Well, of course, we should assume any post secondary institution that wants to be more successful with its new—either first-time or transfer—students, would have a plan to accomplish this. But in my four decades plus experience, I find that very few institutions do. And, while most all institutions have a strategic plan, my work tells me that many are weak on the execution of such aspirational plans.

Foundations of Excellence

I am thinking about this because June 30 is my non-profit organization’s annual deadline for applications for a process we have been offering for 10 years, known as Foundations of Excellence^® (FoE, for short). Very succinctly stated, FoE is a comprehensive, institution-wide, assessment, planning and action process to improve student success and retention. While I wish I could tell you that student success was the number one driver, it is really more selfishly from the institution’s perspective, an effort to improve student retention, which really means institutional retention. And that’s exactly what it does! That is FoE significantly improves retention if you do two very simple, but important things: 1) develop an aspirational plan for improvement; and 2) then execute that plan to a high degree.

A foundation of Excellence was made possible by grants from three foundations: The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Atlantic Philanthropies, and Lumina Foundation for Education.

From 2003-2005 we had 219 four-year institutions involved in a pilot and 88 community colleges involved in another pilot, to produce what we called “Founding Institutions.”

Since 2003 we have had 245 post secondary institutions go through the Foundations of Excellence process. Of this total, 136 have been four-year institutions and 109 community colleges. All but four of the cohorts have been from the continental US. But four institutions came from Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. What we had originally set out to do was to develop a process that would be applicable, effective, and work anywhere in the world where post secondary institutions wanted to be more effective with their students.

So what’s the secret sauce to go through a process like this to increase student retention? At the risk of oversimplification, the recipe includes:

1. You have to have a set of aspirational standards of excellence. You can use ours, gratis. They are out there on our website.
2. You have to create a task force to conduct a thorough assessment of the effectiveness of your first year.
3. You should measure your institution’s current effectiveness against some standards of excellence for the first year or transfer student experience.  For each of the standards you need a set of questions to be asking yourselves in order to apply these standards to your unique institutional circumstances. Our process provides these and we call them “Performance Indicators.”
4. You need to involve a substantial proportion of faculty to be engaged in this process if you want the outcomes to be institutionalized. In addition to faculty, you want to bring together academic administrators, student affairs professionals, IR and assessment experts, and students.
5. Your process needs to be data driven whereby you produce recommended action items for institutional improvement based on the evidence you have marshaled about your current levels of performance.
6. The process needs to result in an action plan.
7. You then have to execute that plan to a high degree. 

The external assessment on Foundations of Excellence, very briefly, with respect to retention over the four-year period post participating in Foundations of Excellence, has found that:

1. All institutions combined, including open admissions community colleges on one end of the continuum and selective four-year institutions on the other end, in the aggregate, regardless of degree of implementation of the FoE action plan, realize a 3% increase in retention over four years.
2. But when we look at level of implementation as the discriminating variable we find that the “high” implementers, two and four-year institutions combined, realize an 8.2% increase in retention.
3. The greatest gains have been realized in private four-year institutions with a 17.2% increase for high implementers.
4. And even in open admissions community colleges the gains are as great as 3.5% for full-time students, and amazingly, 2% for the hardest population of all in which to increase retention, part-time students.

There is no way I can do justice to this work in a relatively short blog posting. But, if you want to learn more: consider participating in a one hour gratis webinar. Of course we also have a great deal of information on our website.

Over the next six weeks or so it is going to be very exciting to pull together our next national cohort of Foundations of Excellence institutions. Nothing I have done in 46 years has taught me more than FoE about what to do to improve student success. I am privileged to have this opportunity not only to be a life long learner in this field of student success and completion, but to be able to continue to work with my higher education peers to help our students.

John N. Gardner
President

It is commencement season again, that is for those of us on the semester system, and for our colleagues on the quarter system, their turn will soon come. It is the season of final exams, make-up exams, grading, submitting final grade reports, award ceremonies, final advising for course selection for next academic year, end-of-term department meetings, faculty development activities, and other kinds of closure events for both students and their higher educators.

Understandably, the academy is more focused on providing closure events, rituals, ceremonies, as it should be, for our students.

But we need these too. And these are getting harder to come by because more and more of all us don’t really have the summer “off” as in the traditional agrarian model of schooling from K-16. And you add to that consideration the fact that our masters can keep demanding our attention through technology, which for most of us is never “off”, and it really is harder and harder to have closure at the end of an academic year or cycle.

