Our Integrated Approach to Student Success

UNC Greensboro is committed to an integrated, institution-wide approach to student success. UNCG graduates lead choice-filled lives and are well prepared to achieve current and future academic, personal, civic, and professional goals. Through a culture of care, intentionally designed experiences informed by evidence, and a deep commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, UNCG has created an environment in which what students do after matriculation matters more for academic success than pre-college preparation or non-academic factors like socio-economic status. This environment leads to equity in retention and graduation rates for students from all backgrounds.

A next step for our campus is to expand our national leadership in student success by supporting on-time bachelor’s degree attainment for more of our undergraduates by closely coordinating our efforts, serving the whole student, and removing institutional barriers to academic achievement. This approach to student success is integrated and data-informed—it acknowledges that improving retention and graduation rates while producing life-long learners requires a richly collaborative and campus-wide set of efforts involving students, faculty, and staff.

Work Now Under Way

The Spartan 30 Hour Challenge: For most students, completing 30 hours each year leads to higher grades, better persistence at UNCG, higher probability of graduation, and decreased time to degree completion. The 30 Hour Challenge provides incentives for students to complete 30 hours on an opt-in basis.

Expansion of Mental Health Support Services: Focused on fostering a culture of care, UNCG offers suicide prevention and mental health/substance use trainings. The first is UNCG Cares: Question Persuade Refer (QPR), a Suicide Prevention Gatekeeper training focused on how to recognize the warning signs of a suicide crisis and how to Question, Persuade, and Refer someone to help. QPR is 1.5-hour training and is tailored to UNCG, offering UNCG specific resources. For further information on QPR and to schedule a training, visit the Question Persuade Refer (QPR) website or contact Jamie Stephens @ jlsteph2@uncg.edu. Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training scaffolds learning from UNCG CARES: QPR suicide prevention course and builds comprehensive skills and abilities to identify, understand and respond to mental health and substance-use concerns. MHFA teaches participants an action plan that can be used in a variety of situations with students varying from panic attacks to nonsuicidal self-injury and alcohol or drug use. MHFA is focused on giving faculty and staff the knowledge and skills to respond to students in an informed, effective, competent, and confident manner. MHFA is an 8-hour training that is typically segmented into two or three sessions, and, like QPR, is provided by UNCG community members and tailored to UNCG procedures and resources. For more information or to schedule a MHFA training, contact Jennifer Whitney @ jmwhitne@uncg.edu In addition to the websites and contact persons noted here, additional resources and information, as well as a comprehensive list of trainings designed to create and support a Culture of Care can be found on the DSA Culture of Care website: https://sa.uncg.edu/facstaffmhguidance/

Extended and Enhanced New Student Orientation : Our new students came to us with the challenge that they had spent most of the prior year and a half learning online. To help with the transition to UNCG and the academic challenges of college, the Division of Student Success is offering an orientation program that lasts all year, and includes events and services that connect students to campus, develop personal and academic support systems, and introduces them to campus resources. The team is also offering programing for returning sophomores, who largely did not have the benefit of engaging campus life in the 2020-2021 academic year. (This work is being partially funded with institutional HEERF III dollars.)

Starfish Early Reporting, Data Collection, and Advising: We have asked instructors of undergraduate courses to complete Academic Status Reports (ASRs) for their students. Raising flags and making referrals helps coordinate early interventions (ASRs 1 and 2), creates a large, detailed, and actionable pool of data about the challenges students face, and gives advisors information relevant for enrollment in subsequent terms (ASR 3).

Direct Academic Support: The Academic Achievement Center has expanded its tutoring, supplemental instruction, and academic skills training operations in an effort to serve more students and be more responsive to Starfish referrals. The three Multiliteracy Centers are also delivering enhanced support for students as they develop skills in writing, speaking, and digital content creation.

The Business of Being a Student: A campus-wide team continues to make student-facing processes like applying, registering, and receiving financial aid simple and seamless. One outcome of this work is Spartan Central, a single website that houses everything undergraduate students need to know about tuition, billing, financial aid, transfer credit, course registration, and graduation.

Data Dashboards: A team from Academic Affairs, Enrollment Management, and ITS have developed dashboards that put important student success data in the hands of school, college, department, and program leaders. These dashboards provide timely information about enrollment patterns, semester credit hour production, seat availability, and grade distributions to deans, heads, chairs, and directors, who can then make detect trends, direct resources, plan interventions, and improve outcomes.

Successful Course Completion Initiative: Using information from the Data Dashboards, deans, heads, and chairs are working with the Division of Student Success and the University Teaching and Learning Center to identify gateway courses with low rates of successful completion, diagnose root causes, and work toward improving student performance in those courses. Higher rates of successful gateway course completion are a priority because they point toward higher student retention.

Examination of Undergraduate Academic Policies: The Academic Policies and Regulations Committee of the Faculty Senate is considering new policies and policy changes that will address several challenges students face as they work to make degree progress, encourage or require behaviors consistent with successful completion, and guide students toward better academic outcomes.

Transfer Advisory Council: A sixteen-member group of faculty, staff, and administrators has been charged with the task of improving the transfer student experience, making UNCG a more transfer-
friendly institution, and ensuring ease of access to UNCG for transfer students. The Transfer Advisory Council is working toward more and better data sharing and analysis, improved relationships with partner institutions, and higher rates of retention and graduation for transfer students.

This page will be updated as further student-support programs are layered in. Taken as a whole, the initiatives now underway will support students more fully as they work to make timely degree progress, perform at higher levels in their classes, and make the transition to university life and then to life after degree completion.