Immediate Strategies: Improving Student Retention and Persistence

• Leveraging Philanthropic Support to Address our Greatest Needs
• Cross Divisional Partnerships/Collaborations in Student Success
• GI 2025 and Additional Student Success Initiatives
• Expanded Learning Communities
• New Student Onboarding
• CSUCI Initiative for Mapping Student Success (CIMAS)
• Degree Planner
• Holistic Student Supports

Leveraging Philanthropic Support to Address our Greatest Needs

Despite the challenges associated with the COVID pandemic and significant leadership changes during this time, philanthropic support of CSUCI has soared to an extraordinary degree. As noted in the figures below, CSUCI has outpaced all Peer 1 groups with regards to 3-year philanthropic productivity and percentage of endowment growth. While our Mackenzie Scott gift in 2020 played a significant role in these data, our momentum continued in 21-22, and we are currently on pace to further surpass our recent productivity for 22-23.

Perhaps most importantly, our data informed philanthropic model has focused on investing in student success initiatives targeting our most pressing needs. This fall, our First Year Experience initiatives were funded through this philanthropic support, including our CSUCI Summer Success Academy, financial support in the form of renewable 4-year scholarships and new housing grants renewable for 2-years, and embedded peer-to-peer academic supports in all A2 and B4 courses.

• CSUCI Summer Success Academy: We expanded our original EOP Summer Bridge program to a five-week residential program that included six GE units and incorporated embedded, academic peer-to-peer support (all of the students took a UNIV course, half took ENG Composition, and the other half took COMM Public Speaking). Co-curricular programming focused on various aspects of student development, including navigational capital, community building and belonging, academic identity, and metacognition. 68 incoming EOP and Sankofa Scholar students were served in this program. Average GPA upon completion of the program was 3.5, and 67 of the 68 students received passing grades in both GE courses.
• Financial Support for Housing Students: We offered 200 housing grants of $5,000 to low-income FTFT students, renewable up to two years. Students receiving this grant were required to participate in a Learning Community for the first year.
• Renewable 4-Year Scholarships: We examined our scholarship data going back to 2016 and conducted comprehensive data analyses with the purpose of identifying which scholarship features were most associated with improved retention and persistence. Our findings suggested that 1) financial awards of $6,000+ and $1,500-$3,500 were significant predictors of improved retention; 2) more frequent scholarships were significant predictors of improved retention; and 3) propensity score matching modeling suggested that students with an incoming GPA below 3.0 who received a scholarship outperformed those with an incoming GPA above 3.0 who did not receive scholarship assistance.
  
  As such, through philanthropic support and collaboration from Jeff Green and Dataphilanthropy, we offered 50 renewable scholarships ($12,000 over the first two years and $8,000 over the last two years), for Pell eligible/Dreamer eligible, first-generation students, with an incoming high school GPA 2.99 and below. We tied these awards to participation in a Learning Community in the first year, in addition to mandatory Academic Advising two times per semester. The scholarships are structured to incorporate Career Development Services during the junior and senior years. We are confident that by intentionally targeting the “murky middle,” so to speak, with financial incentives and proven academic supports, we will see a significant impact on the retention and persistence of this incoming cohort.
  
  We have also secured an additional commitment of $5M to expand this program up to 250 students for the incoming Fall 2023 cohort.

• Embedded Peer-to-Peer Support in Quantitative Reasoning (B4) and Composition/Rhetoric (A2) Courses: We have allocated resources to expand our embedded peer-to-peer academic tutoring in almost all sections of first-year English Composition and Quantitative Reasoning courses through our Multiliteracy and Writing Center and Learning Resource Center. Earlier analyses had indicated a positive impact of embedded tutoring on DFW rates and increased utilization of academic support programs. Our programming also included a 30-hour, summer faculty development program to facilitate best practices in fully incorporating the embedded tutors and more active learning strategies into the curriculum.