For the past two spring terms, I ended them, so to speak, by going with my wife to Europe, and immersing myself in very different cultures than those in which I live and work in the States. These periods have been helpful to me in reflecting what have I accomplished in the academic year just finished and what new directions shall I forge ahead in for the coming year.  Perhaps the most important things I do are simply changing my daily pace and separating myself in time and space from my regular demands and especially from my dominant US cultural influences.

But realizing that the majority of my readers are practicing academics who do work in post secondary education settings, what are some generic strategies that I could suggest for end-of-term closure for us? Here’s a possible check list:

• Try writing a commencement address, one that you could actually give to students? Or give to yourself? Your adult significant other(s)? Make this partially a perspectives check. How do you see the academy functioning these days for your students? And for you this year? I have written a number of this fabled genre and find it to be an interesting and productive intellectual exercise.
• Ask for some formal feedback from someone you report to about how your year has gone?
• More importantly, and much lower stakes, have a series of conversations with colleagues, either individually or in groups about the year we have just finished. Reflect on it and ourselves during its passage.
• Engage in reflection yourself, in solitary fashion. Create some guiding questions. Record some observations. Decide if you will share any of these with anyone? Consider: what did you learn this year? What worked well for you, and the opposite? Who were your most successful students? What were your most successful activities, accomplishments?
• And what about your institution? How do you think it performed this year in the ways that matter most to you and that you are best able to judge? What is the impact on you of your institution’s performance this year?
• Use your reflections to set some goals for the coming year. Decide what you need to do over the coming summer hiatus, should you be so fortunate to have one, to pursue the implementation of your goals for next year.
• Is there some ritual that you should engage in, either in solitary fashion or with others, to mark the passing of this academic year? An evening out perhaps with colleagues? A departmental luncheon? Visiting someone who did something especially helpful to you this year to present her/him with a token of appreciation? There are endless possibilities.

In 1998 my co-authored book, The Senior Year Experience, was published by Jossey-Bass. We gave that book a subtitle to the effect suggesting that this closing period of undergraduate education was, ideally, a period for reflection, integration, closure, and transition. As this year comes to a close, it is important for each of us to reflect and take stock; mentally integrate what we have experienced and learned; join others in activities for closure, professionally and personally; and look forward to the transitions that lie ahead, particularly those that we have some control over and will improve our lives and thus those of our significant others and the students we serve.

John N. Gardner
President

This posting is inspired by my attendance recently at a play at Blue Ridge Community College, in Hendersonville, N.C., which is about 20 miles from my and my wife’s home.  This was a production of the British drama classic, Pride and Prejudice. We had gone originally to see a friend and spouse of one of our office colleagues, Rick Huhn, perform in his rendition of the father character.

Of course, my readers would fully appreciate the commitment of our nation’s community college to open door access and to the education of some of our least advantaged and least fortunate students. Typically these prior circumstances of our students are defined in terms of socio-economic status and level of academic preparation.

But in this particular performance what most caught my attention was that two of the five daughters in the plot were students with visible special conditions.

One female student acted as she sat in a wheel chair, the mechanical sophistication of which surely would not have been possible in the 19^th century period she was portraying. And one of the ways she carried off her performance was to dance, literally, from her rapidly spinning, twirling wheel chair pirouetting around her happy male partner. Her face conveyed that mode of mobility could not possibly be construed as anything other than perfectly normal, which for her it was. And her face and entire body conveyed the maximum possible bliss that anyone could derive from dancing. I later learned that this student had a spinal injury from an automobile accident.

And simultaneously there was another student actress, sister, who performed with a special partner, namely, a trained dog, the kind used to protect people with a history of seizures.

So there these two students were, at the same time, having the times of their lives and giving the same to an appreciative audience.

I came away from this even more fully appreciating so many things about our students: their diversity, courage, abilities, optimism, tenacity, perseverance and joie de vivre.

And I came away really appreciating this open door college for having an obviously not well funded theater program at all, but at least they had one; and for giving these students such an affirming developmental experience, that was truly educational and inspirational for many members of the audience I am sure.

I never had any idea that I could earn my living by talking, literally, until my squadron commander in the Air Force ordered me to perform community service, which he defined as being an adjunct college teacher for the University of South Carolina’s budding extension system back in the 1960’s. Higher educators weren’t exactly rushing into South Carolina 3 years after the Civil Rights Act and so there were lots of vacancies.

When I got over my nervousness about teaching during the first six-eight weeks or so of my first college course, I realized that I was having a ball. And like a true academic, rather than just enjoying it I decided I would analyze my reactions. I had never had any career planning in college because it didn’t exist then at small liberal arts colleges like the one I attended. So I had never been through any kid of exercise to get me thinking about the intersection of my values, activities that gave me pleasure, and possible vocational options. It didn’t take too much thinking on my part though to realize that I had discovered in college teaching the four things I loved to do: talk, read, write and help people. And so I have earned my living for the past 46 years by talking.

