Retain your students: the analytics, policies and politics of reinvention strategies.

Baer, Linda L. ; Duin, Ann Hill

It is time for all colleges and universities to marshal the resources needed to make completion our strategic priority.

IN JANUARY 2013, the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment (NCHEA) wrote an open letter to college and university leaders. The commission, made up of six presidential associations in Washington, DC, includes representatives from institutions ranging from small liberal arts colleges to community colleges to large research institutions. The leaders of the commission reported:

The strength of America's future depends on the ingenuity sparked by our college graduates. Now more than ever before, our nation needs leaders of higher education to recommit themselves to making college more accessible and, ultimately, more attainable. (National Commission on Higher Education Attainment 2013, p. 5)

This article calls to action every college and university president and chancellor to make retention and completion a critical campus priority. Every institution must pay as much attention to the number of degrees it grants--completion--as it does to success in admissions and recruitment. It is time for all colleges and universities to marshal the resources needed to make completion our strategic priority (National Commission on Higher Education Attainment 2013).

Why does higher education need to embrace reinvention strategies?

Change in higher education is real. Whether it's pressure for more accountability, assessment, student learning outcomes, competencies, or affordability, institutions are being pressured at all levels: local, state, regional, federal, parental, and citizen. The change to date has often been nothing more than tweaking around the margins without really facing up to the massive change needed to adequately serve the students of today and the future.

In this article, we share perspectives on the importance of a three-part strategy for reinvention that includes the analytics, policies, and politics required for launching, nurturing, and sustaining change in higher education. It is critical for leaders to understand the deep changes on the horizon so that they can equip their institutions with a culture that embraces change in order to improve how we deliver on our promise of education for the future. To be fully engaged stewards of the future, we all need to be aware of the importance of analytics in developing the backdrop to continuous improvement, the role of policies in supporting the framework that will allow us to deliver on our promise, and the politics that form the complex environment that either leads to sustaining the current ways of doing business or supporting and enhancing the new opportunities of the future.

ANALYTICS

The use of analytics in higher education is a major focus at many institutions today. Many campuses are claiming that analytics has the power to improve student success. Analytics provides the tools to assess, analyze, and change what institutions do in relation to students, faculty, and the learning environment. President Michael Crow (2012) of Arizona State University determined that we need to develop an environment of "no more excuses," and he set goals to accomplish improvements (figure 1):

Figure 1 The Goals of Arizona State University 2002

Goals 2002                  Outcomes 2011

Increase graduate numbers   Increased degrees awarded by 52%

Increase graduation rate    Increased six-year graduation
                            rate by 19%

Increase freshman           Increased freshman persistence
retention rate              to 84% (up 9%)

Expand ethnic and           Increased minority enrollment as %
economic diversity          of total population by 52%

                            Increased enrollment 30%

Source: Adapted from Crow 2012.

Figure 1 shows an example of how analytics can be used in higher education to review past trends, plan in the present circumstances, and anticipate the future. Crow believes that the outcomes shown in the figure were made possible through a comprehensive use of analytics (Crow 2012). If you use these analytical tools, you will know where you are, what you are doing, if what you are doing is working, if you need to be doing new things customized to fit your particular school or demographic, and infinitely more information that will help students be successful. What a treasure trove of information! But does this stay a buried treasure? Or, if institutions develop reports, what is done in response? Leaders today need to use the power of data, trends, and metrics to improve student success and institutional performance.

PAST DATA AND ANALYTICS

Higher education began to take increased notice of enrollment management in the 1980s when enrollments were stagnating. This effort was largely tied to influencing enrollments as the numbers of traditional high school students started to decline. Campuses began to move to more targeted marketing, focusing on yields from feeder high schools to improve enrollments. But few activities were focused on the retention side of enrollment management (Seidman 2012).

Most institutions have largely remained at this level of data utilization. While they have large amounts of data, and are sometimes even "awash in data," the information contained in the data remains a buried treasure as few people ever access it for basic reporting and fewer still use it for decision making.

Through analytics we can revisit past student enrollments, admissions characteristics, and persistence levels. We can identify courses that have high rates of dropouts, withdrawals, and failures. We can detect past trends in majors as well as local, regional, and state needs in the labor market. We can begin to move an institution past the buried treasure status of student information.

