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Marquette University will open its new wellness and recreation center in January 2025, joining a growing number of higher ed institutions that have combined mental and physical health within a single facility. The $80 million project involves renovating the Helfaer Tennis Stadium and Recreation Center, built in the 1970s, for a new, updated version including health resources like counseling services and a medical clinic.
A 2021 study found students returned to campus after remote instruction due to COVID-19 because they could participate safely in recreation center activities, interact with their peers and create a network of friends.
What’s the need: Students at Marquette have expressed a need for expanded recreation and fitness facilities for years, says Lora Strigens, vice president for planning and facilities management at Marquette. The concept for an integrated wellness and recreation center, however, began with the university’s master plan in 2016 and began to make progress as a priority for being a healthy campus grew.
“We recognize—as many institutions do—that caring for the entirety of a student is not just their academic success, but their mind, their body and, for our institution, their spirit,” Strigens says. “I find it hard to separate the idea of students’ success from the idea of wellness, especially post-pandemic.”
In addition to the health and wellness services the new facility will offer, it will be a space for programming to increase community and a sense of belonging, Strigens says.
What it is: The new space will be 180,000 square feet, doubling the wellness, counseling and medical space on campus and increasing fitness and recreation capacity by 25 percent.
A three-story, 30,000-square-foot wellness tower in the facility’s center will house the medical clinic and counseling center, as well as space for the alcohol and drug recovery program, sexual violence prevention programming, and meeting spaces. On the recreation front, the facility will have two multipurpose courts, four tennis courts, four basketball courts, a 25-yard swimming pool, two group fitness studios and a cycling studio.
Marquette authorities chose to renovate the Helfaer center rather than create an entirely new structure.
“In addition to it being really great programmatic projects … it’s also a very interesting building project, I think, keeping the two large volumes of space that house our tennis courts and basketball courts,” Strigens says. “It's a sustainable decision by the university, both financially and environmentally, and then it gives us the opportunity to really create this marquee facility on the site.”
Moving all health and recreation resources into one building also consolidates touch points for students to engage in wellness. “The goal is for us to make it as easy as possible for students to access the services and the support that they need,” Strigens explains.
The top two floors of the wellness center will be known as the Lovell Center for Student Wellbeing, named after Marquette’s president Michael Lovell and his family, due to his commitment to student wellness and mental health.
The facility is funded by donor gifts, the institution and a student wellness fee, which has been in place since 2016.
Feedback and input: When designing the space, the project team received feedback from a variety of stakeholders, including student affairs, the medical clinic, counseling programs, recreation and fitness experts and, of course, students.
The recreation and fitness space, for example, is designed to be used by all students spanning all levels of experience, comfort and engagement. The result is a variety of flexible spaces and different programming.
As the project continues, Marquette will continue to solicit student input on furniture and branding.
“We want them to feel represented in the space, and we want it to feel, as campus is their home away from home, that it’s a space that they feel comfortable and welcome in,” Strigens says.
Does your institution have a new wellness and recreation facility that is contributing to student retention? Tell us about it.
Marquette University will open its new wellness and recreation center in January 2025, joining a growing number of higher ed institutions that have combined mental and physical health within a single facility. The $80 million project involves renovating the Helfaer Tennis Stadium and Recreation Center, built in the 1970s, for a new, updated version including health resources like counseling services and a medical clinic.
A 2021 study found students returned to campus after remote instruction due to COVID-19 because they could participate safely in recreation center activities, interact with their peers and create a network of friends.
What’s the need: Students at Marquette have expressed a need for expanded recreation and fitness facilities for years, says Lora Strigens, vice president for planning and facilities management at Marquette. The concept for an integrated wellness and recreation center, however, began with the university’s master plan in 2016 and began to make progress as a priority for being a healthy campus grew.
“We recognize—as many institutions do—that caring for the entirety of a student is not just their academic success, but their mind, their body and, for our institution, their spirit,” Strigens says. “I find it hard to separate the idea of students’ success from the idea of wellness, especially post-pandemic.”
In addition to the health and wellness services the new facility will offer, it will be a space for programming to increase community and a sense of belonging, Strigens says.
What it is: The new space will be 180,000 square feet, doubling the wellness, counseling and medical space on campus and increasing fitness and recreation capacity by 25 percent.
A three-story, 30,000-square-foot wellness tower in the facility’s center will house the medical clinic and counseling center, as well as space for the alcohol and drug recovery program, sexual violence prevention programming, and meeting spaces. On the recreation front, the facility will have two multipurpose courts, four tennis courts, four basketball courts, a 25-yard swimming pool, two group fitness studios and a cycling studio.
Marquette authorities chose to renovate the Helfaer center rather than create an entirely new structure.
“In addition to it being really great programmatic projects … it’s also a very interesting building project, I think, keeping the two large volumes of space that house our tennis courts and basketball courts,” Strigens says. “It's a sustainable decision by the university, both financially and environmentally, and then it gives us the opportunity to really create this marquee facility on the site.”
Moving all health and recreation resources into one building also consolidates touch points for students to engage in wellness. “The goal is for us to make it as easy as possible for students to access the services and the support that they need,” Strigens explains.
The top two floors of the wellness center will be known as the Lovell Center for Student Wellbeing, named after Marquette’s president Michael Lovell and his family, due to his commitment to student wellness and mental health.
The facility is funded by donor gifts, the institution and a student wellness fee, which has been in place since 2016.
Feedback and input: When designing the space, the project team received feedback from a variety of stakeholders, including student affairs, the medical clinic, counseling programs, recreation and fitness experts and, of course, students.
The recreation and fitness space, for example, is designed to be used by all students spanning all levels of experience, comfort and engagement. The result is a variety of flexible spaces and different programming.
As the project continues, Marquette will continue to solicit student input on furniture and branding.
“We want them to feel represented in the space, and we want it to feel, as campus is their home away from home, that it’s a space that they feel comfortable and welcome in,” Strigens says.
Does your institution have a new wellness and recreation facility that is contributing to student retention? Tell us about it.
Attracting students to various institutional resources remains a challenge for all higher education professionals. Muhlenberg College’s career center dug through the data to understand which of its students were not visiting the office or attending its programs and adjusted accordingly.
“Data is driving 100 percent of the decisions we’re making, and it’s really opening up our eyes to gaps that we didn’t know … existed,” says Sean Schofield, executive director of career services at Muhlenberg.
What happened: When Schofield began in his role in May 2021, he first turned to the data.
The career center collects all kinds of information from its Handshake platform, including student demographics, major interests, career goals, event or workshop participation, and appointments booked with the center. Surveys, focus groups and interviews also add data to the reports from Handshake.
In addition, the center surveys recent alumni to understand their initial postgraduate plans, what Schofield calls their “first destination,” and any experiential learning completed during their undergraduate careers.
Muhlenberg’s career center was reaching 62 to 72 percent of its student population annually at the end of the 2021 academic year.
“My first question I asked when the team told me that was, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic. Is it always the same, like 30 percent or so that we don’t hit?’” Schofield says. He wanted to understand who was being missed and if there was any connection in who those students were.
Schofield and his team realized in their data analysis that students in performance arts majors and those planning on attending graduate school were less likely than their peers to visit the career center or complete their first-destination survey.
The solution: As a result, Muhlenberg’s career center staff focused their attention on these groups and how they could enhance outreach and relationships.
For performing arts students, the career center established a career coach who would liaise between the departments and increased collaboration with those faculty members. Muhlenberg’s campus is divided by a road, Chew Street, that separates most academic facilities and administrative services from the theater, center for the arts and rehearsal house, so the career center’s goal was to “Cross Chew Street,” Schofield explains.
Similarly, the Graduate School Preparatory Program had a new dedicated staff member to support students as they applied for programs and considered options in continuing their education.
Both career coaches had personal and professional experience in their related fields, Schofield says, making them the perfect fit for the roles and able to gain the trust of faculty and students in their fields.
More broadly, the career center changed the language and phrasing on its website to be more inclusive for students and their postgraduate experiences. Instead of marketing a list of employers a student could work with, the center emphasized stories and diverse outcomes following graduation.
“We not only tell stories of professional advancement in full-time work but highlight our support structure for students who are applying to graduate and professional schools,” Schofield says.
The center also re-evaluated its experiential learning opportunities, and the allocated funding for those programs, to expand its supports for underserviced students.
Other uses for data: Besides assisting the center in reaching students, the focus on data is contributing to building relationships with faculty.
“One of the things that initially I did was to go around to faculty and introduce [myself] and say, ‘Hey, what data can we provide you?’” Schofield explains.
By working with data, the career center is also reconstructing its services more broadly. When hiring new team members, for example, Schofield is intentional in selecting personnel who are comfortable with and have a high aptitude for data synthesis and reporting. Schofield has hired five new faces to his team, strengthening the career center’s data strategies.
