Institutional Strategies. A New Three-Part Series
Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter describes
policies, programs, and practices employed by a diverse group of
high-performing American colleges and universities to enhance student
achievement. Authors George Kuh, Jillian Kinzie, John Schuh, Elizabeth
Whitt, and their associates clearly demonstrate that higher education
institutions that make a campus-wide commitment to student success
can make a difference in student engagement and persistence. Based
on the Documenting Effective Educational Practice (DEEP) project
from the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University,
this book provides real world examples from twenty institutions and
guiding principles and recommendations that other colleges and universities
can learn from and adapt to create an enhanced setting for student
success.
The book is organized into four main parts: an explanation of why
the authors undertook the DEEP project, a discussion of the six overarching
features common to twenty high-performing colleges and universities,
examples of the policies, programs, and practices of these schools,
and a summary of findings and general recommendations for colleges
and universities interested in enhancing student success. Written
with the practitioner in mind, the authors refrain from using many
research notes and references in an effort to make this book reader-friendly.
The text is also intentionally descriptive, not evaluative; readers
seeking empirical evidence of the impacts of specific student success
strategies are advised to look elsewhere. But college administrators
and others charged with the responsibility for student success initiatives
will delight in this book, which is brimming with examples of student
success policies, programs, and practices that could be adapted for
use on most North American campuses. Indeed, the authors encourage
readers to “creatively swipe” what seems to be working
at these high-performing institutions.
The pragmatic tone of this book, however, should not diminish the quality of the research upon which it is based. For the uninitiated, the DEEP project, led by George Kuh and his associates at the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, attempts to determine how strong learning environments in higher education settings are created and sustained. The twenty colleges and universities identified as DEEP institutions for inclusion in this book were selected through a multi-stage process. First, a regression model was employed to identify four-year institutions that had higher-than-predicted scores on the five clusters of effective educational practice used by the Center’s National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). These clusters are level of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student interaction with faculty members, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environment. A second regression model was then employed to determine the predicted graduation rates of these schools, and then to compare those rates with their actual six-year graduation rate. Both regression models took into account student characteristics and institutional features, including size, selectivity, and location. The twenty institutions featured in this book are among a larger number that met the criteria for higher-than-predicted student engagement and graduation.
After selecting the schools and conducting on-site research over a two-year period, the research team identified six characteristics found to be common to the twenty DEEP colleges and universities. These institutions, the authors argue convincingly, share a “living” mission and “lived” educational philosophy, an unshakeable focus on student learning, environments adapted for educational enrichment, clearly marked pathways to student success, an improvement-oriented ethos, and shared responsibility for educational quality and student success. While the identification of these characteristics clearly owes a debt to work by Peter Senge and Michael Fullan on systems theory, learning organizations, and change leadership, it is the grounding of these theories in the real world experiences of higher education institutions that makes this section valuable. The authors devote an entire chapter to each of these traits, supporting the discussion by citing specific examples from diverse DEEP institutions, which include private and public colleges, small liberal arts colleges, large research-intensive universities, historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, women’s colleges, and one men’s college.
These chapters contain fresh perspectives on what can make a tangible difference in student success that might surprise even the more seasoned reader. The chapter on “Environments Adapted for Educational Enrichment,” for instance, highlighted the potential of the natural and architectural setting of the campus to contribute to student success. The examples are illustrative. Sewanee’s isolated mountaintop is used as a living laboratory for environmental studies, forestry, and geology classes and as the setting for numerous student success initiatives, including the first year orientation program. Other schools, including Evergreen State, have created architectural spaces designed to foster interaction and collaboration across the campus. Evergreen State’s Longhouse Education and Cultural Center provides a gathering place large enough to accommodate campus-wide events while symbolically representing the institution’s commitment to promoting multicultural study and understanding. Even institutions lacking these stellar natural and architectural resources find powerful ways to use their sites to support their student-centered missions and, in the process, induce students to form strong emotional attachments to the “place” of the college.
In addition to discussing these shared characteristics, the researchers also set out to identify examples of policies, programs, and practices that other institutions might “creatively swipe” and adapt to enhance student success on their campuses. Institutional policies, programs, and practices are richly described, and while concepts such as first-year seminars, capstone projects, and learning communities are not unfamiliar to higher education professionals, the authors argue that the programs themselves cannot achieve student success. It is how these programs are implemented that is most critical—the “fit” with the unique needs and characteristics of the institution, the substantial numbers of students involved with one or more of these programs, the high quality of the programs, and, most significantly, the integrated approach to achieving student success that is employed by DEEP institutions—an approach that recognizes and respects the complementarity and interdependence of an institution’s policies, programs, and practices.
Given this holistic view of student success, the authors discourage readers from using the book as a checklist of best practices and instead dedicate the final section to summarizing their findings and making general recommendations for colleges and universities interested in enhancing student success. Their primary recommendation is drawn from an important lesson learned by DEEP colleges and universities: “student success must be everyone’s business in order to create the conditions that encourage and support students to engage in educationally productive activities at reasonably high levels” (p. 295). What is needed most is an institutional culture that is fully committed to student success. The book’s concluding discussion on organizing for student success is, arguably, the most valuable section of this book.
Student Success in College is a “must-read” book for higher education administrators, faculty, and staff who are committed to making student success a priority on their campuses. This book will be most effectively employed to stimulate discussions on and provide guiding principles for campus-wide initiatives to improve student outcomes and create an institutional culture focused on student success.
Throughout the series, we look forward to getting feedback from you about your experiences and how they related to our discussion. Feel free to email us at: info@educationalpolicy.org.
EPI SPONSORS
