Special to BIZ. Magazine
SHREVEPORT – The real work has begun.
Participants from the LSUS faculty, staff and student body met with members of the Gardner Institute and Complete College America on Monday on the LSUS campus.
The meeting officially kicks off a five-year process of transforming the first two years of the college experience aimed at closing inequitable performance gaps and improving student learning and success.
LSUS was one of 11 universities across the nation chosen for this inaugural cohort, which was selected this past summer.
More than 40 members representing various entities across campus began to lay the groundwork, highlighting the university’s success in these areas as well as opportunities to improve.
“Understanding context is the first step in the institutional transformation process,” said Dr. Brandon Smith, associate vice president of Gardner Institute, a leading national student success nonprofit organization. “(Monday’s) work centers on hearing from the campus community and asking questions about how systems support student success.
“You can look at outcome data, but those data are just indicators of the larger systems that students, faculty, and staff work to navigate each day. In both the survey responses and the participants’ voices in the meeting, it’s clear that a culture of care undergirds student success work at LSUS.”
The initiative’s aim is to move toward eliminating demographics, zip codes, and similar variables as the best predictors of college success.
In September, LSUS achieved Tier 1 status in assisting low-income graduates achieve economic mobility in a study conducted by national thinktank Third Way.
LSUS’s success in this area along with growing enrollment and budget, a rarity among public regional universities, attracted consideration to be a cohort member.
“Because of the growth of our online programs, we’re able to take some of that additional revenue to explore what our students need,” said Dr. Helen Wise, assistant academic provost at LSUS. “We’re not in a situation where we are trying to figure out what student services to cut, we’re investing in student services.
“We’re actually looking at what additional supports our students need, and we have a group that is very committed to this work.”
Cohort members, which hail from New York to Alaska down to the Gulf South, will share strategies and initiatives throughout the program with the goal of developing a blueprint for other universities to follow.
Complete College America, a national advocate for dramatically increasing college completion rates and closing institutional performance gaps, works in tandem with the Gardner Institute to evaluate and improve upon college education systems.
“Today, the work becomes alive, from data on the page to actualization,” said Dr. Akilah Martin, strategy director for Complete College America. “We have an opportunity to be in the room together to come to agreements on how this work will lead to student success and completion at LSUS.
“Complete College America and the Gardner Institute work together to ensure LSUS has the support and resources for this transformational change.”
Wise added this collaborative environment, complete with the partnership of cutting-edge organizations and universities, is possible because of the long-term commitment to improving the structure of higher education.
“Some student success initiatives are tied to a timeframe – take a six-week class and implement a strategy or try something out for a year,” Wise said. “But this is developing a network of support from across the entire country that we have access to for five years.
“We’re not coming back next year and asking, ‘Did everything change?’ We actually have the time to plan and implement this program.”