“Whatever we do, we want to be able to count in some way,” Schofield says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean with numbers, but we have to be able to count it, and what we’re counting has to be learning.”
Rather than evaluating participation or utilization, the career center re-established programs to target specific learning outcomes for every year a student is enrolled at the college, creating a phased approach to career development and readiness that it calls the Muhlenberg Action Plan, or MAP for short.
Do you have a data success tip that might help others encourage student success? Tell us about it.
Attracting students to various institutional resources remains a challenge for all higher education professionals. Muhlenberg College’s career center dug through the data to understand which of its students were not visiting the office or attending its programs and adjusted accordingly.
“Data is driving 100 percent of the decisions we’re making, and it’s really opening up our eyes to gaps that we didn’t know … existed,” says Sean Schofield, executive director of career services at Muhlenberg.
What happened: When Schofield began in his role in May 2021, he first turned to the data.
The career center collects all kinds of information from its Handshake platform, including student demographics, major interests, career goals, event or workshop participation, and appointments booked with the center. Surveys, focus groups and interviews also add data to the reports from Handshake.
In addition, the center surveys recent alumni to understand their initial postgraduate plans, what Schofield calls their “first destination,” and any experiential learning completed during their undergraduate careers.
Muhlenberg’s career center was reaching 62 to 72 percent of its student population annually at the end of the 2021 academic year.
“My first question I asked when the team told me that was, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic. Is it always the same, like 30 percent or so that we don’t hit?’” Schofield says. He wanted to understand who was being missed and if there was any connection in who those students were.
Schofield and his team realized in their data analysis that students in performance arts majors and those planning on attending graduate school were less likely than their peers to visit the career center or complete their first-destination survey.
The solution: As a result, Muhlenberg’s career center staff focused their attention on these groups and how they could enhance outreach and relationships.
For performing arts students, the career center established a career coach who would liaise between the departments and increased collaboration with those faculty members. Muhlenberg’s campus is divided by a road, Chew Street, that separates most academic facilities and administrative services from the theater, center for the arts and rehearsal house, so the career center’s goal was to “Cross Chew Street,” Schofield explains.
Similarly, the Graduate School Preparatory Program had a new dedicated staff member to support students as they applied for programs and considered options in continuing their education.
Both career coaches had personal and professional experience in their related fields, Schofield says, making them the perfect fit for the roles and able to gain the trust of faculty and students in their fields.
More broadly, the career center changed the language and phrasing on its website to be more inclusive for students and their postgraduate experiences. Instead of marketing a list of employers a student could work with, the center emphasized stories and diverse outcomes following graduation.
“We not only tell stories of professional advancement in full-time work but highlight our support structure for students who are applying to graduate and professional schools,” Schofield says.
The center also re-evaluated its experiential learning opportunities, and the allocated funding for those programs, to expand its supports for underserviced students.
Other uses for data: Besides assisting the center in reaching students, the focus on data is contributing to building relationships with faculty.
“One of the things that initially I did was to go around to faculty and introduce [myself] and say, ‘Hey, what data can we provide you?’” Schofield explains.
By working with data, the career center is also reconstructing its services more broadly. When hiring new team members, for example, Schofield is intentional in selecting personnel who are comfortable with and have a high aptitude for data synthesis and reporting. Schofield has hired five new faces to his team, strengthening the career center’s data strategies.
“Whatever we do, we want to be able to count in some way,” Schofield says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean with numbers, but we have to be able to count it, and what we’re counting has to be learning.”
Rather than evaluating participation or utilization, the career center re-established programs to target specific learning outcomes for every year a student is enrolled at the college, creating a phased approach to career development and readiness that it calls the Muhlenberg Action Plan, or MAP for short.
Do you have a data success tip that might help others encourage student success? Tell us about it.
Financial wellness may not be the first area that comes to mind when thinking of well-being, but it is considered one of the eight dimensions of wellness.
Inside Higher Ed spoke with three financial aid professionals about their best strategies to strengthen this area for students.
Mike Runiewicz, assistant vice provost and director of student financial services at Washington University in St. Louis, sees the institution’s role in student financial wellness as “helping students obtain the information that will help them successfully navigate different aspects of their lives.”
The first concern is an admitted student’s cost of enrollment and financial resources prior to starting at the institution, and then colleges must support the student in having the resources to graduate on time.
“It is important to us that financial aid and finances are not what people are thinking about and worrying about through their college experience,” Runiewicz says.
In a 2022 Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse survey, only four in 10 college students called their financial knowledge “excellent” or “good.”
Students at a four-year university were more likely to use their university’s information and resources, with 41 percent using the financial aid office and 20 percent turning to other institutional sources. Only 25 percent of students at two-year universities have used their financial aid offices, and 14 percent have used other institutional resources.
Students also disproportionately use their financial aid offices based on their class year. Only 27 percent of the Class of 2022 (then graduating seniors) had never interacted with their financial aid office, compared to 50 percent of the Class of 2025, then first-year students.
Among all students, 58 percent indicated they would like financial aid offices to provide more support to navigate their own finances, and 54 percent want more education and awareness around personal finances now and postgraduation.
Here’s how financial aid professionals can, through conversation and more formal efforts, be supporting students and giving them the tools to establish and maintain good financial habits.
Most students don’t think about financial literacy until they’re about to graduate, says Brad Barnett, associate vice president for access and enrollment management and the financial aid director at James Madison University.
Financial aid officers should work to grow a student’s financial literacy in phases, beginning in their first semester and culminating the term before graduation.
“It’s about setting up that mind-set: even though you don’t have a full-time job, the concept of saving, the concept of living within your means, budgeting,” shares Dana Kelly, vice president of professional development for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
A freshman could learn how to create a budget, reduce debt, avoid credit card traps and navigate the dangers of peer-pressure spending, whereas a senior could learn about choosing a health insurance policy and investing.
Budgeting was the No. 1 skill identified by the interviewed financial aid professionals as a necessary skill for undergraduate students.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of career you’re going into. You have to have some kind of a budget,” Runiewicz will tell students. “You have a limited amount of dollars coming into your house, and you’ve got to make sure that the dollars going out of your house don’t exceed the dollars coming into your house.”
While budgeting can seem monotonous to a student, financial aid officers and other institutional partners should emphasize the importance of building valuable habits along the way, Kelly adds.
WashU assigns financial aid officers, called Student Financial Services counselors, to students when they’re admitted. The same SFS counselor will work with a student throughout their academic career, providing intentional communication, support and guidance.
“Now any student, regardless of where they are in our process, feels like they have a specific person to talk to, and they don’t lose that person once they enroll at the university,” Runiewicz explains.
The SFS counselor personifies the office for students and provides a continuity of care that is important, he adds. “When a student reaches out to Student Financial Services, we know who that student is, we have some knowledge of that student’s situation and the students are not having to explain every single uncomfortable thing.”
If you can’t bring the student to the financial aid office, maybe you should bring the financial aid office closer to the student.
In January 2020, WashU opened a satellite financial aid office in the student union at the Danforth University Center, which is closer to residence halls and other student spaces.
“Between the time that we opened that [office] in January and the time we closed at the pandemic, we saw more current students in that location than we saw at our primary location,” Runiewicz reports.
Financial aid at WashU, like many institutions, also offers virtual office hours via Zoom.
Reinforcing old-school spending and borrowing habits can teach students how to better manage their finances and set them up for future success.
The ease of making digital purchases and transferring money, especially via mobile devices, can decrease people’s intention with how they’re using their money, Barnett, from James Madison, shares. Instead, he teaches students how to manage money thoughtfully and carefully.
In spite of the federal requirement from the Department of Education for institutions to provide loan entrance and exit counseling, “in this day and age, you could literally go through your entire school career, get loans and never step foot in the financial aid office,” he says. “It’s so electronic; it’s so easy.”
Barnett, when teaching his financial literacy class, breaks down what he considers myths surrounding money and finances. One is about debt and credit spending—that a person has to have good credit to survive or has to take on debt to buy things.
“I want my students to understand there is another way that is less risky. It might take longer, it may require a bit more patience, but it removes risk from the equation,” he says.
Spotlighting financial literacy in a classroom setting can also equip students for financial wellness.
“I would love to see personal finance become a required gen ed,” Kelly shares. Among the many resources present, she envisions an institution could create a credit-based, required course to count toward a liberal arts degree.
Barnett teaches an in-person, three-credit-hour class for graduating seniors in any major. In it, he walks through 12 topics of personal finance. His students keep a journal and write a financial plan at the end of the term to prepare them for their life after graduation and to think critically about money.
Beyond learning skills themselves, students who complete a course on financial literacy will often start a culture shift among their peers, Barnett says.