PRESENT DATA AND ANALYTICS

Indeed, over the years, we have seen the emergence of student-success scientists. There is a long tradition of research regarding what matters in college and what improves student success. However, much of that work has focused on what students do. Today, we are also looking at what institutions are doing to improve success. Campus teams assess data, trends, and outcomes. They evaluate practices to determine what works and for whom. Some have moved to predictive models that bring more insight to the student completion agenda.

Metrics are moving from the level of reporting and analysis to action, in which higher education can make sense of what is going on with students. Currently, higher education is challenged to account for low persistence, high dropouts, and low completion even as the cost of education has skyrocketed--for students, parents, states, and the nation. Analysis has moved to promising research-based practices with focused strategies; with serious concentration on the first days, weeks, and year of a student's learning life and beyond; and with the commitment to develop and deploy interventions so that more students can persist. Practices now can be more intentional and can empower learners to succeed. Learning management systems and learning analytics tools provide opportunities to gather data to assess what is happening now and what can happen. The hidden treasure trove of data is now being made available to more faculty, staff, and advisors.

A key example is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). The survey grew out of research at Indiana University in which researchers began to explore what practices resulted in active and engaged learning environments and experiences. Surveys accumulated data from students and faculty about practices that resulted in increased student engagement and retention. George Kuh and his colleagues then studied those institutions with Documented Effective Educational Practices (DEEP) that were consistently doing better in student engagement, persistence, and completion. The High Impact Practices identified in Kuh's research are known to improve student engagement, persistence, and success. Kuh's work resulted in a number of reports published by the NSSE Institute on "six conditions that matter to student success." They are:

1. "Living" mission and "lived" educational philosophy

2. Unshakeable focus on student learning

3. Environments adapted for educational enrichment

4. Clear pathways to student success

5. Improvement-oriented ethos

6. Shared responsibility for educational quality and student success

Exemplar campuses attend to these conditions for the majority of students, and evidence shows that they have higher student completion rates. Yet, even when we know the importance of these conditions, there are resource issues involved. Intervention practices for at-risk students are labor intensive and costly; they require intrusive advising and ongoing connections and communications with students (Kuh et al. 2010).

We know more about what interventions work best given the cost of the practice. Long-term research from NSSE and others resulted in the development of the Association of American Colleges and Universities' (AAC&U) list of practices that enhance student engagement. These practices include:

* First-year seminars and experiences

* Common intellectual experiences

* Learning communities

* Writing-intensive courses

* Collaborative assignments and projects

* Undergraduate research

* Diversity/global learning

* Service learning, community-based learning

* Internships

* Capstone courses and projects (Association of American Colleges and Universities 2014)

Which of these high-impact practices do you support on your campus, and how many students and faculty are involved? What effort will it take on your campus to scale and sustain what is known to improve the student learning environment and, ultimately, student success?

FUTURE DATA AND ANALYTICS

Every student who is serious about succeeding will do so. Analytics at the predictive level can provide a road map for maximizing student learning success personalized to the individual learner. Improved alignment with K-12 education to increase readiness, focused advising and support in the first year, ongoing training for faculty and staff on student learning needs, and course schedules developed for the student's success are among the components of taking student success seriously.

The future includes data tools that motivate students to succeed. Adaptive learning platforms will move students at a pace they can master. Personalized learning tools will allow for smart data so that students can improve their success across an academic time frame. These tools will include "nudge" technologies that support the "right choice" architecture for students and advisors; they will adapt to student motivation, behavior, and record of achievement. These tools will begin to incorporate non-cognitive behaviors, and they will help faculty and advisors intervene and improve advising. These tools will capitalize on the fact that people make the difference in student success.

Exemplar campuses will wrap the student experience around integration with faculty, financial aid specialists, advising centers, tutoring centers, transfer advisors, and counselors all working toward the same goal--student success. Some are calling this a student-success network and engaging the total institutional environment: instructors, admissions, residential hall directors, tutoring, advising, deans, disability services, financial aid, and other student-focused services. With powerful personalized learning systems, students will take the right courses at the right times matched to the right major cluster of career/training opportunities that match their interests. They will follow a career pathway guided by the advisors, faculty, and staff on their success team. Thus the treasure trove, previously hidden or open to only a few, is now open, transparent, and available for the student, faculty, advisor, and student-success team to access.

