MSU’s Student Success Initiative wins Innovation Award

Michigan State University has won an award for its commitment to increasing graduation rates and closing opportunity gaps for first generation, low-income and underrepresented populations through its Student Success Initiative.

Presented by the National Research Center for College & University Admissions, the Eduventures 2017 Innovation Award honors higher education institutions that have demonstrated significant innovations in enrollment management, student success and student outcomes.

“MSU is very proud to be recognized for our new approaches to student success, from our residential neighborhoods and proactive academic advising, to curriculum changes and analytics tracking,” said Sekhar Chivukula, associate provost for undergraduate education and dean of undergraduate studies. “Already we have substantially increased persistence rates.”

The Student Success Transformation Initiative reaches across all MSU departments and is a true collaborative campus effort to advance the belief that all undergraduate students are capable of graduating and help students reduce the time it takes to compete their degree.

The six priority areas of the Initiative:

• Proactive Advising focuses on delivering activities that can help academic advisers in their daily roles support students through direct interaction across all college departments and “Neighborhood” residential clusters.
• Student Success Analytics contains the projects and work streams related to developing better reporting, diagnostic and predictive analytics capabilities to support student success interventions.
• Curriculum and Instruction supports longer-term efforts by which fundamental changes to what and how students are taught can impact overall student success.
• Enabling Technology and Data involves or is closely related to the work streams responsible for implementing the supporting technology necessary for Proactive Advising and Student Success Analytics.
• Process Review, and Consolidation and Acceleration of Neighborhoods Activities incorporates a review of institutional processes that can impact student success and completion of the Neighborhood Student Success Collaborative residential cluster reorganization to enable enhanced student success from a residential life perspective.
• University Engagement includes activities needed to inform, communicate and engage the broader MSU community as it relates to the Student Success program and initiatives.

 MSU has also created The HUB for Innovation and Learning and Technology to transform what happens inside the classroom by creating new ways to collaborate, learn, research and deliver instruction.

“As the nation’s pioneer land-grant university, we place high priority on access to education,” Chivukula said. “We admit students from varied backgrounds creating a very demographically diverse student population. At MSU, we are creating the tools necessary to assist because we have the unwavering belief that every student admitted can succeed.” 

Other Innovation Award recipients include Purdue University, Texas State Technical College and Wellesley College. The awards were presented during Eduventures Summit 2017 in Boston. Eduventures, the research division of NRCCUA, provides data, research and advisory services that are focused exclusively on analyzing the forces that are transforming higher education.