“During the course of the semester, students start teaching their friends what they’re learning,” he explains. “It spreads just through word of mouth, and the students become ambassadors with people in their cohort to help them fix their money as well.”
Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our new Student Success focus. Share here.
Financial wellness may not be the first area that comes to mind when thinking of well-being, but it is considered one of the eight dimensions of wellness.
Inside Higher Ed spoke with three financial aid professionals about their best strategies to strengthen this area for students.
Mike Runiewicz, assistant vice provost and director of student financial services at Washington University in St. Louis, sees the institution’s role in student financial wellness as “helping students obtain the information that will help them successfully navigate different aspects of their lives.”
The first concern is an admitted student’s cost of enrollment and financial resources prior to starting at the institution, and then colleges must support the student in having the resources to graduate on time.
“It is important to us that financial aid and finances are not what people are thinking about and worrying about through their college experience,” Runiewicz says.
In a 2022 Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse survey, only four in 10 college students called their financial knowledge “excellent” or “good.”
Students at a four-year university were more likely to use their university’s information and resources, with 41 percent using the financial aid office and 20 percent turning to other institutional sources. Only 25 percent of students at two-year universities have used their financial aid offices, and 14 percent have used other institutional resources.
Students also disproportionately use their financial aid offices based on their class year. Only 27 percent of the Class of 2022 (then graduating seniors) had never interacted with their financial aid office, compared to 50 percent of the Class of 2025, then first-year students.
Among all students, 58 percent indicated they would like financial aid offices to provide more support to navigate their own finances, and 54 percent want more education and awareness around personal finances now and postgraduation.
Here’s how financial aid professionals can, through conversation and more formal efforts, be supporting students and giving them the tools to establish and maintain good financial habits.
Most students don’t think about financial literacy until they’re about to graduate, says Brad Barnett, associate vice president for access and enrollment management and the financial aid director at James Madison University.
Financial aid officers should work to grow a student’s financial literacy in phases, beginning in their first semester and culminating the term before graduation.
“It’s about setting up that mind-set: even though you don’t have a full-time job, the concept of saving, the concept of living within your means, budgeting,” shares Dana Kelly, vice president of professional development for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
A freshman could learn how to create a budget, reduce debt, avoid credit card traps and navigate the dangers of peer-pressure spending, whereas a senior could learn about choosing a health insurance policy and investing.
Budgeting was the No. 1 skill identified by the interviewed financial aid professionals as a necessary skill for undergraduate students.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of career you’re going into. You have to have some kind of a budget,” Runiewicz will tell students. “You have a limited amount of dollars coming into your house, and you’ve got to make sure that the dollars going out of your house don’t exceed the dollars coming into your house.”
While budgeting can seem monotonous to a student, financial aid officers and other institutional partners should emphasize the importance of building valuable habits along the way, Kelly adds.
WashU assigns financial aid officers, called Student Financial Services counselors, to students when they’re admitted. The same SFS counselor will work with a student throughout their academic career, providing intentional communication, support and guidance.
“Now any student, regardless of where they are in our process, feels like they have a specific person to talk to, and they don’t lose that person once they enroll at the university,” Runiewicz explains.
The SFS counselor personifies the office for students and provides a continuity of care that is important, he adds. “When a student reaches out to Student Financial Services, we know who that student is, we have some knowledge of that student’s situation and the students are not having to explain every single uncomfortable thing.”
If you can’t bring the student to the financial aid office, maybe you should bring the financial aid office closer to the student.
In January 2020, WashU opened a satellite financial aid office in the student union at the Danforth University Center, which is closer to residence halls and other student spaces.
“Between the time that we opened that [office] in January and the time we closed at the pandemic, we saw more current students in that location than we saw at our primary location,” Runiewicz reports.
Financial aid at WashU, like many institutions, also offers virtual office hours via Zoom.
Reinforcing old-school spending and borrowing habits can teach students how to better manage their finances and set them up for future success.
The ease of making digital purchases and transferring money, especially via mobile devices, can decrease people’s intention with how they’re using their money, Barnett, from James Madison, shares. Instead, he teaches students how to manage money thoughtfully and carefully.
In spite of the federal requirement from the Department of Education for institutions to provide loan entrance and exit counseling, “in this day and age, you could literally go through your entire school career, get loans and never step foot in the financial aid office,” he says. “It’s so electronic; it’s so easy.”
Barnett, when teaching his financial literacy class, breaks down what he considers myths surrounding money and finances. One is about debt and credit spending—that a person has to have good credit to survive or has to take on debt to buy things.
“I want my students to understand there is another way that is less risky. It might take longer, it may require a bit more patience, but it removes risk from the equation,” he says.
Spotlighting financial literacy in a classroom setting can also equip students for financial wellness.
“I would love to see personal finance become a required gen ed,” Kelly shares. Among the many resources present, she envisions an institution could create a credit-based, required course to count toward a liberal arts degree.
Barnett teaches an in-person, three-credit-hour class for graduating seniors in any major. In it, he walks through 12 topics of personal finance. His students keep a journal and write a financial plan at the end of the term to prepare them for their life after graduation and to think critically about money.
Beyond learning skills themselves, students who complete a course on financial literacy will often start a culture shift among their peers, Barnett says.
“During the course of the semester, students start teaching their friends what they’re learning,” he explains. “It spreads just through word of mouth, and the students become ambassadors with people in their cohort to help them fix their money as well.”
Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our new Student Success focus. Share here.
Campus climate work affects all members of an institution’s community—but also requires a buy-in and intentional effort from all parties.
Officials at Oxford College of Emory University, one of the university’s two liberal arts colleges, in 2019 identified a need for a more positive campus climate. With the introduction of their Oxford principles, leaders have created a new vocabulary for the campus community to address student needs.
How it works: Oxford College’s career center developed the six principles to oppose “toxic behaviors and norms on campus,” says Ami Hernandez, assistant director of career services.
“We were observing widespread anxiety and depression manifesting itself in a variety of ways, including a low tolerance for uncertainty; an increasingly transactional approach to learning, college and relationships; and a lack of perceived alternatives,” she adds.
The six principles—belonging, care, accountability, learning, presence and identity—were designed to be a paradigm shift. The conversations centered around aligning one’s choices, values and behaviors instead of holding a negative mentality.
Faculty, staff and students provided input to develop definitions of each principle, with the initial focus as a student-facing initiative. Over time, other stakeholders recognized themselves in the messaging, Hernandez explains, and since its conception four years ago, it has involved parties campuswide.
Nailing it down: The Oxford principles have proven useful in more than just improving campus culture. In the Career Center, students are able to name and engage challenges they face when encountering an uncertain future.
As one example, a student who would prefer to be told what their next step in life should be rather than decide themselves can be reminded of the principle of accountability, which encourages students to lean into feeling uncomfortable in the unknown.
“It changes the way that we frame exploration of and engagement with transferable skills that our students can leverage in their professional futures,” Hernandez adds.
Scaling up: Campus partners were eager to jump on board, Hernandez says. “Ultimately, what began as an effort to develop capacity and community at the student level became an intervention at the community level.”
“Our colleagues in the Advising Support Center were early adopters of this initiative and have steadily integrated the language of the principles into various applications of their work in response to an increasingly busy and grade-obsessed student body,” Hernandez says.
Training materials at the ACS for faculty advisers feature the principles and emphasize support and resources for students. The Peer Advising Network, an ACS-sponsored, student-led program of second-years who design and deliver program for incoming students, also introduces and outlines the principles in its work.
The counseling office, similarly, borrows language from the initiative to talk about student stressors.
“Inviting our students to lean into their identities as learners—who have chosen to attend college in order to grow, develop and be changed, and to do so in a community that embraces exploration and discovery as part of its liberal arts mission—has given our counselors just one more tool to use in their clinical and educative roles,” Hernandez adds.
Looking ahead: Hernandez describes the current stage of the process as the second iteration, as it moves from students to the college community.
“In our current exploration and development of this initiative, we are leaning heavily into the questions when we consider programming opportunities with students and engagement opportunities for campus educators,” Hernandez says.
Over the years, the team at Oxford College has had to embrace change and a little chaos to pull the project off. While students and staff enjoyed a grassroots approach to the rollout, faculty wanted a more top-down look.
While there’s still much to learn, two concepts have risen to the top.
First, capacity-building for students must start with educators. “We’re not equipped to create conditions that support capacity-building on our campus until we tend to those same needs within ourselves,” Hernandez says.
Second, a willingness and commitment to collaborate across disciplines and departments is key. “As educators, our own capacity-building has been supported by the relationships that we have cultivated and the commitment we have made to learning and growing together,” she adds.
Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our new Student Success focus. Share here.
Campus climate work affects all members of an institution’s community—but also requires a buy-in and intentional effort from all parties.