What is clear is the need for a rethinking, realignment, and reinvention of institutional policies and practices around a culture of student success. Such a rethinking has already been developed; it is known as the Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) framework. The PAR framework is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort that brings two-year, four-year, public, private, traditional, and progressive institutions together to collaborate on identifying the points of student loss. It focuses on using predictive analytics to improve success for all students. Deliverables include flexible predictive models, openly published common data definitions, and a student-success matrix that links predictions with interventions and student supports, making prediction actionable.

The robust Student Success Matrix (SSMx) developed by the PAR partners provides predictive categories based on research literature and partner experience (Swan et al. 2013). The categories include the predictors shown in figure 2 cross-referenced with the time of student experience (connection, entry, progress, and completion). This matrix is a powerful resource for inventorying, organizing, and conceptualizing supports aimed at improving student outcomes. It connects various student risk types/predictors with supports that have the potential to appropriately and effectively address the specific risk issues at the points at which they will be most likely to have the greatest positive effect. PAR institutions invest in the time, people, resources, and long-term strategies needed to address each component in the matrix.

POLICIES AND PRACTICES

If institutional goals include improving student success, then policies and practices will be required that align to maximize readiness, support remediation for success, optimize the first-year experience, and monitor and mentor learners through the subsequent years to completion. Critical elements include adequate advising, success coaches, tutoring, gateway course scheduling for success, consistent and regular advising for majors, and placement for internships and practicums.

The institutional framework required to support this reinvention will include strategic policies and practices linked to student success. While higher education is well aware of the high-impact practices that support and encourage student engagement and success, evidence reflects fragmented approaches to actually delivering these practices. In addition, there are situations in which what is known to support student engagement is made optional rather than required, thereby sending a message that these opportunities are not really necessary or vital to student success. A basic issue concerns what is communicated to students regarding the information gathered about them that is intended to assist in adequate placement. For example, many transfer students are not informed about transfer credits accepted until after they have started the term.

College degree completion rates are considered to be among the most important indicators of institutional quality. If this is indeed the case, we should see a culture of student success permeate the institution. Everyone would be part of the success team. This requires new expectations, ongoing professional development, and a deep culture of data and analytics.

THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

Colleges and universities are now called upon to address low graduation rates. President Obama's American Graduation Initiative has set a goal of adding five million more graduates to the U.S. workforce this decade in order to remain competitive in the global marketplace. To meet this goal, higher education must radically improve degree completion rates, achieve equity in attainment gaps between groups, and decrease time to degree. As Linda DeAngelo and her colleagues note, "If institutions are to improve their degree completion rates they must first be able to accurately assess how effective they are in moving students they enroll toward graduation" (DeAngelo et al. 2011, p. 4). The focus must be on creating attainment conditions for all students who begin college. Institutional goals should include establishing institution-wide conversations and actions around how to reduce detrimental factors and increase success factors.

At the most basic level, colleges must do the following:

1. Compare their rates of degree completion to those of similar institutional type

2. Develop equations that can be used to evaluate their completion rates relative to others

3. Use the degree completion calculator (Higher Education Research Institute 2014) to evaluate how their rates can be improved using alternative scenarios

What research, data, and organizational infrastructure is needed to support this change? Why are the numbers so difficult to move? Why is building the student-success environment moving so slowly?

While we may now be increasing our gathering and use of data, we lack the alignment with institutional policies needed to sustain a changed environment. The strongest motivators for strategic reinvention come from local and state boards of trustees and regents, state legislators and governors, and regional accreditors, whose mandates require evidence of and progress on student persistence and completion. In addition, the federal government is debating the issues surrounding the amount of federal financial aid that goes to support students who never complete. Conversations are focused on supporting institutions that have strong persistence and completion rates. Currently, the federal government is discussing the use of a ranking system for colleges and universities based on the metrics for success.

REGIONAL ACCREDITATION

In February 2012, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association adopted new criteria for accreditation, assumed practices, and obligations of affiliation effective for all institutions January 1, 2013. Included in Criterion Four: Teaching and Learning: Evaluation and Improvement is item 4C:

The institution demonstrates a commitment to educational improvement through ongoing attention to retention, persistence, and completion rates in its degree and certificate programs.

1. The institution has defined goals for student retention, persistence, and completion that are ambitious but attainable and appropriate to its mission, student populations, and educational offerings.

2. The institution collects and analyzes information on student retention, persistence, and completion of its programs.

3. The institution uses information on student retention, persistence, and completion of programs to make improvements as warranted by the data.

