SOURCE
Vol. 16
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No. 3
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July 2019
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A UCF Knights Tale: Intentional Efforts to Achieve Student Success
Jacob Bonne
Comprising 13 colleges and serving more than 68,000 students from all 50 states and more than 146 countries, the University of Central Florida (UCF) is one of the nation’s largest universities. For incoming students, UCF seeks to increase access while also maximizing academic achievement, with an emphasis on student success, retention, and completion. In 2015, the university sought to address the goal of achieving the state’s preeminence performance metrics. The preeminent designation, which now includes a 60% four-year graduation rate and a 92% first-time-in-college (FTIC) retention rate, comes with millions of dollars in additional funding. At the time, UCF’s FTIC retention rate was 88.8%, and its four-year graduation rate was 40.4%. With retention remaining stagnant for the previous three years, UCF realized it needed a new approach.
Associate Vice President, Student Success
Director, Office of Student Success
DeLaine Priest
University of Central Florida
In developing its strategic plan, Collective Impact, UCF aimed to bring excellence to scale, making a greater impact on students and the community. The university used data from FTIC exit surveys, student feedback, and its Institutional Knowledge Management unit to identify barriers affecting student success and retention. In 2016, UCF established the Student Success Process Improvement (SSPI) initiative to address those barriers to student success, as well as develop methods to restructure support services and identify interventions and strategies to increase FTIC students’ retention.
Specific Targets for Student Success Born from this initiative was the SSPI Retention Team, a collaborative task force featuring more than 30 Student Development and Enrollment Services team members. Within the SSPI, a model was created (see UCF’s website) to identify four subgroups (teams) to target areas specifically affecting student success: enrollment, financial assistance, registration, and advising and retention. The subgroups worked from a framework of improvement and implementation, guided by evaluation, assessment, design, and change management. Key insights from the SSPI initiative highlighted the importance of additional course availability and enhanced financial support, while identifying challenges for students who must navigate registration holds. At the core of SSPI was the university’s desire for data-driven decision making. With this in mind, UCF incorporated an Education Advisory Board (EAB) predictive analytics platform called the Student Success Collaborative Campus, enabling advisors, faculty, and staff to determine which students needed interventions and providing a communications platform. Using the EAB platform, the newly developed Office of Student Success used historical institutional data to identify six high-priority subgroups of students: (a) those reporting low high school GPAs (2.0-2.49), (b) off-campus residents, (c) select on-campus residents, (d) minority males, (e) those who earned a specific grade in UCF’s first-year seminar, and (f ) first-generation and/or Pell-eligible status. The SSPI Retention team crafted outreach and interventions, used primarily throughout the spring and summer to support students not registered for the upcoming fall Return to Front Page Copyright © 2019 National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience® and Students in Transition, University of South Carolina
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