Holistic Student Success: Now more than ever

A few years ago, I wrote a post confessing some internal turmoil. At the time, it seemed like every conversation about student success was also a conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion. I felt a bit guilty because, as the title of the post suggested, in my mind, every equity problem could be framed and addressed through a lens of holistic student success. The inner turmoil arose because either I’d picked the absolute best topic to study in our field, or I was just biased. As they say, when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. Was I just unable to find another tool to support student success?

Well, here we go again. I can’t help but feel like a lot of the challenges we’re facing – not all, mind you, but many – can be answered by reconsidering the ways our colleges and universities support students. Using data on noncognitive skills can, once again, provide a promising solution to addressing some of the massive, fundamental changes that are—and could be—facing our institutions of higher education.

Of all those issues, there are a few that I’d like to emphasize. The first is the potential for cuts – ranging from significant to massive – related to any work in the world of student success. Whether the U.S. Department of Education is dismantled, gutted, or neutered, our institutions are likely to have fewer, rather than more, resources to help improve success. Even actions like the removal of funding from the National Institutes of Health and other seemingly unrelated sources are likely to have downstream effects on what is available to support students.

The second is a direct assault on any work falling under the auspices of diversity, equity, and/or inclusion. What had, for the last decade or so, become the umbrella for many student success efforts—particularly among traditionally underserved populations—has become the target of people who clearly know little about… well, many things.

You may be asking, “How do we continue this vital work, especially if we have access to fewer resources?” Once again, I find myself returning to the work that we do: gathering student-level data—particularly on the noncognitive factors related to the behavioral, motivational, emotional, and social aspects of success—to understand strengths and challenges and connect them with resources to improve their success. Yes, of course, I have a conflict of interest, but as I often tell my wife, just because I’m biased doesn’t mean that I’m wrong.

There are three reasons that come to mind:

1. Using noncognitive skills to articulate student strengths and challenges doesn’t raise the ire of those seemingly hell-bent on destroying DEI initiatives, while still supporting a more inclusive and supportive student environment.

2. Noncognitive skills help organize our resources—particularly when limited—in a more targeted and effective way to support success.

3. By using data to organize our efforts, we can best apply what limited resources we have (e.g., advising, coaching, counseling) based on the type and level of support that each student needs.

The Language of Student Success

It’s worth taking a minute to be clear about what I mean by “holistic student success.” It’s really three things:

1. We measure students’ noncognitive skills – the behavioral, motivational, emotional, and social student success factors like goal commitment, sense of belonging, self-efficacy, etc.

2. We use those results to help articulate strengths and challenges, both to individual students and to those working with them to improve their success.

3. We help institutions redesign their student success culture, strategy, and practice to understand and respond to these factors.

In case you missed that aforementioned post, the gist was this: noncognitive skills are the language by which we can bridge gaps for traditionally underserved populations.

Let me be clear about one thing: DEI work is vital. For any underserved population, the reasons they have been underserved are unique and complex, and we can’t just assume that students of color have the same strengths and challenges as first-generation students, student veterans, or adult learners.

However, I have always taken issue with the notion that our sociological understanding of certain subpopulations is rarely integrated with our psychological understanding of student success. Eaton and Beane (1995) were among the first to point this out, but I have often summarized their perspective into a simple statement: we’re really good at identifying who succeeds and who doesn’t, but we’re not very good at figuring out why.

The beauty of noncognitive factors is that they give a common, research-based, and malleable understanding of student success. When combined with DEI efforts, they can help describe: (a) which factors certain students display at higher or lower levels compared to their peers, (b) which factors matter more to student success for that population, and (c) which interventions are most effective in supporting a particular group of students.

Let’s take, for example, sense of belonging, a topic that has become vastly more popular since the pandemic. While many will note that sense of belonging is important to traditionally underserved populations, what we don’t really know is how it is important. Do first-generation students start college with a lower sense of belonging? Is it that, if they don’t have a sense of belonging, they are more likely to drop out than their continuing-generation peers? Or that efforts to improve sense of belonging are more likely to increase success among first-gen students?

But for the purposes of this post, it’s most important to know that—at least for now—the use of noncognitive skills to support students doesn’t seem to raise the ideological or political ire of those who target DEI efforts. At the same time, we can build an infrastructure to understand and support students that addresses many of the issues that left such populations underserved.

Organizing Our Efforts

Explaining holistic student success is challenging. To many of the institutions with which we work, I would imagine they really think of it as a student survey: “We’re gathering data on these factors that we’ve rarely been able to measure in a meaningful way.”

But in my mind, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Gathering the data is a necessary first step in doing the real work: helping students reflect on their own strengths and challenges; training advisors on how to have conversations with students that don’t just cover the necessary processes of higher education, but help them grow and learn throughout their college careers; guiding institutions in changing a culture that has had so many erroneous assumptions about students, what makes them successful, and how to best improve success. That is the real work.