But I find now people don’t want to talk to me nearly as much. They don’t call me anymore.

Instead, they either write me an e-mail or they go to the website hosted by the non-profit organization which I lead (www.jngi.org). This is a difficult adjustment for me!

I get lots of e-mail messages asking me truly profound questions, to which any thoughtful reply would ideally take a book, or at least a book chapter. And I get these messages from people who would never call me. This is either because they are too far away—from all over the globe and its different time zones; or younger and much less senior people to me in terms of professional achievements and hence they perceive social distance. Actually, I would be happy to have anyone call me. I have always loved the telephone. This love affair began as a teenager when I used the phone to talk to my adolescent heart throbs, said conversations which my mother tried (often unsuccessfully) to monitor and curtail to get me to do my homework.

Seriously, it is common for me to get e-mail requests which say “Please tell me what needs to be done to improve the first-year experience.” Great question. I have been working my whole adult life on it. (To be continued…)

This is a question I have been asking myself for years, and largely in the context of considering some proposed policy or action involving how my or some other institution is or is considering treating its students.

One of the biggest changes I have observed and thought about has been the movement over the past two decades to drive more and more support and information transmission functions “to the web.” Americans loved technology long before the computer. In fact, my favorite American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, observed in the late 1840’s: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

Because I work primarily with colleges and universities that serve disadvantaged and underprepared, lower SES students, I constantly ask myself whether or not what we are trying to do for them, no matter how well intentioned, will further advantage—or disadvantage them.

And so as I observe how at most campuses we want to drive students to the web to glean what used to be found in print catalogues and what used to be explained by academic advisors in real time sessions, how we provide orientation, advising, registration, library help, you name it, all on line, I can’t help but wonder who are we doing this for?

Are we doing this because it is more convenient for us?

Because it reduces the time we actually have to spend with students? Thus freeing us to do our real work….much of that also done using technology.

Because it is more convenient for the students?

It gives them 24/7 access as compared to the much more limited times we might be available to do this real time.

Because we believe that they really would prefer to get their information this way?

Because it is more cost efficient?

Because it has enabled us to reduce staff resource allocations and hence expenditures?

Because we have been persuaded by the most recent purveyors of technology solutions to buy their products so we have the latest upgrade?

Because we believe—or want to believe those purveyors’ promises of greater efficiency and even miraculous educational outcomes like improved student retention?

What about students who live in contexts where they cannot afford on-line access?

What about students for whom the economic inequality in this country means they cannot afford to have their own versions of the technology that we are now requiring them to use?

I ask these questions because I am still trying to practice a mantra that I learned and insisted I practice when I first became an academic administrator way back in 1974: Thou shalt do your best to do for students what might be best for them as opposed to best for you or the …(in my case, University).

President

I visit campuses for a living. I visit campuses for fun. I visit campuses while on vacation, too.

Let me comment first on the latter point. Occasionally, when my wife, Betsy Barefoot and I are on vacation, driving somewhere, and we see a road sign for a college or a university that we have not visited officially (between us we have been on about 700 campuses), just for the fun of it we will get off the thoroughfare on which we were headed before impulsively deciding to check this new place out and we will go mystery shopping.

Usually that involves, for starters, walking into the Admissions Office and seeing how we are treated as we maintain our anonymity. This is sometimes very revealing. You ought to try it.

In fact, that is some advice that should apply to all of us in higher education, namely, that we ought to get out and see as many institutions as possible, for the primary purpose of putting our own institution in perspective.

Unfortunately, in large part, only the senior members of the academy get to travel much because they have access to funds to support such travel. This also varies by institutional type. In my experience there are two types of institutions where the faculty and professional staff tend to travel the least: 1) small, private, non-selective liberal arts colleges; and 2) community colleges. Financial resources plays a major role in both these contexts. Many of the small privates that I work with are especially insular. This is too bad. It means they lack sufficient insights into the nature of the institutions, particularly the public ones, which are their formidable competitors. As for the community colleges, they have inherited the secondary school culture from which so many of them emerged half a century ago and that predecessor culture uses what are known as “in-service” to provide faculty/staff development. What this means basically is that the educators, below the ranks of senior leaders, don’t get to go anywhere and are “developed” by imported talent brought in to provide “in-service days”, and also using in-house talent quite appropriately to perform the same function.

