A Plan for Excellence: Enhancing Undergraduate Education and Student Success

Executive Summary

Undergraduate student retention and graduation rates are critical measures of the quality of a university’s educational experience. As Colorado State University moves to "set the standard for higher education," action across a broad range of areas in the University will be necessary to improve retention to graduation.

At present Colorado State outperforms U.S. News and World Reports prediction of university graduation rates by 6 percent. Surpassing these predictions is a tribute to the institution and its faculty, staff, and students. However, even as the university outperforms national predictions based on the level of student academic preparedness on entry and the level of university financial resources, our current first-year retention rate of 82% and six-year graduation rate of 63% place us in the lower half of our peer group. Since neither the freshman retention rate nor the six-year graduation rate has changed significantly within the last six years, increasing these rates requires substantial commitment on the part of the institution.

National retention research and practice reveal that significant increases in retention and graduation rates are the product of a network of coordinated, systematic strategies aligned in support of a high quality educational experience. No single program or collection of unconnected strategies will produce meaningful change. Improvement requires a "web of interlocking initiatives" (Kuh, 2005) that engage many students in profound ways and increase the quality of the undergraduate experience.

These principles guide the effort:

  • Improved retention rates are a by-product of investing resources, energy, and educational and administrative skill in talent development and institutional excellence
  • The most effective strategies are those that enrich the educational experience
  • Comprehensive, sustained strategies produce significant results; isolated efforts produce only marginal results
  • All retention initiatives should be conceived and implemented with attention to the diversity of students served by the University
  • Academic Affairs and Student Affairs must operate in close partnership to achieve results
  • A powerful and nimble data analytic capacity is one of the most important forces for educational renewal and innovation. Data are critical to measuring progress, focusing discussion, and propelling change.

The Retention Working Group Report recommends that the University implement a comprehensive plan characterized by:

  • enriched opportunities for learning and engagement
  • heightened expectations for students to take advantage of those opportunities and graduate in a timely manner
  • increased capacity for data collection and analysis to inform retention strategy and drive continuous improvement.

More specifically, the report recommends the University undertake strategies and initiatives in the following areas:

  • Values. Articulate and act on an institutional value that emphasizes:
    • The University’s commitment to creating opportunities for exceptional academic experiences – opportunities that combine intellectual challenge and growth with personal enrichment and development – across the breadth of the university
    • The University’s commitment to establishing a community-wide culture of high expectations for student involvement and success.
  • Structure and Basic Systems. Create structures to promote and sustain retention improvement while enhancing and improving basic systems that promote student success across the following areas:
    • Teaching and Learning: Promote pedagogical innovation and the systematic redesign of core, foundational, and gateway courses; support quality teaching; and increase opportunities for active and experiential learning.
    • Academic Advising: Ensure quality advising through appropriate training, evaluation, incentives, and resources, and consider new structures for delivering advising.
    • University Learning Center: Establish a learning center at the core of campus that collects and coordinates academic support services, promotes active learning, and operates in partnership with the Institute for Learning and Teaching.
    • Academic Planning: Establish a system that requires students to develop longterm (two- and four-year) plans with support from their advisors. Develop benchmark course indicators for monitoring students’ progress toward their degree. Institute a process for anticipating course demand and eliminating bottlenecks that impede students’ progress in their major and toward degree.
    • Departmental Retention Efforts: Involve departments in planning and implementing strategies at the unit level to promote retention and student success. Make departmental-level retention data available to unit-level decisionmakers. Expand undergraduate research, service-learning, and leadership development opportunities to increase students’ involvement with faculty and with applied learning outside the classroom.
    • Psychosocial Development: Identify and address the non-academic factors that affect retention. Expand mentoring programs, and utilize student employment to promote student engagement and career development.
  • Increase support for students during their first two years. More particularly:
    • Increase capacity to provide learning community experiences for students who reside on and off campus; develop distinctive opportunities for mid-range index students and students seeking to explore majors and careers; rename and reconfigure open option categories; and assess and enrich the transition experience for first-year students.
  • Provide proactive support for particular populations.
    • Create mechanisms to intervene proactively with students experiencing or likely to experience difficulty; enhance early warning systems; create advising and corrective programs for students on academic probation; examine academic standards in relation to their effect on student performance and retention; examine relationships between financial aid, educational costs, and retention; and expand "pipeline" and "bridge" programs.

Efforts to improve retention and graduation rates are critical to the University’s commitment to set the standard for higher education and to enrich the undergraduate learning experience. As such, they require the University’s focus, creativity, and human and material resources. The Report recommends that planning and implementation processes for retention improvement be set in motion before the end of the spring 2006 semester, so that actions to improve student retention and educational quality proceed without delay.