Officials at Oxford College of Emory University, one of the university’s two liberal arts colleges, in 2019 identified a need for a more positive campus climate. With the introduction of their Oxford principles, leaders have created a new vocabulary for the campus community to address student needs.
How it works: Oxford College’s career center developed the six principles to oppose “toxic behaviors and norms on campus,” says Ami Hernandez, assistant director of career services.
“We were observing widespread anxiety and depression manifesting itself in a variety of ways, including a low tolerance for uncertainty; an increasingly transactional approach to learning, college and relationships; and a lack of perceived alternatives,” she adds.
The six principles—belonging, care, accountability, learning, presence and identity—were designed to be a paradigm shift. The conversations centered around aligning one’s choices, values and behaviors instead of holding a negative mentality.
Faculty, staff and students provided input to develop definitions of each principle, with the initial focus as a student-facing initiative. Over time, other stakeholders recognized themselves in the messaging, Hernandez explains, and since its conception four years ago, it has involved parties campuswide.
Nailing it down: The Oxford principles have proven useful in more than just improving campus culture. In the Career Center, students are able to name and engage challenges they face when encountering an uncertain future.
As one example, a student who would prefer to be told what their next step in life should be rather than decide themselves can be reminded of the principle of accountability, which encourages students to lean into feeling uncomfortable in the unknown.
“It changes the way that we frame exploration of and engagement with transferable skills that our students can leverage in their professional futures,” Hernandez adds.
Scaling up: Campus partners were eager to jump on board, Hernandez says. “Ultimately, what began as an effort to develop capacity and community at the student level became an intervention at the community level.”
“Our colleagues in the Advising Support Center were early adopters of this initiative and have steadily integrated the language of the principles into various applications of their work in response to an increasingly busy and grade-obsessed student body,” Hernandez says.
Training materials at the ACS for faculty advisers feature the principles and emphasize support and resources for students. The Peer Advising Network, an ACS-sponsored, student-led program of second-years who design and deliver program for incoming students, also introduces and outlines the principles in its work.
The counseling office, similarly, borrows language from the initiative to talk about student stressors.
“Inviting our students to lean into their identities as learners—who have chosen to attend college in order to grow, develop and be changed, and to do so in a community that embraces exploration and discovery as part of its liberal arts mission—has given our counselors just one more tool to use in their clinical and educative roles,” Hernandez adds.
Looking ahead: Hernandez describes the current stage of the process as the second iteration, as it moves from students to the college community.
“In our current exploration and development of this initiative, we are leaning heavily into the questions when we consider programming opportunities with students and engagement opportunities for campus educators,” Hernandez says.
Over the years, the team at Oxford College has had to embrace change and a little chaos to pull the project off. While students and staff enjoyed a grassroots approach to the rollout, faculty wanted a more top-down look.
While there’s still much to learn, two concepts have risen to the top.
First, capacity-building for students must start with educators. “We’re not equipped to create conditions that support capacity-building on our campus until we tend to those same needs within ourselves,” Hernandez says.
Second, a willingness and commitment to collaborate across disciplines and departments is key. “As educators, our own capacity-building has been supported by the relationships that we have cultivated and the commitment we have made to learning and growing together,” she adds.
Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our new Student Success focus. Share here.
Understanding a student’s “Why?” can be a first step in nurturing their success.
At Rochester Institute of Technology’s Academic Success Center, staff and student employees work with students to find their intrinsic values and inspire them to work in accordance with those values. In partnership with the Career Services and Cooperative Education Office, RIT students can explore their motivations to learn and work, as well as plan for a future of values-based living.
“Connecting what is going on intrinsically with students to their external demands and deadlines is where the magic is at,” says Glen Dornsife, coordinator of peer education and academic coaching at the Academic Success Center.
Seeing the divide: For most students, their priorities lie in productivity and achievement, rather than in their own desire to work.
“The majority of the study tools and resources we provide are geared toward assisting students to be more efficient and effective,” Dornsife says. “Empowering students to just be more productive does not establish a habit of overall student well-being.”
Instead of prioritizing skills like time management and organization, Dornsife and his team prioritize the values a student holds.
Identifying the core: To identify a student’s values, RIT’s academic coaches and workshops pose questions like, “What is most important to you?” “How do you define success and why?” and “What does your ideal semester look like?”
“These types of questions both elevate the conversation by making it more about their concerns or goals for this exchange, and, at the same time, ground their sense of being and doing, by connecting who they are and their values to the concerns they bring to us,” Dornsife explains.
The office has used values-centered conversations in mentoring and coaching for about a semester and a half now.
From academics to career life: The theme of values at RIT connects beyond the Academic Success Center and into the Career Services and Cooperative Education Office.
Career counselor Chris O’Connor focuses on connecting students’ values to their career goals, he says. Workshops called “Conducting a Values-Based Job Search,” “What Do Values Have to Do With Choosing a Major?” and related topics allow students to reflect on their career work and eventual impact on their communities.
“Many studies show that individuals who are engaged in work that aligns with their values are more motivated and engaged at work and report higher rates of job satisfaction than their peers,” O’Connor adds.
The workshops address using personal values in future work experiences, looking at future employers’ mission statements and of course connecting values to academics in the present moment.
Together, the ACS and Career Services are creating a resource that integrates themes the two offices have seen when talking about values with students. The advice is aimed at helping students more easily identify what’s important to them and how they prioritize tasks.
Data needs: The success center’s peer-mentor program tracks students’ confidence and persistence before and after receiving academic coaching or participating in a workshop, but the team presently lacks data around values conversations specifically.
Do you have an academic success tip that might help others encourage student success? Tell us about it.
Understanding a student’s “Why?” can be a first step in nurturing their success.
At Rochester Institute of Technology’s Academic Success Center, staff and student employees work with students to find their intrinsic values and inspire them to work in accordance with those values. In partnership with the Career Services and Cooperative Education Office, RIT students can explore their motivations to learn and work, as well as plan for a future of values-based living.
“Connecting what is going on intrinsically with students to their external demands and deadlines is where the magic is at,” says Glen Dornsife, coordinator of peer education and academic coaching at the Academic Success Center.
Seeing the divide: For most students, their priorities lie in productivity and achievement, rather than in their own desire to work.
“The majority of the study tools and resources we provide are geared toward assisting students to be more efficient and effective,” Dornsife says. “Empowering students to just be more productive does not establish a habit of overall student well-being.”
Instead of prioritizing skills like time management and organization, Dornsife and his team prioritize the values a student holds.
Identifying the core: To identify a student’s values, RIT’s academic coaches and workshops pose questions like, “What is most important to you?” “How do you define success and why?” and “What does your ideal semester look like?”
“These types of questions both elevate the conversation by making it more about their concerns or goals for this exchange, and, at the same time, ground their sense of being and doing, by connecting who they are and their values to the concerns they bring to us,” Dornsife explains.
The office has used values-centered conversations in mentoring and coaching for about a semester and a half now.
From academics to career life: The theme of values at RIT connects beyond the Academic Success Center and into the Career Services and Cooperative Education Office.
Career counselor Chris O’Connor focuses on connecting students’ values to their career goals, he says. Workshops called “Conducting a Values-Based Job Search,” “What Do Values Have to Do With Choosing a Major?” and related topics allow students to reflect on their career work and eventual impact on their communities.
“Many studies show that individuals who are engaged in work that aligns with their values are more motivated and engaged at work and report higher rates of job satisfaction than their peers,” O’Connor adds.
The workshops address using personal values in future work experiences, looking at future employers’ mission statements and of course connecting values to academics in the present moment.
Together, the ACS and Career Services are creating a resource that integrates themes the two offices have seen when talking about values with students. The advice is aimed at helping students more easily identify what’s important to them and how they prioritize tasks.
Data needs: The success center’s peer-mentor program tracks students’ confidence and persistence before and after receiving academic coaching or participating in a workshop, but the team presently lacks data around values conversations specifically.
Do you have an academic success tip that might help others encourage student success? Tell us about it.
With a heart for minority and underrepresented students, Brian Reed, associate vice provost for Student Success and Campus Life at the University Montana, uses a data-focused approach to gauge student success and career readiness.
Reed spoke with Inside Higher Ed about his cross-departmental work and a new initiative at Montana to match course objectives with professional experience.
Q: What led you to your career in higher education?
A: I was a first-generation college student from a small coal-mining community in east Kentucky. I arrived at college clueless, scared out of my mind, constantly worried that I would flunk out or not be successful in some way. I was like, “So what’s the secret of success here?” And everybody kept saying, “Don’t quit.” And I was like, all right, I can do that. Like, I can not quit.
