- Is success completing an assignment or a course? Earning passing grades? Returning for the next semester?
- Can we measure student success, and if so, how? Is it our graduation rate or helping students get that first job after college?
- Who gets to define student success?
Like many colleges and universities, we have by default used the traditional definition of student success as persistence from year to year with degree completion as the end point. These measures are straightforward to define and relatively easy measure, but they are administrative measures that miss many other ways students can succeed.
In 2017, Educational Advisory Board asked students what success means. Their responses suggest that to them success is personal and broadly results in:
- Cultivating grit to overcome challenges
- Striking a balance between academics and other areas of life
- Nurturing curiosity
- Earning the respect of others
- Finding purpose and fulfillment
As a movement, student success has built upon practices and theories. It started with the first-year experience movement, which grew from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, according to Shawnda Freer of Taylor University. As interest in student success grew, it did so on the foundational work of Vincent Tinto. The emphasis on first-year success expanded in the 1980s with the work of John Gardner and Betsy Barefoot, evolving into the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, hosted by the University of South Carolina.
Emerging from first-year experience work, theories around enrollment management and an emphasis on retention beyond the first year arose in the 1980s. Student success efforts marched on with an intentional focus on students from different backgrounds. In the 1990s, those efforts included expansive tutoring, mentoring and success centers. The new century began with an emphasis on early warning systems, guided pathways and 15 credits to finish, led by Complete College America, Achieve the Dream and foundations that emphasized entry into the workforce as the measure of success.
But how do we define student success at NMSU? In the coming months, the Division of Student Success will work toward a deeper philosophical and operational understanding of student success. Are there reliable milestones along an academic path that signal when a student is likely to complete a program? Is there an assignment within a course that is pivotal for a student’s success in that course? How do our students define success? Do community college students, bachelor’s students and graduate students define success differently?
Please share with me your thoughts around student success or send comments to vpss@nmsu.edu.
