Eric Tack, Ed.D. Executive Director for the Center for Advising and Retention, EricTack@clayton.edu
Clayton State University, located 15 miles south of downtown Atlanta, serves a diverse socioeconomic, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural student population primarily from the Atlanta metropolitan area and its adjacent counties. The University’s mission, reflecting this diversity, is to cultivate an environment of engaged, experience-based learning, enriched by active community service, that prepares students of diverse ages and backgrounds to succeed in their lives and career.
The fall 2017 population totaled 7,003 students (5,786 undergraduate, 787 dual enrolled, and 448 graduate)[1].
Undergraduate Total |
6,573 |
Full-Time |
55.5%[2] |
Part-Time |
44.5% |
Black |
61% |
White |
20% |
Hispanic |
6% |
New Undergraduate Pell Recipients |
67% |
Clayton State’s completion strategies, in line with the mission of serving students from diverse ages and backgrounds, are designed to support completion for all students. Over the past year, the university has especially focused on proactive-intervention advising, increasing the percentage of students enrolling in 15+ credits, and increasing the percentage of new fall starts enrolling in the following summer term.
High Impact Strategy
Advise students within a centralized structure that capitalizes on predictive data analytics to promote deeper student advisor connections and uses consistent advising practices. Further leverage our fully-centralized advising system to implement the USG Momentum Year activities: starting out with making a purposeful choice in a focus area or program, developing a purposeful mindset, following clearly sequenced program maps.
This goal is aimed at reaching a one-year retention goal for the IPEDS cohort to 75% and begin to approach an IPEDS cohort graduation rate of 40% by 2022.
Clayton State University has dedicated work to improve our graduation and retention rates. Prior to summer 2015 academic advising was managed within each of the four colleges and majority done by faculty. Centralizing advising for our undergraduate students permits us to use a proactive-intervention based advising model which has a great potential to impact student retention and graduation rates. This is a high priority and high impact strategy as it addresses an immediate need for the potential to impact a significant student population.
Throughout the 2016-2017 year, the Center for Advising and Retention (CAR) took a number of steps aimed at increasing student interaction. Interactions were targeted at students who identified as at-risk, were new to the university, or within their second year. The CAR created a communication strategy that outlined week-by-week communication campaigns to promote student activity. Examples include a focus aimed at having all new students meet with their advisor or a focus on reaching out to students who were identified as high risk through our Student Success Collaborative (SSC) predictive analytics.
Another significant effort to increase student interaction was to utilize SSC in other offices as an effort to connect student interactions. Within this past year, the Center for Academic Support (CAS), Residence Life, the Writing Center, and the Veteran’s Resource Center were all brought onto the SSC platform. This connected the CAR’s efforts with the other units to create a more holistic approach to interacting with students.
The third activity the CAR took this year was to reorganize staff in order to provide additional support for reaching out to students while still providing quality academic advising sessions. The reorganization created new graduate assistant positions who were able to provide support with reaching out to students while the advisors were meeting with students in advising sessions.
Clayton State uses the number of student visits to the CAR, IPEDS cohort retention rates, and re-registration rates to assess the outcome of this strategy.
|
2015-2016 |
2016-2017 |
2017-2018 |
In Person Student Visits |
9,048 |
9,218 |
11,480 |
Student Updates in SSC Platform |
13,912 |
14,082 |
14,933 |
We will be changing this reporting category to a percentage of degree-seeking students enrolled for each term met with instead of a number of visits. This will provide us with more impactful data.
Fall 2013 |
Fall 2014 |
Fall 2015 |
Fall 2017 |
Fall 2018[3] |
68% |
69% |
71% |
67% |
71% |
Our goal is to reach a 75% one-year retention rate.
Percentage of Fall 2014 Students (excluding graduates) Registered for Spring 2015 |
Percentage of Fall 2015 Students (excluding graduates) Registered for Spring 2016 |
Percentage of Fall 2016 Students (excluding graduates) Registered for Spring 2017 |
Percentage of Fall 2017 Students (excluding graduates) Registered for Spring 2018 |
90% |
89% |
90% |
90% |
Our goal is to reach 91% as the re-registration rate.
We are in our fourth full year of having centralized advising. During this year we have been able to identify structural issues that need to be addressed in order to ensure no student is turned away from meeting with an advisor. This has been addressed for the 2017-2018 year. We have also realized that our focused efforts on the IPEDS rate need to be reviewed. We have had centralized advising for this population for multiple years with slow increases in retention and a significant drop this most recent year. This year we will be holistically reviewing our retention efforts as connected to our Strategic Enrollment Management Plan and the USG Momentum Year initiative.