I had some really great professors who were really supportive, who are first gen themselves and great role models. I was an elementary education major as my undergraduate training, and I kept having this real itch along the way, though: I really liked college. I didn’t know about this thing called Student Affairs just yet, but I knew [there was] a way that I could work at a college and sort of do for other students—particularly first-gen, BIPOC students and Pell Grant students—what others had done for me.
Q: What does student success mean to you?
A: I believe that excellence and talent are equally distributed, but opportunity isn’t. So for me, student success is: How do I help? Or, how do we help, as a campus, every student maximize their abilities and their experiences?
It’s equal parts tearing down and building up, tearing down being like removing all the obstacles that bureaucratically or programmatically stand in a student’s way. The building-up piece is creating programs and services and mentoring opportunities for students that help promote their growth, as well.
One of the things I really like to do is disaggregate data down to some really essential cores to look at how good or not we’re serving minoritized students, Pell Grant students, first-gen students—and saying, “Can we do better? And how do we do better?”
Q: What are the markers of student success in your role?
A: One of the things I pay really close attention to is utilization data. We just recently looked at student’s utilization of counseling services on campus and broke it down by race and ethnicity and we found that a lot of our Native American students weren’t using that service. We saw that data and then our director of wellness and I got together and said, “What can we do about this?’
So what we did is create an embedded wellness coordinator position. These are social workers in our school of social work who are part of the individual college’s leadership team, who serve as a subclinical counseling coach resource to both students and faculty. And particularly with Native American students, we placed one with our American Indian Student Services Office. They’re there 10 to 15 hours a week for students to be able to consult with and get some clinical coaching.
I don’t want to see disparities across race, social class, health status, first-gen status. I really feel like our task is to mitigate and eliminate those disparities. If you look at our DEI plan on campus, it’s really granular in those ways. Each of those directors knows that their task is to look at all of that data and figure out: Who are we serving? Who are we not serving well? And how do we serve them better?
The thing I really like about [student success] work is how it bridges [departments]. Student success is everything. We talked about all the things you have to do to move the needle on retention, and one of the benefits that comes with that is the ability to work with interdepartmental and cross-campus partners and faculty particularly … There’s no better position on a college campus to integrate the curricular and the co-curricular than the one that I have.
Q: What is equity-imperative career readiness and what does it mean to you?
A: One of the things that I lose a lot of sleep over every night is these national trends … around the notion of underemployment.
What we know is that BIPOC students tend to major in majors that have some of the highest underemployment, and then they tend to have the highest underemployment regardless of major. One of the things we’ve really turned our focus on has been postgraduate success, as well.
My general goal is to erase any disparities across race and ethnicity and any sort of outcome that we have in particularly postgrad. The postgraduate is important to me, because the idea is that if you come out underemployed, you’re not working in a field requiring your degree, like the percentage or the likelihood that you will be chronically underemployed is real.
The beauty of having a really big portfolio [of departments] is that I can go to the director of career success and say, “Hey, how about you and I and the director of American Indian Student Services sit in a room together, and talk about how we can create more and early exposure around career readiness for Native American students?”
Q: How do you translate students’ skills and their course outcomes into career readiness?
A: One of the things I’m a huge student of is the skills discussion going on between employers and institutions, as the undergraduate degree becomes less and less a proxy for career readiness.
We have a faculty person that we stipend whose whole job is to work with fellow faculty on extracting work-based skills and competencies out of … syllabi and clearly listing those as course outcomes.
We’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s not going to happen overnight, but the idea is that at the end of the day, a student would be able to have a list of all the skills and competencies that they were able to glean from all their courses here at the University of Montana. So when they sit down at an interview with an employer, they can point directly to, “Hey, I did a group project around data analytics and I have this technical skill in this particular area.”
We offer one-off workshops where we use Lightcast Skills Extractor and AI to help faculty extract the skills that they’re currently teaching in their courses. It’s an illuminating exercise because a lot of faculty will do this, and they’ll get a handful of skills that get extracted from the AI and then they’ll go, “Wait, but I’m teaching this, too—I thought I was teaching this?” And then it’s a brilliant moment, because then we go, “Well, you might be, but you’re not articulating it as a course outcome, so let’s be more explicit with it.”
Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our new Student Success focus. Share here.
At New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, the seven-year-old Vertically Integrated Projects program has grown from five teams to almost 50, involving hundreds of students each semester. Through the experiential learning opportunities, students develop research and their professional skills to prepare them for postgraduate success.
Beyond giving students hands-on experience, Vertically Integrated Projects are designed with accessibility in mind, giving any interested student or faculty member the opportunity to get involved.
The nuts and bolts: A Vertically Integrated Project is an interdisciplinary research study program with 10 to 20 students on a team, distributed across all grade levels.
Projects vary from creating a fully-functioning concrete canoe to exploring accessibility within XR to a vertical farming research project.
Each team is managed by one faculty adviser who supervises and grades students throughout the project.
Students commit to participate in their project for three semesters, earning one to three credits for each, but many work on their VIP for longer, says Jack Bringardner, director of vertically integrated projects at NYU Tandon.
“The ideal student is someone who gets involved in the first or second year and then really takes advantage of that long-term participation to move up into leadership roles to get more of that really in-depth experience,” Bringardner says.
When students do lock in for longer than three semesters, they “start to act like graduate students,” in terms of the level of research and responsibility they take on, which in turn creates greater opportunity in their graduate or postgraduate research, Bringardner explains.
All NYU students can apply, and there are no prerequisite courses. While there is an application process, most students are placed in a project, with the primary consideration on their grade level and major to create balance among teams.
“We actually try to limit any kind of résumé reviews, GPA reviews, all of that,” Bringardner says. “We know internships and some summer research internships … can be kind of exclusive, and the VIP is intended to be accessible.”
The foundation: NYU’s program belongs to the VIP Consortium, first started by Georgia Tech and Purdue University, but it is a university-run and funded initiative.
The VIP solves three common problems in undergraduate research:
“By taking advantage of the size of the team and the multiyear component of it, you have some self-sustaining abilities, where the team starts to develop almost like a start-up culture,” Bringardner says.
Growing up and out: NYU started with five VIPs in 2016: the ReprintBot, NYU-X, the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod, Smart Cities Technology and the Urban Food Lab.
In the seven years since, NYU has added over 40 more projects, with 760 students participating in 46 teams this semester, a jump from the 40 teams and 655 students in fall 2022.
Though VIPs started with the Tandon School of Engineering, as more faculty have joined the fray, projects have expanded in topics as well, even moving outside of engineering. Robotics, sustainability and health applications are some of the most popular research areas.
The project is an asset to faculty looking to complete their own research, because it provides easy access to undergraduate students and support for their research, plus qualifies as “broader impact,” a frequent grant-funded-research consideration.
As the program has grown, so has its staff. NYU Tandon added a full-time program manager and a program administrator to support growth and operations. Uniformity across the program has grown as well, with a new-adviser orientation and branded templates to create program materials.
Tools of the trade: The biggest takeaway from a VIP is to bridge classroom education and curriculum with research and life experience, Bringardner says. “They get educated on disciplinary topics, but also project management skills, so they learn both professional skills that will help them be leaders and managers in the future.”
The research also gives students opportunities to get involved in field development as well as provides work experience, which can be vital for acquiring a summer internship or job after graduation, Bringardner adds. “The thing that we hear over and over from students is that their Vertically Integrated Project that they list on their résumés is the first thing that employers ask about in an interview.”
Share your own story about how a successful program for students has grown.
At New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, the seven-year-old Vertically Integrated Projects program has grown from five teams to almost 50, involving hundreds of students each semester. Through the experiential learning opportunities, students develop research and their professional skills to prepare them for postgraduate success.
Beyond giving students hands-on experience, Vertically Integrated Projects are designed with accessibility in mind, giving any interested student or faculty member the opportunity to get involved.
The nuts and bolts: A Vertically Integrated Project is an interdisciplinary research study program with 10 to 20 students on a team, distributed across all grade levels.
Projects vary from creating a fully-functioning concrete canoe to exploring accessibility within XR to a vertical farming research project.
Each team is managed by one faculty adviser who supervises and grades students throughout the project.
Students commit to participate in their project for three semesters, earning one to three credits for each, but many work on their VIP for longer, says Jack Bringardner, director of vertically integrated projects at NYU Tandon.
“The ideal student is someone who gets involved in the first or second year and then really takes advantage of that long-term participation to move up into leadership roles to get more of that really in-depth experience,” Bringardner says.
When students do lock in for longer than three semesters, they “start to act like graduate students,” in terms of the level of research and responsibility they take on, which in turn creates greater opportunity in their graduate or postgraduate research, Bringardner explains.
All NYU students can apply, and there are no prerequisite courses. While there is an application process, most students are placed in a project, with the primary consideration on their grade level and major to create balance among teams.
