Back in the fall of 2022, the SSR implementation group started at the beginning with Goal 1, Strategy 1 of the COAS Strategic Plan:
G1.S1. Create and enact a comprehensive strategic enrollment and student success plan, including components related to supporting the whole student, recruitment, retention/graduation, and addressing equity gaps.
To advance Goal 1, Strategy 1, we needed to create a Strategic Enrollment and Retention Plan (SERP) that nests within both the college and university plans. Susan Shadle and Kris Collins, leaders of university-level SERP, often say that the “P” in “SERP” stands for process as much as plan. Following their lead, the SSR team put process at the center of our approach to SERP development and implementation. That means, we embrace the SERP as an opportunity to engage in an ongoing equity-minded strategic planning process to make a sustainable impact on student retention and satisfaction, particularly for our most vulnerable students.
Fall 2023 marks an important milestone for the SSR group. Guided by Casey Iezzi’s strategic planning leadership and expertise, we now have a COAS SERP and Data Appendix. At the beginning of the Fall semester, we shared the full draft of the SERP document with the SSR group for analysis and discussion. The team carefully and collaboratively reviewed the document, yielding the following key questions for implementation:
- How can we make the excellent student success work that’s already happening across the college more visible through the SERP process?
- How will we directly involve students in all phases of our SERP work, from needs assessment through implementation?
- How will we embed faculty and staff recognition and support into all aspects of SERP-related work?
These questions are essential because they represent potential barriers to advancing the goals in the COAS SERP¹. In our SSR group discussions, we consistently work to bring barriers to the surface so that we can examine and address them. We know that creating a clear-eyed view of our challenges is the only path to sustainable change-making. Once we identify barriers, we turn them into guiding principles and action items. For example, from the key questions that emerged this fall, we named/reinforced core commitments that guide our work:
- We must honor the incredible student success work that is embedded or emerging across our college. We are not starting from scratch; instead, we are organizing for impact to advance shared equity goals.
- We cannot guess what our students need, and we cannot look at quantitative data alone. We must listen to our students’ voices and experiences, and we must directly include them in the work.
- We must support the faculty and staff who support students. SERP work cannot advance as added, invisible labor.
When we are facing decisions and implementing ideas, we must always look at existing work, seek ways to understand student experiences, and carefully consider impacts on faculty and staff.
This fall we saw an important opportunity to live our core commitments when Amanda Ashley, Kevin Feris and the Innovation Lab Strategic Planning Group invited us into collaboration. First and foremost, we were happy to receive the invitation because we believe that partnering across areas is an essential element of student success work in COAS (see “Collective Impact” in SERP document). We also know that the Innovation Lab grants will surface amazing work—both existing and emerging—across our college. Having reviewed NOIs and proposals, we looked for ways to create new connections (e.g., to the SERP goals, to colleagues and students, to information and tools). From this collaboration across implementation groups, many more collaborative efforts will grow.
During the fall semester, the SSR group also formed two college-level teams that will support our SERP implementation. First, Casey Iezzi launched the COAS Data Team to support COAS academic leaders, faculty and staff in their efforts to design and track student success initiatives. With eight members, the COAS Data Team aims to improve data access in order to support the design, implementation, and tracking of student success work. In addition, we formed the COAS Advising Council. The group operates as a learning space for identifying and prioritizing college-level advising strengths, needs and challenges. The Council is also a space where we can recognize innovative advising solutions and practices across our college to assess the impact of policy changes, technological tools/advances and other factors that affect
advising in the college.
¹ As you will see in the document, we aim to achieve a 90% Success Rate for all COAS majors by 2030, with a 50% reduction in equity gaps for our SERP student populations. Achieving this universal goal means that we will have raised our overall baseline Success Rate by 10%. Over time, this means we will need to improve our success rates by about 2% each year, from 2024 to 2030.