Clayton State University Campus Plan Update 2019

Section 1:  Institutional Mission and Student Body Profile

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 2019 population totaled 6,879 students (5,470 undergraduate, 898 dual-enrolled, and 511 graduate). 

Clayton State Student Demographics Fall 2019

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.

Section 2: Momentum Year Update

All incoming first-year students for fall 2019 are immersed in Clayton State University’s new approach to purposeful program choice in support of the outcomes of the Momentum Year initiative.  Key components of the revamped approach include redesigned guided pathways, purposeful choice engagement during orientation, a reimagined freshman seminar, and increased enrollment while improving success outcomes in Area A Math and English courses.  Academic Affairs will also take a larger role in integrating Academic Mindset strategies into key gateway courses.

Redesigned Guided Pathways

For fall 2019 we updated and redesigned our 4-year pathways for all undergraduate majors.  All guided pathways include the correct gateway Math course and English courses, 9 credits within the associated academic focus area, and 30 credits within the first year.  Department chairs in conjunction with academic advisors pressure tested the pathways to ensure that prerequisites were accounted for as well as considerations were made for course availability.  Pathways also include major specific co-curricular activities aligned with degree progression.  These pathways include information related to Clayton State’s Complete College Georgia Graduate Sooner initiative which is designed to encourage students to attend summer and earn 15 credits each semester.  The pathways were handed out to students and their guests at each fall orientation session.  Future efforts will focus on making these pathways and major information sheets available on a comprehensive major and career exploration website which is scheduled to be completed by summer 2020. A sample guided pathway is included in Appendix A.

Purposeful Choice Engagement During Orientation

Our efforts consisted of two components.  First, orientation group advisement was redesigned by focus areas rather than major.  Faculty developed presentations that introduced students to their focus area and the associated coursework, identified the majors and careers associated with the focus area, and encouraged students to participate in co-curricular activities in alignment with the focus area.  During these presentations students and guests received guided pathway worksheets and major overview worksheets for their declared major as well as any other major of interest within their academic focus area.  Second, students that were officially coded as undeclared (applied prior to creation of focus areas in Banner) or interdisciplinary studies received a phone call from the academic advisement office to discuss their major and career interests.  In some cases, students simply needed their major updated in the system.  Those that were unsure of their major had a referral made to the Office of Career Services where a career counselor reached out to the student to provide more in-depth support.  Future work includes the purchase of a new orientation registration software platform that will allow students to identify their career interests in addition to their major.  Academic Advisors will review instances of misaligned careers and majors and include them in their pre-orientation outreach process.

Reimagined Freshman Seminar – CSU 1000

Clayton State’s freshman seminar, CSU1000, was reimagined for fall 2019 to ensure all incoming freshmen participate in an intentional series of programs to aid students in further investigating focus areas in support of making a purposeful program choice by the end of the first semester of their freshman year.  Students were either registered for a 3-hour course that was part of their Area F curriculum that already had these major exploration components embedded or were required to take the new CSU1000 course that is aligned with a focus area.  Regardless of modality all students completed the Focus2Career assessment and will have at least one class period facilitated by a career counselor in the Office of Career Services.  At the conclusion of each class room visit students are invited to complete referral cards to participate in individualized career counseling.  Students are completing a pre- and post-assessment to aid the university in better understanding the factors that impact and support successful purposeful program choice.  Future efforts will explore if there is a statistical impact on student success based on the student’s self-identified responses to their alignment within their declared major as well as if specific programs led to a stronger feeling of purposeful program choice.

Students Enrolled and Completing Math and English

We made significant progress this year with increasing the percentage of students enrolled in Area A Math and English as demonstrated by the table below.  This is credited to an intentional effort to increase course capacity by the English and Math departments.  One strategy included offering two sections of ENGL1101 during our summer bridge program to reduce the need for ENGL1101 during the fall.  Academic advisors also audited every student’s record prior to them leaving the advising room during orientation.  Clayton State University has also focused on improving the success rates of students in our gateway English and Math courses through participation in the Gateways 2 Completion initiative, increased academic support integration, and math pathways advising.  Since fall 2016 we have realized a 5% decrease in the DFW rate for ENGL1101 and a 1% decrease in ENGL1102.  Since fall 2016 we have realized a 14% decrease in the DFW rate for MATH1111.  During this same time period we realized a 79.5% increase in MATH1101 enrollment as a result of guided pathways advisement while only seeing a small increase in the DFW rate.  Overall the DFW rates for area A2 math has decreased by 5%. While we have improved the success rates and placement rates for Area A courses we continue to struggle to improve the number of students attempting 15 credits in their first term.  An analysis found that 14.8% of our incoming freshmen class registered for 14 rather than 15 credits.  We continue to explore ways to address student perceptions of enrollment by the number of courses rather than the number of credits.  The course view of enrollment by students has a significant impact for our largest incoming major, Health Sciences with a pre-nursing concentration, in that these students enroll in a 1-credit lab science in their first semester.   For fall 2020 we are exploring a move to pre-registration of students prior to orientation to default them into 15 or more credits.

