policy may move in that direction as well, I think that means you just don't keep following the same old playbook and filling the top of the funnel. Instead, you fix the roi, the value part of the equation. You show students and society that the education that you're offering is relevant. You show that the degree, and more importantly, I would argue the knowledge and the skills and the network that you get from it will result in something positive and tangible. And if you build that sense of contribution, but also launch students to a place where they can act on it and do so at a cost that they can afford, I think students and families will stop asking some of the questions that they have been of is college really worth it? Now, that also implies, Jeff, I think getting out of the, you know, some of the games of politics that we've talked about in past shows, and it really means focusing on the questions of cost and business model and value proposition. And I don't mean tuition when I say those things. I mean the underlying spending that an institution does. You know, if you get your cost structure in line and launch programs with lower underlying cost structures that actually result in value. I think you can start to answer these questions, stop digging the hole and, and become the place that's differentiated and other students want to start coming to.

Yeah, Michael, I think it's just, it's so true. And I think it really does start about something you said earlier about really being intentional about innovating more. And that includes on all of these fronts. And it may include trying to figure out how to stretch your resources more so that you're not just focused in one particular area. Because it's really clear to me, you know, judging from just the conversation that we had with Carrie and Randy today, it's that, you know, you can't really, we can't really go back to 2019 because the students and the issues they are facing just in the last four or five years have changed dramatically. And I think we're seeing that in our own kids as well, which means that this is not something and we talked about this on the show before, this is not something that's just going to go away in a couple of years when, you know, the students who are in middle school or high school come through college. I think this is going to be something that is really generational and we're talking a decade plus. So if we don't start being intentional about innovating more on student success now, it's going to be too late, especially when the demographic cliff comes later this decade. So we're going to wrap up there. Thank you again for all our listeners being with us today on this special episode of Future you Around Student Success. Thank you to the Gates foundation for their sponsorship of this particular episode. And we will see you next time on Future View.

Sa.