RE-INVENTING THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
THE RISE INITIATIVE*
BACKGROUND
Colleges and universities across the United States struggle to support a new, more diverse, more tech
savvy, and (in many respects) more needy student population through infrastructures that are
frequently based on the historic needs of students past and on the professional traditions of both
faculty and staff. All too often, students seeking assistance on a wide range of academic, financial
and social issues find themselves athwart institutional divisions that are not conducive to their
ultimate success, despite the evident good will of those who work to support them.
American University is fully committed to providing an outstanding undergraduate experience and
places a high value on diversity. However, until recently, our campus community has not been
especially diverse. In 2008, 10% of our first year students were Pell-eligible, 2% were first
generation-in-college, and 7% belonged to racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in
higher education. Since that time, however, we have consciously focused our financial aid on
students with the greatest financial need. As a result, 20% of entering freshmen in 2014 were Pell
eligible, 11% were first-generation-in-college, and 19% were members of underrepresented minority
groups. Our Admissions Office has also adopted a test optional admission policy that allows
students to apply without standardized test scores, and has cast a wider recruiting net to attract
students from the south and west of the U.S., and from around the world. The resulting change in
AU’s student diversity has been dramatic.
STATEMENT OF THE CHALLENGE
As AU’s student body becomes more diverse in terms of race, culture, geography, family income,
academic preparation and prior experience, and as our students strive to excel in an increasingly
competitive job market, the university’s student support network faces new and significant
challenges. These include problems of social acclimation, homesickness, depression, and anxiety, in
addition to the more classic issues of financial aid and academic preparedness. In the face of these
challenges, we have devoted considerable effort to addressing student retention. Although we have
managed to hold freshman-to-sophomore retention steady at approximately 90%, our efforts to
improve the retention of students have been hampered by a siloed student service model, of a sort
that is all too typical in American higher education today.
It is our contention that assisting and retaining an ever more complex and diverse student body, at
AU and elsewhere, requires a new form of student support structure. When students seeking a mix
of academic, financial, and social support must interact with professionals from different sectors of
the institution, between which coordination and information sharing are often cumbersome, it is the
students who suffer.
Our students routinely interact with one or more academic advisors, many of whom report to
different supervisors within each of our academic units. We offer a one-stop shop (AU Central) that
provides front-line financial aid, registration, and student accounts services, in partnership with the
offices of Financial Aid, the Registrar, and Student Accounts. Our nationally recognized, university-
wide Career Center serves all students, and there are specialized career services within a few of our
schools. Academic support offices in the schools and the Office of Campus Life offer tutoring, peer
instruction (in writing, mathematics, biology and economics), and research and technology
enrichment. Campus Life provides social and mental health assistance. In university housing,
resident advisors work directly with students. And, of course we have the faculty, whose role as
advisors or mentors differs dramatically across the schools and colleges.
In short, our student support services are abundant, but not smartly coordinated. When an issue
presents itself in student accounts or in the classroom, for example, days can pass before the
appropriate support office is notified and able to address it. Moreover, given that today’s students
(and parents) expect instantaneous responses, the existing system does not leverage technology for
greater efficiency. In too many instances, the system relies heavily upon the student to find the
appropriate assistance. The system is disparate, with hundreds of professionals who are not
necessarily organized around the singular goal of student success. Each unit has its own reporting
line, with varying levels of clarity in their performance objectives and access to communication,
leading to situations in which students feel they are passed from office to office. This is symptomatic
of an organization that lacks an overarching service culture, a single defined service philosophy that
articulates a higher purpose and clearly defined standards of service.
THE PROJECT
It was a recommendation of the 2014 Middle States Evaluation Team that, in light of the changing
demographics of its undergraduates, the university look critically at its “infrastructure” and, where
appropriate, make recommendations that will position AU to fully support the needs of a changing
student body. These services include (but are not limited to) financial and support services, as well as
others that would support inclusion, success, and retention.
The critical questions are:
- What is the best way to achieve student service success for today’s students, and for those
who will enter our universities tomorrow?
- How do we create a structure to support students accustomed to accessing services on
demand from a smart phone or tablet while nonetheless instilling in them a strong sense of
their own responsibility for their academic success?
- How do we realize the efficiencies that technology can afford—either by helping students
quickly find the answers they need or by using student progress data to better target our
interventions— while at the same time holding fast to the ideal of sustained personal
mentorship so critical to liberal education?
- And how do we effect these changes within the structure of a modern university (not the
first place one typically looks for organizational nimbleness).
With the support of funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we will begin to address
these questions and remake our infrastructure for student success through a multi-year project to
create a new comprehensive, student-centered, and technologically enabled delivery system for
student support—a new national model for student success.
The project will take place in two phases. An initial grant of $150,000 from the Mellon Foundation
will be used to fund the first phase which will take place over 18 months. In this phase, we will
undertake a comprehensive mapping and assessment of existing student support resources, with
special attention to those areas in which institutional structures and existing processes impede our
ability to support students effectively. This mapping exercise will then inform our development of a
new student support model that is based on best practices in a wide array of sectors (private and
non-profit), that fully leverages technology, and that integrates the current piecemeal systems into a
more seamless process of student support.
In Phase Two, we will effect a phased implementation of the new support model through
redeployment of existing personnel and resources into a new integrated structure, evaluating our
success as we go. We anticipate this process of progressive implementation and evaluation to take
no more than 30 months.
TIMELINE
Spring / Summer 2015
- Establish the project’s two principal leadership groups
- Leadership Steering Committee, including the Provost, select Vice Presidents and Deans, the
Chief Information Officer, and Vice Provosts
- RiSE Task Force consisting of relevant stakeholders and co-chaired by three members of the
Leadership Steering Committee
- Hold facilitated focus groups of students and staff
- Assess university resources dedicated to student services
- Initiate interviews with parents of incoming first year students
Fall 2015
- Plan Fall Leadership Retreat
- Identify and invite external experts to campus to discuss and advise Leadership Steering
Committee RiSE Task Force on the ways in which practices from their respective fields
might create and support an unsurpassed student experience
- Create forum in which external experts can discuss models and share best practices with
members of the AU community
- Conduct benchmarking of postsecondary institutions to identify practices which might be
adopted at AU to enhance the student experience
- Identify students to create blogs of their experiences on campus
Winter / Spring 2016
- Synthesize data gathered from AU focus groups and other surveys, feedback from campus
forums such as the Leadership Retreat, best practices from benchmarking, and advice from
external experts
- Draft blueprint of a new support system for approval by the Leadership Steering Committee
- Share draft blueprint with relevant AU constituencies
Summer 2016
- Revise and finalize blueprint
- Submit final report to the Mellon Foundation
*The full Mellon Project Proposal can be found at
https://myau.american.edu/groups/workgrp/RiSE/Lists/Mellon%20Project%20Charter/Attachments/5/Mello
n%20Project%20Charter.pdf