“We actually try to limit any kind of résumé reviews, GPA reviews, all of that,” Bringardner says. “We know internships and some summer research internships … can be kind of exclusive, and the VIP is intended to be accessible.”
The foundation: NYU’s program belongs to the VIP Consortium, first started by Georgia Tech and Purdue University, but it is a university-run and funded initiative.
The VIP solves three common problems in undergraduate research:
“By taking advantage of the size of the team and the multiyear component of it, you have some self-sustaining abilities, where the team starts to develop almost like a start-up culture,” Bringardner says.
Growing up and out: NYU started with five VIPs in 2016: the ReprintBot, NYU-X, the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod, Smart Cities Technology and the Urban Food Lab.
In the seven years since, NYU has added over 40 more projects, with 760 students participating in 46 teams this semester, a jump from the 40 teams and 655 students in fall 2022.
Though VIPs started with the Tandon School of Engineering, as more faculty have joined the fray, projects have expanded in topics as well, even moving outside of engineering. Robotics, sustainability and health applications are some of the most popular research areas.
The project is an asset to faculty looking to complete their own research, because it provides easy access to undergraduate students and support for their research, plus qualifies as “broader impact,” a frequent grant-funded-research consideration.
As the program has grown, so has its staff. NYU Tandon added a full-time program manager and a program administrator to support growth and operations. Uniformity across the program has grown as well, with a new-adviser orientation and branded templates to create program materials.
Tools of the trade: The biggest takeaway from a VIP is to bridge classroom education and curriculum with research and life experience, Bringardner says. “They get educated on disciplinary topics, but also project management skills, so they learn both professional skills that will help them be leaders and managers in the future.”
The research also gives students opportunities to get involved in field development as well as provides work experience, which can be vital for acquiring a summer internship or job after graduation, Bringardner adds. “The thing that we hear over and over from students is that their Vertically Integrated Project that they list on their résumés is the first thing that employers ask about in an interview.”
Share your own story about how a successful program for students has grown.
With a heart for minority and underrepresented students, Brian Reed, associate vice provost for Student Success and Campus Life at the University Montana, uses a data-focused approach to gauge student success and career readiness.
Reed spoke with Inside Higher Ed about his cross-departmental work and a new initiative at Montana to match course objectives with professional experience.
Q: What led you to your career in higher education?
A: I was a first-generation college student from a small coal-mining community in east Kentucky. I arrived at college clueless, scared out of my mind, constantly worried that I would flunk out or not be successful in some way. I was like, “So what’s the secret of success here?” And everybody kept saying, “Don’t quit.” And I was like, all right, I can do that. Like, I can not quit.
I had some really great professors who were really supportive, who are first gen themselves and great role models. I was an elementary education major as my undergraduate training, and I kept having this real itch along the way, though: I really liked college. I didn’t know about this thing called Student Affairs just yet, but I knew [there was] a way that I could work at a college and sort of do for other students—particularly first-gen, BIPOC students and Pell Grant students—what others had done for me.
Q: What does student success mean to you?
A: I believe that excellence and talent are equally distributed, but opportunity isn’t. So for me, student success is: How do I help? Or, how do we help, as a campus, every student maximize their abilities and their experiences?
It’s equal parts tearing down and building up, tearing down being like removing all the obstacles that bureaucratically or programmatically stand in a student’s way. The building-up piece is creating programs and services and mentoring opportunities for students that help promote their growth, as well.
One of the things I really like to do is disaggregate data down to some really essential cores to look at how good or not we’re serving minoritized students, Pell Grant students, first-gen students—and saying, “Can we do better? And how do we do better?”
Q: What are the markers of student success in your role?
A: One of the things I pay really close attention to is utilization data. We just recently looked at student’s utilization of counseling services on campus and broke it down by race and ethnicity and we found that a lot of our Native American students weren’t using that service. We saw that data and then our director of wellness and I got together and said, “What can we do about this?’
So what we did is create an embedded wellness coordinator position. These are social workers in our school of social work who are part of the individual college’s leadership team, who serve as a subclinical counseling coach resource to both students and faculty. And particularly with Native American students, we placed one with our American Indian Student Services Office. They’re there 10 to 15 hours a week for students to be able to consult with and get some clinical coaching.
I don’t want to see disparities across race, social class, health status, first-gen status. I really feel like our task is to mitigate and eliminate those disparities. If you look at our DEI plan on campus, it’s really granular in those ways. Each of those directors knows that their task is to look at all of that data and figure out: Who are we serving? Who are we not serving well? And how do we serve them better?
The thing I really like about [student success] work is how it bridges [departments]. Student success is everything. We talked about all the things you have to do to move the needle on retention, and one of the benefits that comes with that is the ability to work with interdepartmental and cross-campus partners and faculty particularly … There’s no better position on a college campus to integrate the curricular and the co-curricular than the one that I have.
Q: What is equity-imperative career readiness and what does it mean to you?
A: One of the things that I lose a lot of sleep over every night is these national trends … around the notion of underemployment.
What we know is that BIPOC students tend to major in majors that have some of the highest underemployment, and then they tend to have the highest underemployment regardless of major. One of the things we’ve really turned our focus on has been postgraduate success, as well.
My general goal is to erase any disparities across race and ethnicity and any sort of outcome that we have in particularly postgrad. The postgraduate is important to me, because the idea is that if you come out underemployed, you’re not working in a field requiring your degree, like the percentage or the likelihood that you will be chronically underemployed is real.
The beauty of having a really big portfolio [of departments] is that I can go to the director of career success and say, “Hey, how about you and I and the director of American Indian Student Services sit in a room together, and talk about how we can create more and early exposure around career readiness for Native American students?”
Q: How do you translate students’ skills and their course outcomes into career readiness?
A: One of the things I’m a huge student of is the skills discussion going on between employers and institutions, as the undergraduate degree becomes less and less a proxy for career readiness.
We have a faculty person that we stipend whose whole job is to work with fellow faculty on extracting work-based skills and competencies out of … syllabi and clearly listing those as course outcomes.
We’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s not going to happen overnight, but the idea is that at the end of the day, a student would be able to have a list of all the skills and competencies that they were able to glean from all their courses here at the University of Montana. So when they sit down at an interview with an employer, they can point directly to, “Hey, I did a group project around data analytics and I have this technical skill in this particular area.”
We offer one-off workshops where we use Lightcast Skills Extractor and AI to help faculty extract the skills that they’re currently teaching in their courses. It’s an illuminating exercise because a lot of faculty will do this, and they’ll get a handful of skills that get extracted from the AI and then they’ll go, “Wait, but I’m teaching this, too—I thought I was teaching this?” And then it’s a brilliant moment, because then we go, “Well, you might be, but you’re not articulating it as a course outcome, so let’s be more explicit with it.”
Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our new Student Success focus. Share here.
For the Black community, the barbershop is more than just the place you get your hair cut or styled.
“If you’ve ever been in a Black barbershop, like, in that cultural space, anything goes,” says Patrick Wallace, assistant director of the Student Success Center at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “Within 10 minutes, you can have five different conversations,” ranging from politics to personal life to sports and everything in between.
Virginia Tech hosts a Black Male Excellence Network (BMEN) that coordinates a Barbershop Talk Series, creating space for its Black male students to talk about their lives in an unstructured, open manner.
How it started: In 2011, Virginia Tech administrators realized that while Black undergraduate students came in as high achievers, 10 percent of them fell into academic probation for holding a GPA of 1.99 or below.
The university created the Black Male Achievement Effort that year, joining offices across the university and student groups, like the African American Brotherhood, to support students, shares Karen Eley Sanders, associate vice provost for college access at Virginia Tech.
“I believe when we invite our all of our students into our university community, it is our responsibility to make sure they have the support and the resources that they need to be academically successful,” Sanders says. “That’s why it’s so important not to just think, ‘These are men of color, so we’re going to lean on the Office for Diversity and Inclusion,’ because the Office of Diversity and Inclusion does not grant college degrees.”
The initiative grew into BMEN and its various programs, like creating a designated study space, hosting an annual conference called the Uplifting Black Men Conference and extends to the Barbershop Talks.
What it is: Once a month, Wallace, also the coordinator for BMEN, hosts a Barbershop Talk in the Black Cultural Center on campus. In the past, the event was held in an actual barbershop in the community, but following the COVID-19 pandemic, the event has lived on campus.
Barbershop talks are not unique to Virginia Tech, Wallace points out, but rather a slice of a larger connection to Black culture. The University of Mississippi, Queens University of Charlotte, Goshen College and Ivy Tech Community College all have held their own barbershop talks, often with a real barber involved.
At Virginia Tech, however, Wallace wants students to direct the conversation.
For each event, Wallace brings food—ribs, pizza or something similar—and a few questions he calls “pocket topics” in case the conversation hits a lull.