4. The institution's processes and methodologies for collecting and analyzing information on student retention, persistence, and completion of programs reflect good practice. (Institutions are not required to use IPEDS definitions in their determination of persistence or completion rates. Institutions are encouraged to choose measures that are suitable to their student populations, but institutions are accountable for the validity of their measures.) (Higher Learning Commission 2014, Criterion Four)

Other regional accreditors are adopting similar language and expectations for their institutions.

To support its commitment to persistence and completion, the HLC launched an Academy for Student Persistence and Completion in early 2014. This academy provides a fouryear sequence of flexible events and activities designed to build institutional capacity to improve the persistence and completion of students. Academy participants focus on (1) effective collection of data and other information to identify student persistence and completion patterns, (2) evaluation and improvement of current persistence and completion strategies, and (3) development of new student persistence and completion strategies for specific cohorts of students.

NATIONAL AND STATE EFFORTS

In Outcomes-Based Funding: The Wave of Implementation, Dennis Jones of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) notes that outcomes-based funding has moved into the mainstream of state-level higher education financing policy (Jones 2013). The NCHEMS staff reviewed the various outcomes-based funding models that have been deployed by states in order to develop a scorecard on implementation. Several points emerged from this review

* Outcomes-based funding models have been developed in the context of state or system goals

* Almost all allow for mission differentiation

* Most recognize the importance of successfully serving underrepresented students

* Some provide year-to-year rewards based on improvements, while others use the most recent year or a three-year average

* The majority use completed credit hours instead of enrolled credit hours as a driver

* The proportion of state funding varies enormously from .5 percent to 100 percent

* Most have carved the outcomes-based funding pool out of the base allocation (Jones 2013)

According to Complete College America (CCA), 16 states are implementing performance-based funding with 10 more planning to adopt it. While performance-based funding will not guarantee more college graduates, CCA believes that it is an essential "game changer" strategy to ensure that the necessary conditions exist for other reforms to succeed. CCA asks: Are states implementing the best reforms to get more college graduates? Are they linking the best research on practices with changes on the campus? (Complete College America 2013).

CCA has also developed an institutional road map to increase student success. The components include:

* Performance funding

* Co-requisite remediation

* Full-time is fifteen

* Structured schedules

* Guided pathways to success (Complete College America 2014)

Some national organizations are focusing on training board members to understand and use the data that support student success. The Association for Community College Trustees (ACCT) is committed to increasing the engagement of community college trustees and governing boards in the student-success movement. Effective governance with an emphasis on student success is a priority for our nation's community colleges.

ACCT has developed a tool kit designed to provide community college leaders with the resources needed to create a culture of data-informed decision making that leads to measurable and meaningful improvements in student success. The tool kit includes sections on

* Readiness: Determining the institution's readiness engaging in student equity, success, and completion initiatives

* Planning: Engaging in a planning process to improve student equity, success, and completion

* Implementation: Establishing policies to advance a shared vision for closing achievement gaps and improving academic quality, equity, success and completion

* Outcomes: Assessing how students are progressing, whether achievement gaps are closing, and whether policy changes will be required (Association for Community College Trustees 2012)

President Obama has challenged every American to commit to at least one year of higher education or postsecondary training. The president has also set a new goal for the country: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

As noted on The White House website:

Earning a postsecondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few; rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy. Over this decade, employment in jobs requiring education beyond a high school diploma will grow more rapidly than employment in jobs that do not; of the 30 fastest growing occupations, more than half require postsecondary education. With the average earnings of college graduates at a level that is twice as high as that of workers with only a high school diploma, higher education is now the clearest pathway into the middle class. (The White House n.d.(b), [paragraph] 1)

To make college selection easier and more streamlined, the federal government has established the College Affordability and Transparency Center and created a College Scorecard designed by the U.S. Department of Education that provides information to students and parents about college affordability and value (The White House n.d.(a)). Each scorecard includes five key pieces of information about a college: costs, graduation rate, loan default rate, median borrowing, and employment. Users can search for a college by name or by selecting factors that are important to the student's college search (e.g., programs or majors offered, awards offered, location, undergraduate enrollment size, campus setting).

A CALL TO ACTION

In summary, student success depends on a wide range of factors, some of which are beyond the control of colleges and universities. States have been divesting in public higher education over the years, leading to cuts in academic and support services programs and higher tuitions. In response, the federal government must keep its commitment to student aid, which has been the bedrock of meeting the promise of higher education for low-income Americans. In addition, institutions need better data to measure how well they do at retaining and graduating students. Finally, students bear a substantial share of the responsibility for their own education (National Commission on Higher Education Attainment 2013). We know what to do and now it is time to do it!

