Dive Brief:
- Wright State University opened its new Student Success Center last June, bringing classroom space together with tutoring, academic advising and study spaces to combine key academic services under one roof.
- The Chronicle of Higher Education reports the building has card readers to log student attendance in classes and service centers, and data collection allows advisers and professors to get alerts for students who have low attendance, a setup that is being replicated in 40 classrooms beyond the Student Success Center.
- The university is progressing toward a goal of decreasing dropouts by 20% in five years, boosting the number of students attending supplemental sessions designed for their courses by 10% year-over-year, and growing the number of students getting math tutoring by 119%.
Dive Insight:
Colleges and universities across the country are considering new ways to serve students, improve retention rates and get more students to graduation. Perhaps if centralizing services and classroom space increases student use of such supports, more schools will adopt the model.
Data analytics programs like the one at Wright State have logged student use of tutoring centers, libraries and other services, drawing connections between providing those services and student success. When it is clear that one or two tutoring sessions per semester can greatly improve student achievement, it is an easy case to make to increase funding for tutoring centers. One key piece of advice from J. Luke Wood, who studies outcomes of men of color at community colleges, is to make anything that clearly improves student success a mandatory requirement, rather than an optional service.