Antonio Bolden, a staff counselor at Virginia Tech’s Cook Counseling Center, joins Wallace at the talks to provide additional support and talking points as students need it. But otherwise, the event is student-led.
“Before I say anything, I leave the floor open to them,” Wallace says.
Why it works: Getting student buy-in and letting them provide direction for BMEN’s operations is one of Wallace’s biggest priorities.
“I incorporate students in almost every process of my programming,” Wallace explains. “I told the students when I first started, ‘I want this program to be something you can take ownership [of] and that you think is reliable and sustainable and something you can leave a legacy with.’”
Wallace also strives to be vulnerable with students in the barbershop talk himself.
“Being more open, as a leader and as a professor, as an administrator, actually encourages them to be more open,” Wallace says. He’ll share his own anecdotes of grief or academic frustrations and finds more reserved students will respond in kind.
If your student success program has a unique feature or twist that you believe is worth modeling, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.
For the Black community, the barbershop is more than just the place you get your hair cut or styled.
“If you’ve ever been in a Black barbershop, like, in that cultural space, anything goes,” says Patrick Wallace, assistant director of the Student Success Center at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “Within 10 minutes, you can have five different conversations,” ranging from politics to personal life to sports and everything in between.
Virginia Tech hosts a Black Male Excellence Network (BMEN) that coordinates a Barbershop Talk Series, creating space for its Black male students to talk about their lives in an unstructured, open manner.
How it started: In 2011, Virginia Tech administrators realized that while Black undergraduate students came in as high achievers, 10 percent of them fell into academic probation for holding a GPA of 1.99 or below.
The university created the Black Male Achievement Effort that year, joining offices across the university and student groups, like the African American Brotherhood, to support students, shares Karen Eley Sanders, associate vice provost for college access at Virginia Tech.
“I believe when we invite our all of our students into our university community, it is our responsibility to make sure they have the support and the resources that they need to be academically successful,” Sanders says. “That’s why it’s so important not to just think, ‘These are men of color, so we’re going to lean on the Office for Diversity and Inclusion,’ because the Office of Diversity and Inclusion does not grant college degrees.”
The initiative grew into BMEN and its various programs, like creating a designated study space, hosting an annual conference called the Uplifting Black Men Conference and extends to the Barbershop Talks.
What it is: Once a month, Wallace, also the coordinator for BMEN, hosts a Barbershop Talk in the Black Cultural Center on campus. In the past, the event was held in an actual barbershop in the community, but following the COVID-19 pandemic, the event has lived on campus.
Barbershop talks are not unique to Virginia Tech, Wallace points out, but rather a slice of a larger connection to Black culture. The University of Mississippi, Queens University of Charlotte, Goshen College and Ivy Tech Community College all have held their own barbershop talks, often with a real barber involved.
At Virginia Tech, however, Wallace wants students to direct the conversation.
For each event, Wallace brings food—ribs, pizza or something similar—and a few questions he calls “pocket topics” in case the conversation hits a lull.
Antonio Bolden, a staff counselor at Virginia Tech’s Cook Counseling Center, joins Wallace at the talks to provide additional support and talking points as students need it. But otherwise, the event is student-led.
“Before I say anything, I leave the floor open to them,” Wallace says.
Why it works: Getting student buy-in and letting them provide direction for BMEN’s operations is one of Wallace’s biggest priorities.
“I incorporate students in almost every process of my programming,” Wallace explains. “I told the students when I first started, ‘I want this program to be something you can take ownership [of] and that you think is reliable and sustainable and something you can leave a legacy with.’”
Wallace also strives to be vulnerable with students in the barbershop talk himself.
“Being more open, as a leader and as a professor, as an administrator, actually encourages them to be more open,” Wallace says. He’ll share his own anecdotes of grief or academic frustrations and finds more reserved students will respond in kind.
If your student success program has a unique feature or twist that you believe is worth modeling, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.
One organization is creating space at the tech industry’s table for undergraduates by providing short-term work experiences to equip them for summer internships and beyond.
Employment in science, technology, engineering and math has grown over the years, with about 24 percent of the U.S.’s workforce in STEM in 2021, but only 18 percent of the field at that time identified as women, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
Judy Spitz, a former Verizon chief information officer, wants to close that gap by helping college-age women receive paid summer internships.
Spitz founded Break Through Tech working with Cornell Tech as a partner. The organization’s Sprinternship program places students in short-term programs to gain hands-on tech experience in a workplace setting. The program has proven successful in giving project-based learning opportunities to over 1,000 women and getting the majority of them in that coveted next-step intern role.
An August 2022 Student Voice survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse found that certain respondent groups were less likely to have had paid internships.
A break in the cycle: Tech companies want to hire more diverse talent, and Sprinternships bridge the gap between employers and students.
“Companies don’t typically recruit from the kinds of schools that we were interested in working with, that have high diversity numbers,” Spitz says. Instead, employers focus on top-ranked schools or students with extensive experience in tech.
It was Break Through Tech’s goal to place women and minority students in internships, which meant partnering with companies to create space for their talent and finding a way to give the students enough experience to be prepared for a summer internship.
A short-term, full-time role in a company creates a relationship between the host company and the intern that often results in a longer summer internship, Spitz says.
Around 80 percent of Break Through Tech’s 500 annual Sprinterns receive offers for summer internships from their host company, and 64 percent receive internship offers from other companies.
The prototype: Sprinternships are three-week micro-internships between a student enrolled at a diverse college or university with one of Break Through Tech’s 125 host employers, such as Verizon, American Express, LinkedIn and CVS Health. Currently, Break Through Tech has eight higher ed institution partners located in New York City, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington, D.C.
The program is focused on women and nonbinary students, but men from underserved communities are also welcome to participate, Spitz says.
Students spend their winter break or a few weeks in May as part of a small group working through a “challenge problem” for their host under the supervision of a company adviser, Spitz explains.
The host organization creates the challenge for students, which is different from work for hire, Spitz says. Instead, the project should require innovative thinking, and students pitch their work at the end of their Sprinternship.
Each host determines the pay rate, but program participants make at least $15 per hour, Spitz says.
Outside the box: One unique factor in Sprinternships is the cohort environment. Each company takes a small group of students who work together under a mentor, which the companies say is easier than one-on-one attention.
“It was important to us that students worked in a group,” Spitz says. “The students lean on each other … and it mimics the real world—they’re working on a team.”
That team environment also gives students talking points when asked in future interviews about areas such as conflict resolution strategies and leadership approaches.
During the program, interns make connections across the companies, meeting engineers, product designers, finance people, lawyers and HR professionals, Spitz says.
“We want the students to ask questions like, ‘Who are your customers? How do you make money? What’s your business model?’ in addition to ‘How do I get hired into this company?’ and ‘What are you looking for on résumés?’” Spitz explains. “Our students don’t have a built-in way to get that kind of experience.”
Break Through Tech matches students directly with the host company, expediting the application process by eliminating the need for an interview on-site.
Tinkering with the tech: Break Through Tech launched its first Sprinternship in 2017 with five students from City University of New York, who worked at Verizon over their winter break. Every student was offered a summer internship. Since then, around 1,500 students have participated in Sprinternships.
Spitz and Break Through Tech have tightened operations to make it more of a “turnkey operation,” she says. The host company’s adviser spends around four to six weeks planning and is responsible for managing the project. Break Through Tech provides a library of project options, consulting support on challenge projects and establishes checkpoints throughout in addition to a post-internship survey for students and hosts.
Solving the problem: Since the program’s start, Spitz has already seen a “second generation” of sorts, when a former Sprintern was employed by her host company and, in turn, became a Sprinternship manager for a new cohort of interns.
Companies are also leaning into the Sprinternship model to source their future workforce. One company hosted 100 Sprinterns this past winter, hoping to pull a significant number of them into their summer internship cohort, Spitz says.
In the future, Spitz hopes to expand the program’s offerings in terms of location, partner organizations and institutions.
Tell us about an innovative way your college or university is helping students gain workplace experience.
This article has been updated to clarify the relationship between students from diverse institutions and the host employers and a company's goal with hosting Sprinterns as summer interns.
Rows of shelves containing everything from card games to coloring sheets, fidget toys to aromatherapy cards, line the Bellin College Student Success Center, encouraging students, staff and faculty to take a moment and reconnect in the middle of a busy day.
The Wisconsin college’s “brain break” space provides tools for pausing and refocusing attention while drawing students closer to academic resources.
Building a collection: Bridgett Lowery, the Student Success Center coordinator at Bellin, noticed students would fiddle with their hands or click pens while working or talking to her. She would offer them something to hold or mess with, often some sea glass she had collected, and found it was an outlet for students.
“It helps people to just have something in their hand,” Lowery explains.