One possible strategy for alleviating this institutionalized and self perpetuating insularity would be to encourage the development of faculty/staff “exchanges” especially between institutional types.

As a higher educator I practice my profession in a very atypical manner in that I get to visit many campuses on a very regular basis. Many of these visits are with the institutions that are engaged in the signature work on our non-profit organization, a self-study, planning and improvement process. This enables me to be constantly learning by noting the similarities and differences between the institutions I visit. I will share just a few from my recent travels, none of which were of the “mystery shopping” genre.

I am so used to noting in student union buildings/centers a plethora of businesses, what our business and finance colleagues call “auxiliary enterprises” that seem to be trying to sell our students just about anything, that when I went in a student center recently where they weren’t doing that, it really struck me as notable and commendable. This was a beautiful new student center at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove Illinois. My hat was off to the planners of this facility who actually left the overwhelming portion of the space to non-commercial purposes, such as a one stop shopping administrative  commons for student services and really spacious seating areas for students to relax, eat, study, socialize, do group study at tables, etc. Good for these people.

I am so used to seeing the physical  facilities which serve are lowest SES students, especially community colleges and truly “urban” campuses, looking almost as poor as the students they serve, that when I saw the opposite recently I just couldn’t get over my shock. Again, this was at a visit at Waubonsee Community College, which does serve a significant cohort of economically disadvantaged students, but you could never tell that from its facilities, some of the most beautiful I have seen anywhere, at any type of post secondary institution.

Very recently I visited a university, Salem State University in Massachusetts where I joined approximately 130 faculty and administrators to explore the current practice of collaboration on campus. Now I have participated in all sorts of retreats, summits, colloquia, symposia in my career; but the idea of pulling together a university community to explore how well we are collaborating with each other and how we could improve that, struck me as very novel, needed, and commendable. What a model for students too. Imagine what it might be like if they could live in communities and work in organizations that focused more on collaboration than the cherished American norm of collaboration.

I participated recently in a meeting of college and university presidents in New England where I heard a stunning description by a president of that president’s fellow CEO’s from an institutional type presidential gathering. The description was that “they were primarily a group of aging white men hoping to get to the point of retirement without having to make the tough decisions that needed to be made right now!” Now, that really caught my attention, not so much for the demographic generalization, but for the observation about abstaining from critical decision making. I would have to say that in my experience, that does not describe the majority of presidents/chancellors that I interact with from any institutional sector. Being a college/university president strikes me as a job that is getting tougher and tougher. I admire many of them.

Twice in a month I have been on campuses (CUNY’s York College and Waubonsee Community College) where I heard moving testimonials from students as to the powerful influence on their learning, skill and self concept development, from being involved in co-curricular activities, particularly interest affinity groups. Most recently I heard students at Waubonsee Community College describe life-changing lessons they had learned from being founders of new student organizations.

I could go on but I won’t, at least not in this posting. You have to get the idea. There are other ways I continue my learning about different campus cultures and practices but this is the manner in which I think I learn the most. What about you? How do you learn, especially about your own campus culture and its impact on students and educators alike?

Almost always when I visit a campus and have a scheduled meeting with a group of students, there has been some vetting involved in whom I meet with. It would be very uncommon for a host for my visit to schedule me with a group of the most unsuccessful students. But that’s exactly whom I need to talk to on occasion, and not only to remind me of my own very inauspicious beginnings in college.

Like all of us who went to college I have an alma mater. Mine is Marietta College. And I am pleased to see and say that they are doing more for students who are academically deficient in the first term of college than many places I know about. These students are either offered, or in some cases required, to take a two-credit college success course during their second term of college.  I was placed on academic probation after my first term at Marietta and all I received was a letter to that effect giving me one semester only to get my act together.  And I did and got off academic probation. That was a life changing and life saving transition experience.

Recently I met via SKYPE with two groups of these students at Marietta College, about nine to a group.  They were disproportionately male, minority, and student athlete. But they were all very approachable and I thought receptive to having a conversation with a interested stranger about their initial college experiences.

So what do you say to students who are on academic probation? What is to be learned from them? I am not sure what is the best thing to say to them but my approach was/is to practice some honest self-disclosure, share my own miserable first-term, and see what we might have in common. Often when I talk with students I note and reflect on the ways in which their experiences are different from mine; but in the case of students on probation, I find their experiences are much more likely to be the same or very similar to  mine.

