Re-aiming the Road Map update: Strategic Priority 2 ’deep dive’

Each quarter, the Road Map Steering Committee hears from one or two of the Road Map Strategic Priority Committees for what is called a “deep dive” that brings the entire Steering Committee up to speed on that particular priority’s activities. The most recent dive was presented Jan. 27 by Strategic Priority 2 (SP2): Provide a transformative learning community that prepares students for advanced education, careers and purposeful living. The presentation reviewed SP2’s goals and metrics, and provided information for plans moving forward.
Presenters included Vice President for Students Affairs Brian Rose, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Chief Wellness Office Johann Fiore-Conte, Vice Provost for Online and Innovation Education James Pitarresi, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Enrollment Management Donald Loewen, Assistant Vice President for Student Services Kelli Smith and Director of Financial Aid and Student Records Amber Stallman.
Goal 1: Binghamton University has a dynamic and transformative learning community.
The metric for this goal, students who participate in High-Impact Practices (HIPs), has not changed, with the target of having 100% of undergraduate students experiencing at least one HIP by 2026. HIPS include experiences such as internships, undergraduate research and education abroad.
Looking at HIPs, once called High-Impact Learning Experiences, over time there has been a dip in some areas except for research, and that’s what happens when we make investments in particular programs, Smith said. “The dip in education-abroad is self-explanatory, as are internships. And there has been a creep back up with service learning. We do know that students who do one, tend to do multiples. We went through a period of growth in HIPS until 2020 and now we’re in recovery.
“We don’t include student employment and that is more and more being included nationwide,” Smith added, “so there’s a lot of discussion around making those HIP experiences.
To increase the number of students participating in HIPs, Smith said next steps include developing attainable solutions to address barriers such including financial, academic and scheduling barriers, the addition of a wider survey with connections to department and student demographics, and focus groups to develop a deeper understanding of barriers.
Goal 2: Undergraduates seeking graduate degrees are prepared for the challenges of graduate school; students are prepared to enter the workforce and successfully navigate their own career choices.
The metric for this goal is placement rates. “We raised our target for this goal to 90% by 2026 because we achieved our earlier targets,” Rose said.
The knowledge rate — the basic information about graduate career outcomes — has improved from 17% to 90% from 2011 to 2019, Smith said, “and the overall placement rate is up from 57% in 2011 to 84% in 2020. Our overall placement target is 90%.”
Goal 3: Undergraduate students graduate in four years.
The metrics for this goal are retention and four- and six-year graduate rates. These targets were also raised because earlier targets had been met. The new targets are a 93% one-year retention rate by 2026, a 75% four-year graduation rate by 2026 and an 85% six-year graduation rate by 2026. “Staying where we are isn’t going to be easy for these,” Rose said. “Just remaining stable will require new programming efforts.”
Retention and four- and six-year graduation rates are core metrics that go into national rankings, so we pay attention,” Pitarresi said. “Our retention rate hovers in the 90s, but what we’re really excited about is that our 2020 cohort was hit hard by the pandemic but they came back. We gave them a great experience and they came back.”
Pitarresi said looking at some subgroups showed the same trend, generally, with the exception of international students. “But still, even with international students at a 70% retention rate, for other schools that would be considered a good number.”
“Our four-year graduation rate over time went through the roof,” Pitarresi added. “Students took courses in the pandemic! We gave out scholarships and implemented other advising initiatives that keep them on track to graduate.”
The University’s six-year graduate rate is also up in the 80s, Pitaressi said. “These are generally good numbers but we have some work to do here. We want all student groups to do well, but we do see the international students are an outlier here. We work really hard to get them here; let’s keep them and figure out how we do that.”
There has also been a rise in out-of-state students, and, according to Loewen, a number of changes in strategies and approaches with scholarships and recruitment may have had that impact. “We’re trying for a higher quality out-of-state student,” he said, “and have had around 300 students a year the past three years. These students maintain their GPAs.”
Loewen added that a comparison of Binghamton’s full-time retention rate to U.S. News peer institutions shows us in good shape. “We’re at three, the same place we’re at for four-year graduation rates, and we’re in sixth place for six-year graduation rates. We don’t even talk about the average because we’re so many points above the average.”
We place higher than all other SUNY Centers, at the top for six- and four-year graduation rates and one-year retention rates. “By the metrics were very comfortably the top public school in the state in what matters to students and parents,” Loewen said. “If you think about the economic impact for students and families for getting out a year early, that’s a huge swing. If they come to Binghamton, they likely get out earlier and also start their career earlier.”
Goal 4: Binghamton University will provide opportunities for students to engage in a healthy lifestyle, supporting continuous well-being.