For many, seeing this forest for the trees is difficult at first. But on rare occasions, I will talk with a colleague who gets all of this right from the start. It’s so refreshing. One such instance took place when introducing some of my work to my dear friend and colleague, Sara Finney. I was working on a previous effort to assess noncognitive skills, and Sara said something to the effect of, “Oh… so this is like the curriculum for student affairs?”

YES!

One reason that people gravitate toward concepts like grit, growth mindset, and sense of belonging is that these terms capture what we’ve all been working toward but perhaps haven’t articulated in a common way. When combined into a single framework, like in our ISSAQ platform, it helps people in the student success world see a clearer picture of all the things we do to try and support students. It helps compare and contrast the strengths and challenges various students face. “Yes, you might be organized and motivated but lack strong social support; for other students, the exact opposite is true.” From this holistic understanding, supports start to follow more logically. Add in the research showing how vital these factors are to student success, and the importance and rigor of student affairs programs becomes even more apparent.

As an example, Sara and some colleagues (Pope, Finney, & Crewe, 2023) published an article using a framework of holistic factors to assess a program for students placed on academic probation. Not only was a holistic measure useful for articulating the goals of the program, but data from a noncognitive assessment could be used to identify strengths and areas for improvement.

These tactical uses aside, using a broad-based theory of holistic student success can be helpful in times when things are questioned—either for reasons of political ideology or scarcity of resources. When working with institutions, we always start with a process called “co-curricular alignment,” which takes each of the factors in our model and asks the school to consider, “What would you do to support a student who was struggling in this area?”

The results of this effort are helpful in multiple ways. For one, it provides an inventory of resources that can be used by students and staff to guide individual conversations and connect students with appropriate supports. From an institutional perspective, co-curricular alignment helps avoid redundancy or neglect in resources.

Whether it’s for design, assessment, or strategic planning, holistic student success is a valuable tool to help organize all the things that go on outside of the classroom (and occasionally inside it). If resources become scarce, rooting co-curricular programs in such a framework can help articulate their value, foster coordination and collaboration, and—as Pope et al. showed—demonstrate the theoretical foundation and empirical value of our work.

Target and Tailor

As a research and data person, I geek out on how empirically cool noncognitive data can be. It all began with a meta-analysis conducted by Steve Robbins and colleagues at ACT back in 2004. When I first saw this study, I was amazed that these noncognitive factors were not only significant predictors of GPA—above, beyond, and controlling for measures of academic preparation and socioeconomic status—but their value in predicting retention (the thing we were chasing) far exceeded such markers.

The beauty here is that not only do noncognitive factors provide a novel way of articulating the strengths and challenges students bring to college—they also work. At the time, I thought (and frankly, still think to this day): How could anyone NOT want to do this?

This two-fold use of data—predictive and diagnostic—led me to a term I’ve used frequently over the last several years: target and tailor.

• Target refers to using analytics to identify a student’s likelihood for success. Based on these results, we can determine whether students need early and intrusive intervention or if other supports might be more appropriate. Just because a student isn’t likely to drop out doesn’t mean we don’t want to engage with them.

• Tailor means using noncognitive data to understand which strengths and challenges a student has, so we can match them with the right supports. Not all first-generation students face the same challenges. Noncognitive data help personalize interventions.

I don’t think many people get really excited when the term “efficiency” gets applied to their work, but the fact of the matter is that’s what we’re talking about. If I’m an advisor who can only meet with 20 students in the first week of classes, wouldn’t I want those efforts to have the most impact?

As resources become scarcer, this is another huge advantage of holistic student success. We can use the data to not only better understand our students but better guide our efforts to support them.

Conclusion

Holistic student success has always represented a paradigm shift for higher education. Our traditional means of focusing on academic, economic, and demographic factors have not helped us improve success among traditionally underserved populations. In my mind, that has always been a compelling reason to engage in this work.

But these external factors are going to force us into a new way of thinking, one way or another. I do not relish that, but I do firmly believe that holistic student success is a tool that can help us navigate these challenging times.

References (APA Style)

• Eaton, S. B., & Bean, J. P. (1995). An approach/avoidance behavioral model of college student attrition. Research in higher education, 36(6), 617-645.

• Pope, J. P., Finney, S. J., & Crewe, C. (2023). Assessing the impact of academic support programs using a holistic framework. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 6(1), 35-50..

• Robbins, S. B., Lauver, K., Le, H., Davis, D., Langley, R., & Carlstrom, A. (2004). Do psychosocial and study skill factors predict college outcomes? A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 130(2), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.2.261