Academic Mindset

In early 2019, an Academic Mindset committee was convened that included faculty representatives from the various Colleges and select staff members from Student Affairs and the Center for Academic Success (Clayton State’s tutoring center). In this initial meeting, the concept of Academic Mindset was discussed and data from the “Getting to Know Our Students Survey” was highlighted to identify potential strategies moving forward.

The committee decided to wait on developing strategies until the next set of survey data was available to institutions so, we could better determine trends across multiple survey administrations. During this time, the faculty lead involved with the committee subsequently resigned and the effort has since stalled. We are currently in the process of identifying another faculty member to co-lead the committee along with Justin Mays, Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Once this faculty member is identified, we plan to reconvene the committee, analyze the latest round of survey data, and begin development of strategies to increase activities across campus which intentionally serve to increase growth mindset, purpose, and social belonging. These efforts will target faculty teaching key gateway courses for first-time freshmen.

Section 3:  Other Institutional High-Impact Strategies, Activities, & Outcomes

High Impact Strategy Number 1

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.

Completion Goal

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.

Demonstration of Priority or Impact

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 an intrusive 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.

Summary of Activities

Throughout the 2018-2019 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) Navigate predictive analytics as well as critical course dashboards provided by the University System of Georgia. 

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.

Measures of Progress and Success

Clayton State uses the number IPEDS cohort retention and graduation rates, and overall re-registration rates for all undergraduate students to assess the outcome of this strategy.

IPEDS Cohort Retention Rate

IPEDS Cohort Retention Rate[3]
 

Lessons Learned

Clayton State University continues to realize the benefits of our efforts to fully centralize academic advising starting in Fall 2015.  Since then we have realized gains in IPEDS retention and graduation rates as well as improvements in overall re-registration rates.

High Impact Strategy Number 2

Utilization of scalable technology to decrease time to completion and increase student success in key gateway courses.

Completion Goal

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.

Demonstration of Priority or Impact

Building off of the success of our fully centralized advising center Clayton State University has continued to explores ways in which the work of advisors can be focused towards students most in need of assistance while also developing scalable solutions to improve student outcomes.   These efforts seek to leverage existing technology in collaboration with our Office of Information Technology to provide scalable solutions.  Two solutions outlined in this report include our Early Alerts initiative and automated course repeat notifications.

Summary of Activities

Early Alerts

Launched in fall 2017 twice during each semester faculty teaching in select “Critical Courses” or “Catapult Courses” as identified by the University System of Georgia have been required to complete progress reports on their students between weeks 4-6 and week 9-12s of the semester.  These alerts create cases that are assigned to associated student support offices, which results in personalized phone outreach to students.  During this time period we found that students that act (e.g., advising or tutoring appointment)

Automatic Course Repeat Notifications

In fall 2018 academic advisors were provided a report and began notifying students of courses for which they had previously received credit and earned a C or higher. This was difficult to scale but still had a positive impact. Launched for spring 2019 we automated notifications via our inhouse texting solution to students with final calls being made by advisors. 

Measures of Progress and Success

Lessons Learned

Further integrate technology into student success efforts will be key to achieving Clayton State’s CCG goals of improving retention and graduation rates for all undergraduate students.  Technology offers the unique ability to scale student success efforts in ways that are not possible and allow academic advisors and other student support staff to focus their efforts on the most at-risk students that need personalized interventions.  Future efforts will explore the use of technology to decrease the number of students taking courses not aligned with their declared program of study.

Early Alerts

On these alerts realized on average a 0.66 improvement from their midterm to final grade. For future actions we will explore course level impacts of tutoring and/or Supplemental Instruction on students with Early Alerts.  Our success with this work will be profiled at the 2019 EAB Connected Conference.

Automatic Course Repeat Notifications

These efforts have resulted in a significant decrease in course repeats by students and potential savings to students of roughly a quarter of a million dollars for fall 2019.

Primary point of contact

Eric Tack, Ed.D., Assistant Vice President for Student Success, EricTack@clayton.edu