Student success was the topic at the first of two town hall meetings Thursday.
The Strategic Action Group Committee on Student Success highlighted its main interest: creating an environment to ensure student success that helps lead the University to flagship status.
The University holds these town hall meetings to provide faculty, staff and students the opportunity to share and receive insightful information about its six primary goals.
Committees have been presented with the task of drafting proposals for University improvement.
Some of the issues addressed at Thursday’s meeting included student advising, student retention and teaching tools.
The SAG committee reported that first-year-experience programs are a way for the University to retain students. The more engaged students are, the greater their chances are of graduation, the committee reports.
Undergraduate Scholars is one of these programs.
It instructs students on time management, how to deal with test anxiety and how to enroll early for classes.
‘All of those individual programs are important because the ones that I know about are the ones that we have data showing they work,’ Libby Barlow, executive director of Academic and Institutional Information, said. ‘Students involved in the PROMES program or youth scholar programs, we know they are more likely to be retained than other students, but we also know that Universitywide – 27,000 undergraduate students -retention and graduation rates are not as high as we would want them to be.’
Only 1,850,000 of 2,800,000 high school graduates will attend college, and of those, 925,000 will receive a bachelor’s degree, the Center for the Study of College Student Retention reported.
Student advisers help students make decisions during their college life.
The committee’s report stressed advisers need to be trained and paid more and their numbers must increase.
‘Professionalizing academic advisers are key to this effect because some of them do not feel like professionals,’ Janie Graham, director of academic affairs for College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, said. ‘An adviser with professional training, the right background and resources they need, can achieve some of these goals they are talking about here and help students through their success.’
The student-to-advisor ratio recommended by the National Academic Advising Association is 300-to-1.
CLASS has improved its ratio from one adviser for 1600 members to three advisers, Graham said.
Other goals that were discussed in the meeting included a Center of Teaching Excellence to support faculty members by mentoring new recruits and teaching them how to use necessary technologies, among its other functions.
The committee proposed teaching assistants receive lighter teaching loads to improve research activity.
It also addressed the financial-aid process, reporting that its goal is to improve student satisfaction to at least 75 percent within four years.
The last town hall meeting is from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Monday in the San Francisco, UH Hilton.
Local and worldwide recognition will be the focus of that meeting.
To review the Strategic Action Group Committee on Student Success or make comments or suggestions, please e-mail the committee at [email protected].
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