The "Pain Points" of Student Success
Here's the challenge of what we do. Whether we call it noncognitive skills or holistic student success, it's a departure from traditional higher education approaches. In my mind, it's just always been the right way to do things. Articulating the principles of the work is easy.
But marketing folks will tell you that you need to help others see the "pain points" in their own experience. Once you can articulate the customer's pain point and how you (the provider) can help alleviate that pain, you've got the makings of a good pitch.
After years of hearing this - from about a dozen marketing firms across my time at ETS and DIA - I think I may have finally cracked it. Who knows whether it was procrastination or a sudden inspiration, but I think I've finally got it down. Here are, in my best estimation, the biggest pain points in student success work and how holistic student success helps to address that.
One quick note before I begin: Is this a sales pitch for ISSAQ? Well, sort of. ISSAQ was built as a platform to address these very issues, but it's not like I'm pushing this in a self-serving way. I'm pushing it because we need to improve student success, and I - along with others, like the Community College Research Center - think this is a good way to go.
Pain Point #1: Identifying issues before they become problems.
Whenever I talk with faculty about why students fail their course, the response is almost always some version of "they stop showing up" or "they stop engaging." Indeed, one meta-analysis proclaimed class attendance to be "a better predictor of college grades than any other known predictor of academic performance, including scores on standardized admissions tests such as the SAT, high school GPA, study habits, and study skills" (Credé, Roch, & Kieszczynka, 2010).
Attendance strikes me much like what I hear from many institutions who talk about studying retention among their own students. Too many times I've heard something to the effect of: "We surveyed all of the students who left, and the number one reason they listed for leaving was finances."
But, as I've written before, here's the problem with viewing student success through the lens of these phenomena: we notice them too late. While we may be able to recuperate a few of these students though early alert, additional outreach, etc., more often than not, by the time these issues arise (or at least by the time we notice them), there's little we can do. The student who hasn't been showing up to class is, too often, already on their way out the door. The student who doesn't have money has decided that, even if they could conjure the finances, it's not worth it.
When viewing student success through a more holistic lens, we have lots of direct and indirect mechanisms to avoid this. Through Engagement, for example, we can identify those students who don't understand the expectations of college-level courses and intervene before they start missing class. Through Goal Commitment, we can help students see, value, and prioritize their college success so that budgeting and planning for college expenses become top-of-mind. And when all else fails, through Sense of Belonging and Help Seeking, we can make sure students feel connected and willing to ask for support when challenges do start to arise.
So, if you're feeling that the biggest problem you face in student success is encountering issues that are too entrenched or too far gone to fix, holistic student success can help. By understanding and connecting with students early, we embody that old adage, "reaching out and supporting students before they even know they need it."
Pain Point #2: We don't have enough resources to go around.
A few years ago, I was attending a presentation led by a large ed tech firm. Presenting alongside a university partner, they talked about how the firm had provided a platform for data integration, predictive analytics, and student outreach that had coincided with a drastic improvement in student outcomes. After the company rep finished their pitch, the institutional rep got up to talk about their side of the story. Buried somewhere in the "Context at XYZ Univ." slide was a tiny little detail: as part of this effort, the school had also hired more than 40 new advisors.
When talking with institutions, there are a few things I like to understand early just so we can figure out what we're working with:
Do students have a dedicated advisor that sticks with them?
What's the student-to-advisor ratio?
How much time does each advising appointment typically last?
The challenge is this: if we don't have enough people to support students, we don't have the time to do the important work of student success. Moreover, the less time-per-student we can spend talking about their success, the more that advising is going to focus on choosing a major, setting a schedule, getting a bill paid... those basic checkboxes that absolutely must be completed to continue enrollment.
But even if those people/time resources exist - as a part of "advising" or perhaps through another function ("coaching," "counseling," "mentoring," etc.) - they aren't infinite. How do we spend those resources in the best way possible to improve student success?
