Radical Reimagining For Student Success In Higher Education

Co-published with the Association for State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), which sponsored the project from which the book emerged.This book answers the question “What would your institution look like if students really mattered?” The authors argue that really putting student success at the center of attention will require a radical reimagining of higher education. Much of what is presented here is grounded in the findings of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ (AASCU’s) Re-Imagining the First Year (RFY) initiative, which brought together 44 member institutions over a three-year period to identify and test programs, strategies, and tools aimed at improving retention rates for first-year students. The book makes a provocative set of arguments about what is possible if campuses radically reimagine their culture, practices, structures, and rules with the primary purpose of helping students succeed in college and beyond.

Reimagining the Culture of Leadership for Student Success A revision to the practical and popular guide, this book asks the crucial question within today's environment, "What's a student-ready college?" Higher education leaders are responsible for preparing their institutions to serve the students they admit in the best way possible. By asking ourselves how we can transform our institutions into student-ready colleges to create a new culture of leadership that is responsive to current challenges and focuses on understanding and utilizing student assets and social capital to achieve shared goals for student success. Becoming a Student-Ready College shows you how. Conversations in higher education tend to focus on defining college readiness for students. Too often, we forget to ask the question from the other side, and we miss important opportunities to develop institutions in ways that can help students thrive. Higher education leaders and educators can better serve today's college students through responsive and redesigned practices and policies. This updated edition features revisions and new material that speak to the social realities of today's incoming students and cover the latest strategies and techniques for connecting with learners to foster equity and success. Leverage existing resources to the benefit of students and deliver the right support at the right time to achieve equity in student outcomes and build on students' assets Design eco-systemic partnerships and support programs that nurture the relationship between the student and the institution Strengthen institutional capacity-building for achieving defined student-ready goals Build shared governance to promote agency and to foster change and collaboration Becoming a Student-Ready College explores leaders' shared responsibilities in advancing student success and provides practical recommendations for educators at all levels.

A revolutionary new educational model that encourages educators to provide spaces for students to display their academic brilliance without sacrificing their identities Building on the ideas introduced in his New York Times best-selling book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, Christopher Emdin introduces an alternative educational model that will help students (and teachers) celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. Ratchetdemic advocates for a new kind of student identity—one that bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of the ivory tower and the urban classroom. Because modern schooling often centers whiteness, Emdin argues, it dismisses ratchet identity (the embodying of “negative” characteristics associated with lowbrow culture, often thought to be possessed by people of a particular ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic status) as anti-intellectual and punishes young people for straying from these alleged “academic norms,” leaving young people in classrooms frustrated and uninspired. These deviations, Emdin explains, include so-called “disruptive behavior” and a celebration of hip-hop music and culture. Emdin argues that being “ratchetdemic,” or both ratchet and academic (like having rap battles about science, for example), can empower students to embrace themselves, their backgrounds, and their education as parts of a whole, not disparate identities. This means celebrating protest, disrupting the status quo, and reclaiming the genius of youth in the classroom.

Much of higher education was originally designed to meet the needs of full time 18-22 year-old students who enter directly from high school. However, the New Majority of our students are older, likely to swirl among institutions, and have significant adult responsibilities outside of the classroom. The New Majority Student: Working from Within to Transform Higher Education is a call to transform colleges and universities to meet the academic and student experience needs of New Majority students and for adult educators to become advocates, allies, and resources for needed reforms. Book contributors, including faculty, staff and administrators at public, private and community colleges, provide insights for this transformation. The bookutilizes a business perspective to academic transformation, providing a guide to how universities can redefine and restructure their education product to meet student needs. Taking a Human Centered Design approach, the contributors provide frameworks and examples of how institutions can reallocate technology, effort (internal, external, student, faculty) and finances to reimagine programs and ensure long term institutional health.

Higher education in the United States is facing a critical juncture. Tuition costs are rising, while measures of success are declining. Students struggle to meet the most basic academic requirements, barely passing their courses, while others battle physical and mental health difficulties that profoundly impact their ability to do well in college. This book responds to these challenges, offering a holistic collection of practices to guide those working with emerging adults in higher education. Beginning with an introduction to the developmental period of emerging adulthood, the volume examines how the social and emotional development of emerging adults is relevant to struggles and successes in higher education. Subsequent chapters focus on how technology has impacted on learning and communication for today's students and how faculty and staff can best work with students through meaningful relationships. Consisting of chapters from experts in a variety of disciplines, the volume provides faculty, administrators, and staff with the knowledge and skills needed to help today's students succeed.

Although access to higher education is virtually universally available, college student retention stills remains a vexing and puzzling problem for educators and legislators. In College Student Retention: Formula for Student Success, second edition, Alan Seidman deals with this problematic issue by examining a number of areas critical to the retention of students, including the history, the theories and concepts, models, and a standardized definition of the term. Seidman and his contributors also lay out the financial implications and trends of retention in one of their updated chapters. Completely new to this edition are three chapters that examine several recent issues: the current theories of retention, retention of online students, and retention in community colleges. Tying all of these components together, Seidman then presents his formula and highly successful model for student success that colleges can implement to effect change in retaining students and helping them to complete their academic and personal goals.

Student Success in College describes policies, programs, and practices that a diverse set of institutions have used to enhance student achievement. This book clearly shows the benefits of student learning and educational effectiveness that can be realized when these conditions are present. Based on the Documenting Effective Educational Practice (DEEP) project from the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, this book provides concrete examples from twenty institutions that other colleges and universities can learn from and adapt to help create a success-oriented campus culture and learning environment.