Insights

After almost 100 years of maintaining a status quo that was created with the traditional college student in mind, two executive leaders led a college-wide revolution to respond to 21st-century student needs. After analyzing the student body and examining disaggregated success metrics, it became evident that the structure and systems that existed at the College were not serving the students of today. Instead of pointing the proverbial finger at the students, the data made it very clear that asking whether students were ready for college was the wrong question; the paradigm needed to be flipped to ask whether the College was ready for the student. With low completion rates and the significant gaps in achievement they observed, the answer was clearly no.

Inspired by the college completion agenda and the Guided Pathways movement, institutional leaders dove deep into data, as well as existing policies and practices, to understand the student experience and explore how a college built to suit their student body might look. Throughout this 3-part series, you will learn how these executive leaders created transformational change through organizational learning, cultivated employee engagement, and facilitated a data-informed systems-approach to successfully design a college experience that leads to student momentum and completion.