To me, the coolest part of research into noncognitive skills is their predictive efficacy. There are good philosophical reasons to consider students engagement, motivation, self-efficacy, sense of belonging, etc., but more importantly than that, when we can measure these things well, they are powerful predictors of success, particularly retention outcomes (Robbins et al., 2004; Markle et al., 2013). Even the most old-school, academically-minded meritocrat can't ignore the data.
This ability to predict student success addresses this pain point in two powerful ways. First, we can better identify and support those students who are unlikely to be successful. One of our current partners has put this to practice perfectly in their academic advising center. Each advisor has a caseload of about 300 students, and, using the predictive indices included in ISSAQ, they get a clear indication of the students that have the lowest probability of success. At the start of each semester, they focus their initial outreach on those students who require the greatest support: doing everything they can to sit down with those students first.
The second advantage with regard to resource allocation is acknowledging that this sort of triage support is not what every student needs. For those students who have a high probability of success, sure, academic advising is important, but they could also benefit from opportunities to maximize their skills and improve their learning and development, as opposed to just putting out fires and avoiding hurdles. At the same partner, we developed trait-based profiles for both undergraduate research and service learning - two powerful "high-impact practices" - and created outreach campaigns to help those students connect with these resources early.
I often talk about this as viewing student engagement qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Students don't just need different amounts of support (i.e., advising), they need different types of support. By using the predictive power of noncognitive data, we can align the right type of resources to each student's needs. It's efficiency, but in a way that benefits both the student and the institution.
Pain Point #3: A lot of effort with little return.
"Traditionally underserved populations" are a big part of most institutions' student success efforts. At nearly every campus, there are groups - first-generation college students, veterans, men of color, etc. - where gaps in success have been persistent and problematic. The typical response is to create something - a center, a position, a resource - that enhances our outreach to these groups of students.
As Eaton and Bean (1995) once put it, this approach represents a sociological approach to student success: "We know that some groups of students... often adapt poorly to their college environments. We know less about the characteristics of individuals within such a group that increase the likelihood of their remaining in school until graduation." Or, as I put it, we can often identify the who of student success, but we're not really good at identifying the why.
Once again - holistic student success/noncognitive skills to the rescue. By understanding the skills, strategies, and mindsets of students - rather than just the demographic corollaries of success - we are better positioned to support students in two key ways. First and foremost, we can better articulate the experiences of those populations we're trying to serve. Students don't succeed or fail simply because their parents went to college or didn't. Research into social and cultural capital teaches us that the real differences between first- and continuing-generation college students are the values, behaviors, and beliefs that each group receives. That's what noncognitive skills represent! Thus, as I've said before, noncognitive skills give us the language and tools to better understand and support these students.
The second advantage lies in interventions. There's a logical connection between "first-generation students are succeeding less so let's build a center for first-generation students." But here's the simple truth: we're not going to change the fact that those students grew up as first-gen. Demographic and socioeconomic values are immutable - which means we can't change them. We can, and certainly SHOULD seek to understand the differences in experiences, goals, expectations, etc. for these students, but our sociological approach has yet to bear fruit in addressing student success equity gaps.
However, if we focus our understanding (i.e., assessment) and support (i.e., interventions) on the behavioral, motivational, emotional, and social aspects of success, we can not only better understand our students, but focus our conversations on the things that we can change. That works for students who come from all populations - whether we've traditionally served them adequately or not. That's why so much of this work has felt Sisyphean. When our interventions are built around characteristics we cannot change, the return on effort will always disappoint. When they're built around skills, behaviors, and mindsets - things students can develop and institutions can actually influence - the same effort starts to move the needle.
Conclusion
I'm sure there are some colleges and universities that aren't too worried about student success... I just haven't encountered one yet. People who are focused on this work often feel these pains: we're too late... we don't have enough resources... are we even doing the right things? If any of these pains sound familiar, the problem is not your effort. It is the lens.
I started DIA and created ISSAQ because I thought holistic student success was the best way to address all these needs. Ultimately, holistic student success is not a program or a product. It is a commitment to knowing students well enough to help them early, allocate what we have wisely, and work on the things we can actually change.
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