HBCU Newsletter | Issue No. 2 August 2022

Collaboration and Partnerships for Student Success at HBCUs

This is the second issue in a newsletter series that will serve as a report and thematic summary of content shared in the National Resource Center’s multipronged engagement of HBCUs in their work with the Advising Success Network (ASN).

The Center has identified HBCUs as spaces where some of the most innovative and effective work is being done to improve student success outcomes and advance equity. Yet, too often, the work at these institutions is not part of the larger dialogue about advising redesign and student success and, thus, the positive impact of their efforts has not been fully shared, celebrated, and modeled. As part of a commitment to engaging HBCUs in ASN activities, the Center created several dedicated channels for their involvement.

One of these channels was a one-day Symposium, delivered live in October 2021 via a virtual conference platform. The Symposium represented a mix of plenary content delivered by invited speakers and interactive content proposed and presented by participants. Throughout the Symposium, presenters and other participants relayed collaborations and partnerships that are working to promote student success at their institutions.

As such collaborations can occur in many forms, this newsletter will highlight examples from organizations and institutions that contributed to the Symposium program and dialogue.

Delivering on the Spelman Promise

Dr. Alayna Blash is associate director for student success at Spelman College; Dr. DeKimberlen Neely is an associate dean at Spelman. For their roundtable presentation, “Huddle Up: Collaborative Advising Efforts for Academically At-Risk Students,” Blash and Neely used the backdrop of athletics as a frame of reference for student success and collaboration across the institution.

1. Team Meeting: The first step toward possible partnerships requires planning. By narrowing down the campus stakeholders involved, institutions can better identify key players for this purpose. With these stakeholders identified, an institution can then:

• organize its efforts;

• recruit appropriate staff;

• set the tone for success as a universal goal; and

• develop a plan for success that is flexible and rooted in the institution’s strategic plan.

2. Friday Night Lights: With this second step, institutions put planning into action. Every institutional staff member has the opportunity to impact students directly. Institutions can make the most effective impact through their collaborative efforts by:

• building trust and increasing effectiveness through frequent and transparent communication;

• finding out what staff members are already doing to collaborate with other entities – and what they have the ability to do; and

• sharing expectations among institutional partners (i.e., outcomes, challenges, victories).

3. Game Stats: Institutions need methods of assessing how they are doing. Relative to sports, then, winning can be defined by measuring variables such as:

• retention,

• GPA,

• graduation,

• employment outcomes,

• utilization of services, and

• faculty adoption of best practices.

4. Monday Morning Quarterbacks: By analyzing their past efforts and building on them, institutions can work to improve students’ future college experiences.

For Spelman, a winning game plan relies on three objectives:

1. ensuring every student graduates with a competitive edge;

2. inspiring an efficient, collaborative, and resultsoriented culture among faculty and staff; and

3. streamlining student processes.

“We have to think about, what is the win?” Blash said during the Symposium. “On campus, it’s not that Student Success is winning, or that the Dean’s Office is winning, or the professor is winning. It’s really about the student winning and institutional winning. … We all can win.”

For students, solving the challenges of economic mobility can be a roadblock to success. To give potential graduates a competitive edge, Spelman partners with Braven, a national nonprofit that helps students reach a path to economic mobility. Using Braven’s resources, sophomore Spelmanites can receive mentoring, leadership coaching, learning labs, and 16 weeks of interviewing experience.

Elsewhere on campus, Spelman analyzes various data points to help it plan collaborative interventions with students. These collaborations include:

• first-year study groups, which meet three times weekly to go over academic work and other topics dealing with the college transition and allow upperclassmen to serve as leads;

• oval walks with a dean, in which students have 20- to 30-minute walking conversations with a staff member from the Dean’s Office;

• advising, which involves collaboration between Spelman’s faculty advisers and the college’s Student Success office, as Spelman does not use professional advisers;

• quarterly meetings with the Student Success Program and the Dean’s Office;

• “ask a” sessions with the Dean’s Office and the Student Success Program;

• the use of EAB Navigate to communicate intervention efforts and outcomes (e.g., alerts, progress reports);

• Spelman’s College Completion Action Team, composed of representatives from all areas on campus who identify annual goals and strategies for the institution; and

• a partnership between Spelman’s Office of Undergraduate Studies and the college’s Student Success Center.

Removing Barriers to Success

By identifying what could be possible in a best-case scenario, student success staff and their institutions can bring their ultimate goals in closer focus. For a separate roundtable discussion, Blash and Neely solicited feedback on how collaborative advising efforts are leveraging on-campus partnerships to support academically at-risk students. To spark discussion, the presenters asked Symposium attendees a series of “What if?” questions, each of which presupposed a best-case scenario.

• What if you had unlimited resources on your campus? Dr. James Cabaniss, executive director of student success and retention at Elizabeth City State University, vouched for students’ impact on the advising process. With busy schedules for student services staff, including advisers, many cannot regularly assist students “on the hall” in residential spaces, Cabaniss said. At ECSU, students in on-campus living–learning communities can provide academic and peer support as academic housing advisers. Among other tasks, these advisers encourage fellow students to go to tutoring sessions, work with university staff to ensure students are in good standing close to midterm, and identify students who aren’t logging on to Blackboard to complete their coursework online. “Having someone who’s dedicated as a student that can assist has worked out very well for us,” Cabaniss said of the program.