Lowery then introduced fidget toys and coloring sheets into the success center, and “from there it expanded,” she says. Beyond games and toys, the Student Success Center features music playlists for studying or sleeping, gratitude cards and bubbles.
“Bubbles I kind of get the side-eye on the most, but those are probably my personal favorite brain break,” Lowery says. “It’s breath work. You can’t help but breathe in, breathe out and feel calmer.”
Fidget toys are the most popular and, in the summer, students will use chalk to draw on the sidewalk outside.
Making study click: While Lowery preached the importance of breaks, she realized it was just as important to provide outlets for students to practice taking them.
“When you are trying to learn something, those breaks are really important, not just for your physical body but for your mind to process information,” Lowery says.
Taking small breaks while studying or in class also reduces stress and information overload.
Not every brain break requires an object. Some researchers point to tongue exercises, meditation, cleaning, dancing, stretching or eating a snack. The value is found in removing a person from their work and jump-starting the brain with something creative or different.
Low effort, high reward: Implementing a brain break station was extremely affordable and easy, Lowery says. Most of the items featured on her center’s shelves were free to print or cheap purchases. Lowery used money from her budget to purchase the items, but other institutions could host a drive to collect items, she suggests.
All of the fidget toys can be sanitized, and she keeps a basket for used items to help keep the space clean.
A piece of the puzzle: Making brain break items available is just one strategy Lowery has implemented at Bellin’s success center.
The center offers information on skills like time management, organization, stress management and meditation alongside its academic coaching. Lowery renamed the role of “tutor” to “peer academic coach” to reduce the stigma around needing help.
As a result, a student’s experience at and perception of the center has shifted. In the past year, visits jumped 94 percent and the number of coaching sessions rose by 155 percent.
“I definitely can tell that, now, the space is seen as a space where you’re welcome no matter what you’re doing,” Lowery says. “It’s made the Student Success Center more accessible.”
If your student success program has a unique feature or twist that you believe is worth modeling, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.
One organization is creating space at the tech industry’s table for undergraduates by providing short-term work experiences to equip them for summer internships and beyond.
Employment in science, technology, engineering and math has grown over the years, with about 24 percent of the U.S.’s workforce in STEM in 2021, but only 18 percent of the field at that time identified as women, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
Judy Spitz, a former Verizon chief information officer, wants to close that gap by helping college-age women receive paid summer internships.
Spitz founded Break Through Tech working with Cornell Tech as a partner. The organization’s Sprinternship program places students in short-term programs to gain hands-on tech experience in a workplace setting. The program has proven successful in giving project-based learning opportunities to over 1,000 women and getting the majority of them in that coveted next-step intern role.
An August 2022 Student Voice survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse found that certain respondent groups were less likely to have had paid internships.
A break in the cycle: Tech companies want to hire more diverse talent, and Sprinternships bridge the gap between employers and students.
“Companies don’t typically recruit from the kinds of schools that we were interested in working with, that have high diversity numbers,” Spitz says. Instead, employers focus on top-ranked schools or students with extensive experience in tech.
It was Break Through Tech’s goal to place women and minority students in internships, which meant partnering with companies to create space for their talent and finding a way to give the students enough experience to be prepared for a summer internship.
A short-term, full-time role in a company creates a relationship between the host company and the intern that often results in a longer summer internship, Spitz says.
Around 80 percent of Break Through Tech’s 500 annual Sprinterns receive offers for summer internships from their host company, and 64 percent receive internship offers from other companies.
The prototype: Sprinternships are three-week micro-internships between a student enrolled at a diverse college or university with one of Break Through Tech’s 125 host employers, such as Verizon, American Express, LinkedIn and CVS Health. Currently, Break Through Tech has eight higher ed institution partners located in New York City, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington, D.C.
The program is focused on women and nonbinary students, but men from underserved communities are also welcome to participate, Spitz says.
Students spend their winter break or a few weeks in May as part of a small group working through a “challenge problem” for their host under the supervision of a company adviser, Spitz explains.
The host organization creates the challenge for students, which is different from work for hire, Spitz says. Instead, the project should require innovative thinking, and students pitch their work at the end of their Sprinternship.
Each host determines the pay rate, but program participants make at least $15 per hour, Spitz says.
Outside the box: One unique factor in Sprinternships is the cohort environment. Each company takes a small group of students who work together under a mentor, which the companies say is easier than one-on-one attention.
“It was important to us that students worked in a group,” Spitz says. “The students lean on each other … and it mimics the real world—they’re working on a team.”
That team environment also gives students talking points when asked in future interviews about areas such as conflict resolution strategies and leadership approaches.
During the program, interns make connections across the companies, meeting engineers, product designers, finance people, lawyers and HR professionals, Spitz says.
“We want the students to ask questions like, ‘Who are your customers? How do you make money? What’s your business model?’ in addition to ‘How do I get hired into this company?’ and ‘What are you looking for on résumés?’” Spitz explains. “Our students don’t have a built-in way to get that kind of experience.”
Break Through Tech matches students directly with the host company, expediting the application process by eliminating the need for an interview on-site.
Tinkering with the tech: Break Through Tech launched its first Sprinternship in 2017 with five students from City University of New York, who worked at Verizon over their winter break. Every student was offered a summer internship. Since then, around 1,500 students have participated in Sprinternships.
Spitz and Break Through Tech have tightened operations to make it more of a “turnkey operation,” she says. The host company’s adviser spends around four to six weeks planning and is responsible for managing the project. Break Through Tech provides a library of project options, consulting support on challenge projects and establishes checkpoints throughout in addition to a post-internship survey for students and hosts.
Solving the problem: Since the program’s start, Spitz has already seen a “second generation” of sorts, when a former Sprintern was employed by her host company and, in turn, became a Sprinternship manager for a new cohort of interns.
Companies are also leaning into the Sprinternship model to source their future workforce. One company hosted 100 Sprinterns this past winter, hoping to pull a significant number of them into their summer internship cohort, Spitz says.
In the future, Spitz hopes to expand the program’s offerings in terms of location, partner organizations and institutions.
Tell us about an innovative way your college or university is helping students gain workplace experience.
This article has been updated to clarify the relationship between students from diverse institutions and the host employers and a company's goal with hosting Sprinterns as summer interns.
Rows of shelves containing everything from card games to coloring sheets, fidget toys to aromatherapy cards, line the Bellin College Student Success Center, encouraging students, staff and faculty to take a moment and reconnect in the middle of a busy day.
The Wisconsin college’s “brain break” space provides tools for pausing and refocusing attention while drawing students closer to academic resources.
Building a collection: Bridgett Lowery, the Student Success Center coordinator at Bellin, noticed students would fiddle with their hands or click pens while working or talking to her. She would offer them something to hold or mess with, often some sea glass she had collected, and found it was an outlet for students.
“It helps people to just have something in their hand,” Lowery explains.
Lowery then introduced fidget toys and coloring sheets into the success center, and “from there it expanded,” she says. Beyond games and toys, the Student Success Center features music playlists for studying or sleeping, gratitude cards and bubbles.
“Bubbles I kind of get the side-eye on the most, but those are probably my personal favorite brain break,” Lowery says. “It’s breath work. You can’t help but breathe in, breathe out and feel calmer.”
Fidget toys are the most popular and, in the summer, students will use chalk to draw on the sidewalk outside.
Making study click: While Lowery preached the importance of breaks, she realized it was just as important to provide outlets for students to practice taking them.
“When you are trying to learn something, those breaks are really important, not just for your physical body but for your mind to process information,” Lowery says.
Taking small breaks while studying or in class also reduces stress and information overload.
Not every brain break requires an object. Some researchers point to tongue exercises, meditation, cleaning, dancing, stretching or eating a snack. The value is found in removing a person from their work and jump-starting the brain with something creative or different.
Low effort, high reward: Implementing a brain break station was extremely affordable and easy, Lowery says. Most of the items featured on her center’s shelves were free to print or cheap purchases. Lowery used money from her budget to purchase the items, but other institutions could host a drive to collect items, she suggests.
All of the fidget toys can be sanitized, and she keeps a basket for used items to help keep the space clean.
A piece of the puzzle: Making brain break items available is just one strategy Lowery has implemented at Bellin’s success center.
The center offers information on skills like time management, organization, stress management and meditation alongside its academic coaching. Lowery renamed the role of “tutor” to “peer academic coach” to reduce the stigma around needing help.
As a result, a student’s experience at and perception of the center has shifted. In the past year, visits jumped 94 percent and the number of coaching sessions rose by 155 percent.
“I definitely can tell that, now, the space is seen as a space where you’re welcome no matter what you’re doing,” Lowery says. “It’s made the Student Success Center more accessible.”
If your student success program has a unique feature or twist that you believe is worth modeling, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.
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