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Cross Divisional Parternships/Collaborations in Student Success

Our campus fully understands that the most effective way for us to stabilize and grow enrollment is to improve student retention and persistence. We have worked diligently to engage all divisions and programs across campus to engage in this work. Historically and as a young institution, CSUCI had experienced challenges related to cross-divisional collaborations and partnerships, which resulted in a lack of centralized and coordinated effort, duplication of services, and a general inefficiency and ineffectiveness in addressing many of our student success needs – especially those related to co-curricular supports and addressing administrative barriers. We have made significant process in the last year, through the intentional leadership of our cabinet members, and our cross divisional partnerships and sharing of responsibilities across units are flourishing in this time of shared crisis. The following cross-divisional teams are carrying out some of the most important work on our campus:

Cross-divisional partnerships, with a shared crisis encouraging shared responsibilities
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GI 2025 and Additional Student Success Initiatives

Detailed information about where our campus is relative to our established GI 2025 goals is provided in CSUCI's 2021-2022 Institutional Progress Report, submitted to Interim Chancellor Koester on August 24, 2022. Our GI 2025 Task Force continues to pursue key GI 2025 goals and Equity Priorities, including block scheduling, along with new initiatives related to program review and early alert. Our most recent task force report and our 3rd Quarter on Equity Priorities, both from October 2022, include a number of links relevant to the most recent GI2025 Quarterly Report. We will also be moving Summer Session courses from Extended University to Stateside, beginning Summer 2023. With this move, we will be capturing Summer Session enrollment in our Stateside enrollment numbers, with Summer being the beginning of each new academic year.
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Expanded Learning Communities

Because Learning Communities and Living Learning Communities are one of our most impactful student success initiatives, we expanded our LC/LLC programming to serve 298 students in Fall 2022 (up from 98 students served pre-pandemic, in 2019) in various themed group cohorts. Previous regression modeling and propensity score matching analyses of longitudinal LC data indicated that after controlling for multiple individual/pre-college factors, LC participation predicted higher CSUCI and overall GPA at the end of the first term and year; increased total units attempted in the first year; higher probability of retention into second term and second year; fewer DFW’s in the first term, and higher probably of being in good academic standing at the end of the first year. Based on these data points, scaling up and increasing the capacity of our LC’s are a primary focal point of our student success and retention efforts. Plans for 2023-24 include expanding our LC/LLC programming further, to serve up to 70% of our incoming FTFT students. In doing so, we are working to create sustainable, discipline-based homes for these LC/LCCs in the University. See the Learning Communities Ad Hoc Task Force Proposal (12/12/2022) for that study group’s recommendations moving forward.
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New Student Onboarding

This is a collaborative effort across the divisions of Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and Business & Financial Affairs. Through this effort, we are ameliorating timeline and administrative barriers and challenges associated with the life cycle of recruitment to enrollment (i.e., application, admission, orientation, awarding of financial aid, transcript review, and of course, registration and enrollment). We moved quickly to ensure this new cycle was in place for our Spring 2023 New Transfer cohort. We plan to evaluate and assess the impact of this work on new transfer yield and subsequently implement for the Fall 2023 first-year and new transfer cohorts.

In addition, we have taken steps to more rigorously and critically examine our student communication involved with new student onboarding. Several years ago, our now-Dean of Extended University and AVP for Digital Learning and colleagues developed an inventory of communications received by students throughout their first year at CSUCI. This project yielded results demonstrating that new students received thousands of email messages from a wide array of offices across the university. An uncoordinated barrage of communication is not helpful to students, at best, and may create confusion and conflicting information that adversely impacts their success, at worst. A Middle Leadership Academy team was formed to study and propose steps toward ensuring an integrated, culturally relevant, and academically grounding new onboarding experience at CSUCI. The MLA White Paper provides strategies for accomplishing this goal.
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CSUCI Initiative for Mapping Student Success (CIMAS)

