Clayton State University Campus Plan Update 2018

Primary point of contact

Eric Tack, Ed.D. Executive Director for the Center for Advising and Retention, EricTack@clayton.edu

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 2017 population totaled 7,003 students (5,786 undergraduate, 787 dual enrolled, and 448 graduate)[1]. 

Clayton State Student Demographics Fall 2017

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.

2018 Strategy Summary

High Impact Strategy

Advsing

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 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.

Summary of Activities

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.

Measures of Progress and Success

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.

Student Visits to the Center for Advising & Retention

Measure of Success: 

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.

IPEDS Cohort Retention Rate

Measure of Success: 

Our goal is to reach a 75% one-year retention rate.

Re-registration Rate

Measure of Success

Our goal is to reach 91% as the re-registration rate.

Lessons Learned

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.

Primary point of contact

Eric Tack, Ed.D. Executive Director for the Center for Advising and Retention, EricTack@clayton.edu

High Impact Strategy

Graduate Sooner

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.

Completion Goal

This goal is aimed at increasing the percentage of students who graduate within 4 years.

Demonstration of Priority or Impact

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.

Summary of Activities

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. 

Measures of Progress and Success

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.

New Undergraduate Students by Active Credits

Measure of Success

Our goal is to have the 15+ category be the majority of the student population.

IPEDS Cohort Graduation Rate[4]

Measure of Success

Our goal is to reach a 40% six-year graduation rate for cohort year Fall 2018.

Percentage of Fall New Students Enrolling in the Following Summer Term

Measure of Success

We have not set a goal to reach for this category. 

Lessons Learned

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.

Reflections and Observations

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. 

Primary point of contact

Stephen Schultheis, Ed.D. Assistant Vice President, Enrollment Management, StephenSchultheis@clayton.edu

Momentum Year 90-Day Updates

purposeful chioce

Activities Accomplished

• All new undergraduate students are guided into a major which has been mapped to an academic focus area.  We have accomplished this by eliminating the undecided option on the admission’s application, utilized Focus II (career focused assessment) during the orientation process, and advised students who selected a major but through orientation identified as undeclared into an academic focus area.

Activities Underway

• We are developing a website and other collateral to assist prospective students in determining their major.  This site will have the academic focus area descriptions, career outcomes, program maps, and additional educational information.

Guided pathways

Activities Accomplished

• We have aligned math requirements for each academic major, advised new undergraduate students to enroll in math (3 credits) and English (6 credits) in their first year, advised students to enroll in 30 credit hours in their first year, and mapped and advised students to enroll in three major focused courses (9 credits) within their pathway.

Activities Underway

• We are developing co-curricular activities and practices that are supportive of students engaging in their field of study and evaluating our Freshmen Seminar Course and the alignment to the three major focused courses in a student’s pathway.  We will be evaluating the percentages of students who have enrolled in math, English, and a major area course.

productive Academic Mindset

Activities Accomplished

• We launched our Academic Mindset Survey during orientation and introduced Academic Mindset during our start of semester Faculty Meeting.

Activities Underway

• We are continuing to develop institutional knowledge related to Academic Mindset especially as it relates to intentional strategies in and out of the classroom.  We are developing our training and implementation plan.

Reflections and Observations

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. 

Primary point of contact

Stephen Schultheis, Ed.D. Assistant Vice President, Enrollment Management, StephenSchultheis@clayton.edu