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At Cal State Northridge we've been working for eleven years
on improving retention and graduation rates of our students. It was at one of my priorities
when I was appointed as president in july of two thousand
we have during that over a decade commitments
used a variety of
pretty commonly available techniques
to improve
the retention and graduation of our students
but we've done a couple of very specific things
that crosses over to all of the techniques that we've used. The
one thing that we've done is we have used
data to track
the student retention and graduation so that if we have a project that
hasn't produced the kind of results that we would like to have
then we will
eclipse that and use
the resources and personnel to advance some other effort.
But when you ask what's the one or two things that you can attribute to our emphasis
is I think when you talk to institutions like ours
you really can't explain in one or two ways it's comprehensive. It's completely comprehensive.
Its from our grounds crew to our campus police officers to our senior faculty.
It's getting everybody to understand that our main responsibility is not just
enrolling students, but giving them the opportunity to make sure that they're on a pathway to
graduate
and that's my number one job as a president and I know for many of my colleagues that
we know that this is a moral obligation that we have for our students.
More specifically data has been, critical for us. We filter data right down into our actual
departments. Academic departments so our chairs know what their graduation rates are.
We to have become very data driven and that been
exceedingly important to us to really follow the numbers and see what is happening
when it's happening and if it's happening
by using our data
Last June
when we were at one of the chancellors office meetings. We saw the CSU Chico
delivery team and we is the Jerry Sotos the Provost as well as
Suti Perapateria
and we decided to take that delivery chain model
and make it real
and what we mean by that is we want to have one screen where we could have several
electronic dashboards
that looked at our indicators
and our milestones that we were going to use
for monitoring our students retention and graduation rates. One of the things we've done at San Diego
state to improve graduation rates is to pay very close attention to the data
of the students as they go through our programs. That's given us an opportunity
to be very strategic and to make sure that students
uh... varying levels of preparation get the support
they need
rather than trying to create one program that fits across
all students
to help students with
graduation retention rates at the university
is to provide
very clear directions
on what courses they need to take
what sequence in which they need to take them and also how many hours they need to sign
up for as incoming students
we send a very clear message to all of our students at orientation
their first year that they need to take at least fifteen hours in their first semester.
We have found that by asking more of our students.
We get more from them and they're more inclined to stay engaged and to stay at the university.
So the one interesting thing that we found is
many students actually can learn
math very fast. Its not like they cannot do it.
They just need more guidance and also building strong foundation
So this is what we do.
We revise material
we never use textbook. We use our own material
for the boot camp for remediation class
and the students find this so comfortable
that they don't buy hundred dollar book
our class size
ranges from a sixty to one hundred students.
And actually you see the students find this a very comfortable and his own
they enjoy come to class and they do the work.
The Kern high school district and East Bakersfield high school in particular
always had a very very good relationship with Calstate bakersfield and the state university
system here in California.
The students that we're graduating now are better prepared and better prepared to enter
the Calstate system. The FYE has prepared me to transition to CSUB
by helping me meet my professor,
by introducing me to a social setting, and by helping me feel comfortable around campus.
So many of our students come from backgrounds first-generation college students. Its so very
important
for students, once they get to campus, they feel like they have a safety net at a place
that they can call home.
We were looking at a variety of factors that might impact the rate at which students
stay in the university.
We came upon one that struck us as interesting We found that students, a good number of students,
in their freshman year had not register for classes for the spring
semester. In what we call "Titan One" or the first phase of registration.
We found that there are about three hundred and forty full-time students at about sixty
to seventy part-time students in that freshman class who had not done so. We found out that
first of all a good number of students didn't even know they have pre register.
Secondly that student unaware that they might have a holds. Holds that might result from
needing
mandatory advising, perhaps a
fee. Late fee payments.
Those kinds of things.
So we set out our
people from academic advising, from the college dean, system dean's, to associate deans freshman
programs to make contact with them.
Our overall
attendance rate for the Fall 2010 for that class had improved
by four point two percent.
And among our underrepresented minority students four point eight percent.
Thus we consider this an extremely successful project.
We have totally restructured our advisement system
from adding new staff to do advising to
centralizing training things that you would think that would have been in place but
simply were not at a
newer younger institution.
We have at clarified our degree pathways. We have degree audits.
We have living learning communities as we've heard about before.
We are doing
being spent inside the classroom and outside the classroom.
We looked at the grade point average of those students
who struggled during the first semester
and provided them with a student success course in the spring semester along with
more emphasis on advising
more emphasis on mentoring
and some greater opportunities for engagement with the campus community.
Those who participated in the student success course during first year
contributed to one of the highest retention rates that we've seen in the history
of Fresno State.
In year two, which is the current year, we're focusing on the students orientation to
their majors because we realize that in the second year as they move out of general education
and into the major.
There is much more risk of
lack of success that has been leaving the university.
I think a lot of cases that's
its definitley true that a student can relate to a Peer Mentor better
because we are.. fresh out of that freshman stage. We know whats been going on.
We know about problems with financial aid and not knowing where to go for tutoring, about scholarships, caps
We know about all the resources because we were just there
A couple weeks ago when there was a death in my family
and I had to miss classes. Immediately it was the Peer Mentors who went in there
and let the students know the situation
and made themselves available. What was going on
Where I was
why I maybe wasn't getting back to them. So that was a huge help and gave me time
to grieve with my family. Be there for my family then be able to come back
be there for my students and they never really felt that lost because somebody else there
So the peer mentor
is a hundred times better because we get that
guidance from another student
and that I think is very different from guidance from a teacher or counselor.
You know the students is
I guess you could say at your level and you see eye-to-eye on anything.
Certainly this latest initiative is asking us to
really focus on closing the achievement gap
is very congruent with our values of what we consider to be very important and what
the California State University in really needs to be doing in this state because
these are our students these are the future citizens of California.
We hope to assess the success each year of this particular set of initiatives
and institutionalize those initiatives that are successful so that every first-year student
who is struggling from now on
has the opportunity for students success course. Every second year student from now on has
the opportunity to engage with the department, the discipline, the department chair and other
students in the major.
What the initiative has done is help us re-energizing in something
we've been doing for four-and-a-half five years already
we've had a major thrust in the initiative from the system level has said look we've
gotta keep moving in this direction it is a national agenda issue. It is the national
governors association issue. So we've got a moral obligation to help them succeed economically
in life and that's different today than its was a decade ago and that's why I think all
of our presidents in the system are truly behind this initiative.
CAPTION BY TY MELVIN Academic Technology Services