We piloted this program in Spring 2022, which targeted students who had at least one DFWI in the Fall 2021 semester, and based on these initial results, we are moving forward with another cohort for Spring 2023.  This was a semester-long, comprehensive, immersive program which incorporated faculty, staff, and peer mentorship; academic skills support; sense of belonging/community; and place-based experiential learning opportunities. Initial data was very promising. The average GPA for CIMAS students increased from 2.01 in Fall 2021 to 2.58 in Spring 2022; average units attempted increased from 11.0 to 13.0; and the Spring to Fall persistence rate was 89.7%. Compared with eligible students who did not participate in CIMAS, CIMAS students had a Fall 2022 GPA that was almost 1 grade point higher and had a 7% higher persistence rate.
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Degree Planner

In full alignment with the Chancellor’s Office GI2025 equity goal priorities, CSUCI has recently implemented an updated version of the Degree Planner. Moving forward, we are fully committed to building a course schedule based on real-time student utilization data to ensure that we are offering the courses students need when they need them.
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Holistic Student Supports

Data from our Basic Needs, Counseling & Psychological Services, and Campus, Access, Retention & Equity (CARE) Team are experiencing an increase in student demand. In addition, we are investing in our student affinity groups and Identity, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) initiatives. These programs are especially important to student success, as focus groups and qualitative data indicate that our students are struggling with higher levels of isolation and emotional distress and present with poorer coping skills and study strategies. In addition, an examination of our Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement results for the Fall 2022 cohort indicated that expectations about their level of engagement at CSUCI in relation to their overall success are at all-time lows – on some measures having fallen 20 or more percentage points since 2019.  This is true for nearly every topic surveyed – from expecting to seek help when having difficulty with coursework; to thinking that support services will be available to them; to anticipating the need to write more than one draft for a paper; to expecting interactions with people of a race or ethnicity or with religious beliefs other than their own, and many other behaviors associated with student success. These findings further highlight the importance of our co-curricular supports focusing on holistic student development and success.

• Campus, Access, Retention & Equity (CARE) Team: CARE support at CSUCI has continued to grow with more students being referred to the Dean of Students office for support through reports from faculty and staff. Our cases from Fall 2021 to Fall 2022 increased by over 45% (104 students). We know from periodic feedback received from students that they are grateful for the outreach and the expressions of care and concern. Through CARE reports and outreach, we are able to refer students personally to campus services to help them personally and academically. We are in process of examining the impact of CARE support on student retention and persistence.
• Basic Needs: Basic Needs has been able to support almost double the number of unique students in Fall 2022 compared to Fall 2021 (1070 in Fall 2022 compared to 623 in Fall 2021). This is largely due to expansion of the Dolphin Food Pantry, investment in pantry facilities and staffing, and key partnerships to increase resources and implement procedure/ policy changes. This includes implementation of EAB across all Basic Needs services, collaborating with community resources such as Foodshare and Food Forward, and revising the emergency grant, Ekho Your Heart Grant, and Emergency Housing processes and procedures with assistance from Financial Aid, Advancement, and Housing. When examining our Dolphin Food Pantry data going back to 2018, which included the quantitative analyses of over 1,500 unique food pantry users and the secondary analyses of 40 semi-structured interviews, between-group comparisons revealed a positive correlation between food pantry use and decreased DFWI rates, credit completion rates, cumulative GPA scores, advising utilization, and retention or graduation rates.
• Affinity Spaces for Student Groups and Expanded IDEA programming: We have committed $1M in philanthropic funds to support the creation of affinity spaces for various student groups. A clear realization of the past two decades in higher education and student success is that it matters greatly, whether students feel a sense of belonging on their college campus – and further, that belongingness is more elusive for students minoritized by constructs like race and ethnicity, sexuality, and disability.
• Disability Accommodations and Support Services (DASS) Case Manager: We leveraged philanthropic funding to support the creation of a DASS Case Manager Position, which builds upon our existing case management model for various programs, including Basic Needs, CARE, CAPS, and now DASS.

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