Eric Tack, Ed.D. Executive Director for the Center for Advising and Retention, EricTack@clayton.edu
High Impact Strategy
Increase the number of new fall starts enrolling in 15+ credit hours per term and the number of new fall students enrolling in the following summer term.
This goal is aimed at increasing the percentage of students who graduate within 4 years.
Clayton State University new students have historically enrolled in less than 15 credits per term. The path to completing a degree on time requires students to take 15+ credit hours per term. Focusing on increasing the percentage of students enrolling in 15+ credit hours per term has the ability to significantly impact a number of students graduating on time. We have found that students who enroll in at least one summer term graduate at a rate of 64% while students who never attend a summer term graduate at a rate of 7%. Increasing the number of students enrolling in the summer will ultimately have a positive impact on graduation rates.
This is the second year that we have used the Graduate Sooner message as a means to encourage students to take 15+ credits per term and to enroll in the summer. We gathered staff and faculty support to promote this initiative. We communicated this message through orientation, presentations (freshman English courses, residence halls, student government association, student leadership council, and information tables), and mailings to students via email as well as their home. Most significantly, we promoted this initiative through the academic advisors during advising and registration for the spring and summer terms at the same time.
Clayton State uses the percentage of new fall undergraduate students enrolled in 15+ credits and the percentage of that same population who enrolled in the summer as a measure of progress and success.
|
Fall 2014 |
Fall 2015 |
Fall 2016 |
Fall 2017 |
1-5 |
3% |
2% |
3% |
3% |
6-8 |
11% |
11% |
11% |
12% |
9-11 |
14% |
14% |
14% |
13% |
12-14 |
50% |
47% |
51% |
50% |
15+ |
23% |
26% |
21% |
22% |
Our goal is to have the 15+ category be the majority of the student population.
|
Fall 2011 |
Fall 2012 |
Fall 2013 |
Fall 2014 |
4-year |
11.2% |
9.9% |
8.1% |
12.8% |
5-year |
25.0% |
23.8% |
24.8% |
N/A |
6-year |
30.6% |
31.3% |
N/A |
N/A |
Our goal is to reach a 40% six-year graduation rate for cohort year Fall 2018.
Fall 2015 |
Fall 2016 |
Fall 2017 |
30.5% |
34.6% |
33.7% |
We have not set a goal to reach for this category.
Throughout this year we were able to identify some structural issues with course offerings that caused a barrier to students from being able to enroll in 15+ credits. Some of these issues are associated with course offerings and course sizes. As a result of the return of year-round Pell that we will be able to see a significant increase this year in the percentage of students enrolling in the summer. Student finances continued to be an issue for students attempting to enroll in the all terms. We addressed these concerns in time for some improvements for the fall 2017 new student population. We anticipate changes to the co-requisite math model may impact student interest in registering for 15+ credits as many students will be at 14 credits with this change. Preliminary data demonstrates an improvement in four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates for active cohorts.
Clayton State University continues to undergo significant change over the time that we have been focusing on Complete College Georgia. As we completed our third year our more concerted effort we are beginning to see improvements across all of our active IPEDS cohorts in terms of retention and graduation. We are committed to our strategies associated with Complete College Georgia as well as others found in the Strategic Enrollment Management Plan which has been included with this report.
Institutionally, we have developed strategies to improve retention and graduation rates with a goal of reaching 75% one-year retention and approach a 40% six-year graduation rate by the end of our Strategic Planning cycle in 2022. These strategies can be viewed in our Strategic Enrollment Management Plan. We plan to continue to focus on the implementation of the USG Momentum year initiative regarding intentional program choice, guided pathways, and developing a purposeful mindset.
There is no doubt that Clayton State continues to have an opportunity to improve our retention and graduation rates. Our strategies have been developed on data and theory. We are confident that our institutional efforts will see positive results in the coming and future years.
Stephen Schultheis, Ed.D. Assistant Vice President, Enrollment Management, StephenSchultheis@clayton.edu
Activities Accomplished
Activities Underway
Activities Accomplished
Activities Underway
Activities Accomplished
Activities Underway
Clayton State has fully embraced the Momentum Year work. The Momentum year work complements many of our strategies already in place to increase our retention and graduation rates. Over the fall semester we will be analyzing our success rates relating to our Guided Pathways as well as ensuring our strategies are assessed and modified as necessary.
Stephen Schultheis, Ed.D. Assistant Vice President, Enrollment Management, StephenSchultheis@clayton.edu