This goal has been updated from one that said the campus would engage in healthy living for lifelong success. “The transition to the new goal is moving us into an institutional culture,” Fiore-Conte said. “Measuring institutional culture around wellness is important and something we’re focused on. We identified a tool out of Butler University that measures how well students know how to access resources and our target is that 75% of our students agree that they have this knowledge.”
Fiore-Conte said that we will look at how students use campus systems to see how well they participate and we will look at the CARE Team as the hub of health and well-being on campus. “They triage a lot of students,” she said. “We’ll look at the number of students served and the number that successfully complete the semester.” She added that the University has added a question to a national alumni mobility survey in hopes of gaining information from alumni, and that the University’s Healthy Campus Initiative has a faculty and staff arm because well-being is about everyone.
The SP2 team also reported on how it has used its Road Map funding ($250,000 for two years), supporting:
- summer intervention workshops for calculus and chemistry
- academic assessments in courses enrolling new students
- a program coordinator for Success Coaching
- a student success manager in Enrollment Management
- recovery courses for students
- expansion of services provided by supplemental instruction
The first-year summer workshops were offered to students who scored low on chemistry and math placement exams, Stallman said. “We invited 217 chemistry students to participate and 123 took us up on it and the outcomes for the semester look good. Of grades for chemistry, 98 who participated earned an A through C-. Math used modular courses, and of 59 participants, 48 earned an A through C-. This was an overwhelmingly good job with students we were concerned about.”
The idea for Academic Assessment Day also grew out discussions by the SP2 team.
“One thing we tried to do was reach out to instructors,” Pitarresi said. “We want them to know they can work with our instructional design people, and we specifically reached out to some faculty and about a dozen took advantage. This year we targeted first-year and the D, F and Withdrawal (DFW) rates for courses. We want people to participate and hope for higher impact moving forward.”
Pitarresi also said that spring 2022 recovery courses have been increased to five sections of 100 seats (from 20), and they will begin after the add/drop deadline. “If a student successfully completes a recovery course, they are able to remove probation from their record,” he said. “We’re focusing on intervention with students.”
The program coordinator for Success Coaching and assistant director for Student Success, Enrollment Management are both on board and providing additional academic support for students to help them navigate the many resources we have on campus and to get them connected to the right people, Smith said.
“They’re focused on students who are not doing well,” Smith said. “We’re using strategies from texting, to calling, to meeting with them. Going forward, we will work on the gap populations, those students who are not getting individualized advising. We’ll home in on those students, who they are and how we can bring them in and continue outreach to faculty about alert raising. We want to incentivize it and will try a communication series with some snippets like ‘Be to class on time, take your tests.’ The things students are missing because they were remote for so long.”
Smith added that fall 2021 success coaching saw nearly 200 appointments made by 121 unique students, 47% of them first-semester and 53% continuing students. She also noted that 45% of the students were from an underrepresented population. The reasons for student appointments included for assistance with time management, productivity and procrastination; motivation and accountability; task management; study strategies and methods; among other reasons.
Supplemental instruction funding was used for students in group settings, like a partnership with the faculty, Smith said. Twenty-two sessions were offered per week in eight content areas for 10 sections. Nearly 73% of the students who participated attended two or more sessions, and feedback shows that 92% of the student participants “believed that the sessions would or had improved their academic performance in the course.”
Early alerts were also successful, Stallman said. In total, 6,554 alerts were raised for students in 534 distinct courses. Of those, 3,065 were kudos, 1,279 were medium-level alerts for things such as attendance or class participation concerns or a low quiz score, and 2,210 were high-level alerts for students in danger of failing, withdrawal or grade option change recommendations or low exam scores.
“We communicated this everywhere we could and even sent text messages,” Stallman said. “We also extended the withdrawal deadline to Dec. 10. Of students who received high-level alerts, 879 recovered and earned an A through C-, 96 students received a D, 181 failed the course and 450 withdrew.
There were 597 failures who received no alert, Stallman added. “Could students who hadn’t gotten an alert have done better if they had?”
First-year outcomes specifically showed 125 failures with no alert, but 407 students who receive high alerts recovered, 28 received a D, 36 failed and 91 withdraw.
Students who received alerts also received automated and personalized emails, phone calls and text messages, and many responded that they were addressing their coursework. Others made appointments for tutorial services from University Tutorial Services, athletics tutoring and EOP tutoring.
Pitarresi ended the deep dive with an overview of what SP2 will address next:
- developing a teaching metric
- consideration of Equitable Value Explorer as a measure (a new, national interactive data tool)
- understanding the six-year “gap” and targeting interventions
- challenge of maintaining strong performance with the changing profile of entering students
- strategies regarding retention at scale
- strategies to eliminating barriers to HIP participation