Vincent Tinto (2012, p. 120) makes it perfectly clear: "In admitting a student, a college enters into a contract--indeed, takes on a moral obligation--to establish those conditions on campus, especially in the classroom, that enhance the likelihood that students who are willing to expend the effort will succeed."

Tinto (2012) provides an institutional call to action for improving student success:

1. Develop a cross-functional team dedicated to student success

2. Assess the student experience and analyze patterns of student progress

3. Invest in long-term program development and ongoing assessment of program and institutional functioning

4. Coherently align institutional actions to key progression points identified by the analysis of institutional data

5. Change the way we focus on developmental education

6. Align academic support to key first-year courses

7. Establish early warning systems for key first-year courses

8. Ensure all first-year students have experience in learning in community with others

9. Provide advising to all new students and those who change majors

10. Invest in faculty development, especially for new faculty who teach first-year courses

11. Systematically align student experiences from entry to completion

HIGHER EDUCATION: 2020

In Transforming in an Age of Disruptive Change, Donald Norris and his colleagues note

Today, higher education is pressured to transform broadly and rapidly, partially because we have failed to achieve significant and needed change. We are starting to face multiple combinations of challenges. In previous decades, these challenges occurred singly and independently. If the multiple-challenge trend continues, then higher education could face a new "perfect storm": declining authority, unfavorable economics, new competition, and reduced career opportunities for new graduates. This could translate into declining value propositions for stakeholders all around. Taken together, these factors are truly disruptive to business-as-usual approaches in higher education. They call for fundamentally different strategies, business models, and emerging practices to deal with the Age of Disruption that extends forward toward 2020 and beyond. (Norris et al. 2013, p. 11)

In the Harvard Business Review article "Two Routes to Resilience," Clark Gilbert, Matthew Eyring, and Richard N. Foster identify a crucial strategy for reinvention. In order for organizations to reinvent in the context of disruptive change, they need to develop a two-track approach to transformation as the best path to organizational resiliency (Gilbert, Eyring, and Foster 2012):

   Transformation Track A (Reshape/Reinvent the Core
   Model) should reposition the core business of the
   enterprise, adapting the current (or legacy) business
   model to the altered marketplace. For higher education
   this means adapting existing programs, experiences,
   and outcomes to be competitive with emerging
   alternatives.

   Transformation Track B (Discover Future Business
   Model) should create a separate disruptive business
   to develop innovations that will become the source
   of future growth. For higher education this means
   discovering offerings to address new or unmet value
   propositions that were not possible in the past but that
   are now possible in the Web 3.0 world of the 21stcentury
   Knowledge Age.

Institutions will need to identify their core programs and adapt these to this new marketplace in order to remain competitive, and they will simultaneously need to develop innovative directions that fuel future growth.

BLOW UP THE CURRENT BUSINESS MODEL

President Paul LeBlanc of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is approaching transformative change in this very manner. SNHU invites students to choose the format that works for them: traditional on-campus daytime programs, evening and weekend part-time and hybrid courses on location at regional centers, or courses and programs offered through the Center for Online and Continuing Education. The innovative approach to distance learning has made SNHU the nation's fastest growing online school. In addition, SNHU recently received authorization to provide competency-based education (Southern New Hampshire University 2014).

SNHU is busy questioning the shape of its own future. "We want to create the business model that blows up our current business model," LeBlanc says, "because if we don't, someone else will" (Kamenetz 2012, [paragraph] 8). SNHU's work includes innovative directions in "establishing satellite campuses and launching a groundbreaking three-year Honors Program in Business" (Cullity 2012, [paragraph] 5). Based in part on free Creative Commons-licensed open educational resources that can be delivered on e-readers, the program will be self-paced and will give students access to multiple kinds of support: peers online, faculty experts, and people from their local communities. LeBlanc envisions making the learning materials available for free, much like MIT's Open Courseware; students would pay only for faculty time if they need it and for competency-based assessments, including portfolio reviews, in order to get course credit (Kamenetz 2012).