• What if every student responded to your email? In his role as a retention specialist and academic advisor at Dillard University, Corey Simms works with first-year and transfer students through Dillard’s University College program. The program puts personal interaction with students at a premium; besides advising firstyear students, support team members double as first-year seminar instructors and are housed in the same area as students. Along with increased interaction between students and staff because of the familiarity University College provides, Simms said Dillard recently has seen its women-dominated student population retain a larger percentage of men.

• What if all faculty participated in your efforts? Dr. Judetta Cowden, director of student retention at Talladega College, said higher participation by faculty at her institution has made for a more efficient advising process. When Cowden started work at Talladega’s Student Success Center, she didn’t see many students, she said. While faculty were still referring students for advising, faculty were accustomed to not hearing back from the center, creating a feedback “loop” that Cowden and her team worked to close. “There’s no wrong door,” she said. “If (students) come in, then we will assist them.” During advising, Cowden’s team will perform a “soft handoff” with the college’s admissions office, notifying them that a student needs academic support.

• What if all barriers to student success were removed? While not an HBCU campaign, Appalachian State University’s Black Male Excellence Initiative is a residential living– learning community that aims to give first-year students a sense of belonging on campus while also helping develop connections with faculty, staff, and other students. As part of the initiative, Dr. Will Sheppard, assistant director of university housing and residence life at App State, teaches a required student success course while gathering expertise from across campus to help students learn skills such as financial literacy.

Finding Reasons to Share at Benedict

Through course sharing, institutions are able to fill gaps in their current capabilities by accessing or sharing high-quality courses from like-minded institutions, making for valuable collaborations. For the National Resource Center’s Symposium, Dr. Jamila Lyn, a student success coach at Benedict College, facilitated a plenary session, “Integrating Online Course Sharing at HBCUs to Increase Student Success.”

Lyn addressed the effective use of technology supported advising and student success initiatives as a high-impact strategy, with an emphasis on course sharing. As it highlighted collaboration between Benedict and its external partners, this presentation took a different approach from the various alliances between on-campus partners at Spelman College and other institutions.

Along with her role at Benedict, Lyn is a senior fellow with Acadeum, a platform that powers online course sharing for colleges and universities. Acadeum helps institutions establish course-sharing partnerships for the purpose of:

• enhancing student success;

• boosting degree completion;

• addressing inefficiencies;

• supporting academic strategies; and

• increasing institutions’ revenue.

By helping institutions address imbalances in course supply and demand, Acadeum aims to support student progress while also boosting institutional efficiency.

“When you are building out a program and it’s a new major, you may not have all of the faculty yet to teach those courses, but the students are here,” Lyn said during the Symposium. “The industry that they’re interested in says that you need this, this, this, this. How can we, in the time being, figure out a way to not hold the students up?”

Lyn explained how the course-sharing process led Benedict to take a fresh look at its curricula and programs. Ultimately, Benedict eliminated some majors (e.g., math, history, religion) that were not proving productive for the college and introduced others (cybersecurity and justice administration) because of demand and enhanced course availability through course sharing. The college was also able to eliminate scheduling challenges and roadblocks that normally could delay or prevent degree completion for some students.

Course sharing provides a host of benefits for students, including:

• institutional credit – unlike in transfer courses, grades are awarded in courses at students’ current school;

• credits that can count toward part- or full-time status;

• an expanded course catalog to support progress and completion;

• the ability to apply financial aid to current courses; and

• a stronger connection to students’ home institution (HI).

Along with the revenue generated from students, course sharing provides other benefits to HIs, including:

• less management of transfer credits;

• insight into course quality and delivery;

• an open line of communication with teaching institutions; and

• greater control over the courses students take off campus.

Benedict developed a repository of courses that students can take to stay on track for degree completion; previously, after failing part of a course, students might have had to wait two semesters to retake it. Course sharing also provided students a level of grade recovery, as grades from course sharing are calculated into a student’s GPA at their home institution. Lyn remarked that this feature helped “energize” summer enrollment at Benedict, which launched a new MBA program as a result.

Cultivating Future Success

Because HBCUs must often look around campus and off campus to find support for students, a willingness to collaborate is vital – something the Symposium’s presenters and other participants made clear. The examples given also illustrate these institutions’ willingness to innovate – by making communication more transparent, using technology to expand course options, and overhauling traditional housing assignments for students and instructors, to name a few initiatives.

While the organizations and institutions listed here might vary in their collaborative approach, the impact of their engagement on student success at HBCUs is undeniable.

The National Resource Center recognizes the importance of institutions forging new connections and reigniting older ones where possible. In the years to come, we look forward to sharing these with the community of HBCU educators and advocates as we are made aware of them. Such partnerships are hallmarks of student success and of best practices in advising.