I will share a few observations on our conversations:

1. Many of these students were overinvested in athletics. This did not surprise me. We all like to invest in those activities we are already good at and for which we get lots of attention and reinforcement, from both coaches and fellow players. If only more of us professors taught like coaches! A challenge is for institutions to give these students a commensurate amount of attention and support for their academic development. I could certainly relate to this, as I had been a varsity athlete too. As I told the students, my team sport experience was a motivator to stay in college to remain part of the group and to please a parent. They could relate to that. I also told them that ultimately to please myself I had to choose between being an athlete and a really good student. And I couldn’t do both and get enough sleep. So I gave up the sport. This all comes around to purpose.
2. The real elephant in the room for all these students was/is purpose: why am I here, at this college, at this time, doing these things, with these people? I told them that if they could sort that out anything was possible. I also gave them suggestions as to the types of experiences and people who could help them do just that. And I shared with them that initially my purpose was to please my father with whom I had made a deal with to go to college for one year after which time I could quit if I wanted and he would get off my back! So this got the students to consider for whom were they in college?
3. Another common theme was coming from urban/suburban areas to a rural, isolated place.  And that’s really tough. I shared with them that women usually do better at that because of their greater ability to hunker down and create engaging and supportive relationships wherever they are. The students had mixed views of which gender might be better at doing this but I told them what the research has shown are the advantages that accrue to women. A key to success of course is being here now, making the most of where you are, especially with and through the people around you.
4. This got us to homesickness. I told them I could write the book on that. I was really homesick, in part because of a romantic relationship back home. We considered the pros and cons of that. The instructor of the class asked each student to send me after our conversation some feedback about their reactions and what they might have learned, if anything. This point about the significant other back home really spoke to a number of them. For these students the on-campus residential college experience, geographically removed from their home of origin, had not yet clicked. Overall, on campus residence is a significant predictor for college success and completion, but not yet for these students.
5. Students on academic probation are good at asking questions. They are, as they should be, questioning everything. Why am I here? How did I get in this mess? What can I do to get off? Do I have what it takes? What strengths do I have at all in my interests outside academics that might also apply to academics? I think that one of the things we need to do more intentionally is to put these students in group settings where they can explore precisely these questions, think about them, talk about them, write about them, and make some decisions about them.
6. These students wanted to know, of course, what they did to get on academic probation and how to get off. The first part of that I explained by attribution to my homesickness, depression, not getting any help because none was available, missing my girlfriend back home, and lacking the right kind of college level study skills. How did I get off? By the serendipitous adoption of me by an older student who mentored me in the art and craft of study skills, especially note taking; by getting a new academic advisor, one who believed in and liked me; and by picking my courses by professors, upon the advice of my advisor and student mentor, professors who would be more likely to engage me intellectually, which is exactly what they did. I was pleasantly surprised by the feedback I received from the students on the subject of note taking. I had described for them my semi miraculous improvement of grades once I learned how to take lecture notes and use them to predict the examination questions. They wanted me to explain this could be the case and I explained that in explicit detail. It’s not rocket science but it really is important and they got it. Yes, we would all agree that many entering college students don’t have the requisite study skills. But that’s because they have been taught those skills. And when they are, they can learn them and be successful. And I’m living proof. So I told the students if I could do it, so could they.
7. And, of course, these students wanted to discuss the challenges of picking a program of study and how to relate that to occupational choice. While many of us who teach in the liberal arts may wish our students were not so vocationally oriented, it is very understandable that they are.  We really have to address this much earlier and more intentionally. This all relates to motivation.
8. I was asked some very good questions. The one I liked the best was really a request to define what I would mean by “excellence” in the beginning college experience. The questioner learned that professors don’t often give simple or succinct answers to the most important questions. And I told them that in life the questions were often more important than the answers. I was also asked to reflect on my college experience and to report those experiences from which I had learned the most. That one was a tough one. But I told them that if forced to make the choice, the experience that was the greatest teacher was that of becoming a student activist in student government co-curricular activities, where I had many opportunities to put in place the thinking, writing, organizing, and visioning skills I was learning in the curriculum. I explained that it was in that context that I learned to do what I do now for a living: help colleges universities effect meaningful change.
9. I was also impressed by how many of the students wrote me subsequently to thank me for my candor—almost as if they aren’t used to that. I think what they were commenting on was more than I would self disclose at all. And I also found it noteworthy that a number of them thanked me for “serving our country.” This was in response to my telling them that I had been drafted after finishing college. My assumption is that few of them know anyone who has served recently in the armed forces. It also suggested to me that maybe they don’t hear enough from other adults about the importance of serving their country—and that when they do, they don’t find this aversive at all, to the contrary.

I guess the point of this piece is to suggest that you have your own dialog with some students on academic probation. I predict it will be salutary for them, and for you.