SNHU has set a course to be a transformative institution. In so doing, the leadership has established three separate educational models supported by three separate business models. This is a variation on Gilbert, Eyring, and Foster's Transformation Track A and Transformation Track B. Track A is claiming a creative space in online education with multiple levels of support for learners. Track B is a competency-based model requiring a totally new approach to education that responds to the rapidly changing skills, knowledge, and competencies needed in the 21st-century Knowledge Age. This approach by SNHU is brilliant in that other institutions have tried to add new educational models to the existing traditional one, in essence bolting the new onto the old, only to have that approach fail. As we have seen, the new cannot exist bolted onto the old policies, practices, and culture. In order for the new to thrive, it needs a space, model, and culture that support its unique existence.

THREE-PART APPROACH TO REINVENTION

After developing a strategy map for reinvention based on the Track A and Track B models, the next step is to build the approach for reinvention. To do this:

* First, build an analytics foundation with ready access to the data, analysis, and predictive analytics that will enable the institution to know where students are, where they need to go, and how they will get there. Smart systems are improving students' choices and matching their interests, skills, and aspirations with colleges and majors that better fit their needs. Leaders need to assess their data and analytics capacities and determine what they need to do to improve their data, the enterprise supporting the data, the leadership needed to invest in and sustain the efforts, the technical infrastructure, and the people needed to run the data and analytics enterprise.

* Second, assess policies and practices to see where the institution can modify its rules to enhance student success. The Linking Institutional Policies to Student Success project from Florida State University found that even when campuses have many high-impact practices in place, they have only a small percentage of students participating in them (Cox et al. 2012). If the practices are known to improve all students' chances for success, then it is critical to build the student-success service infrastructure to ensure that all students participate in orientation, first-year experiences, mentoring and advising, and ongoing major and career explorations and decisions.

* Third, build an environment that welcomes and supports open discussions regarding change, innovation, and reinvention. In the end, the major factor in a successful change is developing a culture that can embrace and implement change. In his essay "The Challenge to Deep Change: A Brief Cultural History of Higher Education," Sanford Shugart (2012) points out that "culture trumps strategy" (p. 2) and that culture-changing leadership must take seriously the deep roots of the attitudes and behavior of faculty and those institutional leaders who have come up through the faculty. It is not surprising that past successful efforts to change strategies, business models, and best practices have either created new institutions where new approaches could be developed or focused on new offerings that were not seen as substitutes for core institutional programs. Leaders will need to create strategy maps for sustainable change. They will need to assess what continues to be important in educating learners. They will also need to assess what policies and practices support or hinder student success.

CONCLUSION

Where do leaders see their institutions in the future? Do they have teams exploring new or different approaches that can improve student access, success, and completion--and better meet the vision and mission of the institution? These approaches might include expanding online education, serving different learner populations in different ways, building student-success systems that maximize student learning and engagement, unbundling education into smaller "bursts of knowledge" that might be easier to understand, or moving to competency-based education. These are examples of what is already being deployed to improve student learning. What's next?

Leaders must take this call to action very seriously. In order for higher education to meet the growing need for improved student access and greater success for underprepared students, new models, new thinking, and a new culture are required. Every leader must consider whether the future of the higher education enterprise will be supported by making small, evolutionary tweaks with which we think we can wait out the latest tsunamis of change or by boldly embracing a future that clearly meets students where they are and takes them where they need to go to be successful, contributing citizens of a global community.

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--. n.d.(b). Higher Education. Retrieved March 24, 2014, from the World Wide Web: www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/highereducation.

Tinto, V. 2012. Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action. University of Chicago Press.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

LINDA L. BAER, lindalbaer0508@gmail.com, serves as a senior consultant and national leader on analytics at i4Solutions, St. Paul, Minnesota.

ANN HILL DUIN, ahduin@umn.edu, serves as a professor of writing studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and national fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education.

Figure 2 Student Success Matrix

Predictor Category                 Connection           Entry
                                   Application to       Completion of
                                   enrollment           gatekeeper
                                   (advising to         courses
                                   enrollment)          (Beginning
                                                        of class)

Learner characteristics
Learner behaviors
Academic integration
Social/psychological integration
Other learner support
Course/program characteristics
Instructor characteristics/
behaviors

Predictor Category                 Entry into program   Completion
                                   to 75% of            of course of
                                   requirements         study and
                                   completed (middle    graduated with
                                   of class)            market value
                                                        (end of class)

Learner characteristics
Learner behaviors
Academic integration
Social/psychological integration
Other learner support
Course/program characteristics
Instructor characteristics/
behaviors

Source: Swan et al. 2013, p. 20.