Skip to content Skip to navigation

Georgia Southwestern State University Campus Plan Update 2025

Georgia Southwestern State University Mission

Georgia Southwestern State University is a state university serving a diverse population of students, offering a range of strong undergraduate and graduate programs in a vibrant learning environment. The University is a collegial community that values collaboration and community engagement with an emphasis on faculty, staff, and student interactions. An active student body and state-of-the-art amenities enhance the learning experience on a visually appealing campus located in historic Americus, Georgia.

Student Body Profile

Georgia Southwestern State University’s (GSW) total enrollment in fall 2024 was 3704. At that time, the gender distribution of the student population was 65.9% women and 34.1% men. The ethnicity of the fall 2024 student population was 55.6% White, 29.4% African American, 7.0% Asian and Pacific Islander, 3.5% Hispanic, 3.2% Multiracial and 1.3% were Native American or Unknown. Approximately 42% of GSW undergraduates receive Pell Grants; 56% are First-Generation college students (no parent/guardian with bachelor’s degree or higher); 19% began college for the first time as adults (25 years old or older); and 23% are age 25 or older. Most of our undergraduates (58%) are classified as full-time (taking 12 or more credit hours); 28% live on campus; 76% are enrolled in one or more online classes; and 37% are enrolled exclusively in online classes. These populations are also representative of our recent graduates. Out of the undergraduates who were awarded bachelor’s degrees in FY23, 56% had received the Pell Grant while enrolled at GSW, 53% were first-generation students, and 24% were 25 or older at the time of graduation.

Student Success Inventory

GSW has coordinated its Momentum Student Success Strategies with its ASPIRE Success Strategies to the extent possible, and since our SACSCOC reaffirmation in December 2024, we have also coordinated our Quality Enhancement Plan with these activities.

Success Inventory

English and Math Completion (Georgia Southwestern State University-2025)

Strategy/Project Name: 
English and Math Completion
Momentum Area: 
Pathways
Category: 
Corequisite Learning Support
Course Redesign
Math Pathways
Mindset
Tutoring
Other/Undefined
Strategy/Project Description: 

Increasing pass rates in English 1101 and the major appropriate MATH courses is the goal of this strategy. Both the department of English and Mathematics have submitted improvement plans and are implementing them. Among the strategies being employed include:

  • ENGL 1101
    • Increases the number of sections of ENGL 0999 to reduce the number of students per section
    • ENGL 0999 instructors meet regularly to coordinate their efforts, since most of the students are from University College and are taught by same ENGL 1101 instructor who also teaches one of the ENGL 1101 sections
    • Two trained consultants from the University Writing Center are being used as embedded tutors, each covering two of the four sections
    • A committee in the Department of English and Modern Languages is working align goals, grading procedures, and assignments in ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
    • The department has also enacted a common attendance policy
  • Major Appropriate Math Courses
    • Instructors are using the Mindset Intervention in sections of MATH 0999
    • Two Math instructors have secured a USG STEM Initiative Supplemental Funding Grant to improve pass rates in MATH 1111 College Algebra and MATH 1120 Calculus I
      • Using diagnostic exams administered in the first week to identify possible issues in the students’ preparation
      • Employing tutors who are available five days a week in the building where most Math sections are taught
      • Using self-diagnosis questions through the semester to teach students to identify their personal strengths and weaknesses
Activity Status: 
Scaling
Evaluation/Assessment plan: 

Each fall semester the Director of Institutional Effectiveness & Planning and the Director of Institutional Research collaborate on a progress report of the cohort from the previous fall. This report tracks the completion of ENGL 1101, ENGL 1102, Major Appropriate Math Courses, and any other Math courses taken by the cohort. From this report, the percentage of students in the cohort who have passed ENGL 1101 and their Major Appropriate Math Courses are calculated. The report also allows us to see how many students take another Math course in addition to their Major Appropriate Math Courses, as well as how many students complete ENGL 1102 during their first year. For the purposes of these calculations, Dual Enrollment and AP credit is excluded unless the student took a dual enrollment course from GSW and subsequently matriculated here. We also monitor grade distributions in English Composition and Core Mathematics courses to ensure alignment of grading standards. To assess the effectiveness of embedded tutoring in ENGL 0999, we will monitor the pass rates of ENGL 0999 sections in in their co-requisite college-level course.

Progress and Adjustments: 

Reducing the section size for ENGL 0999 and increasing the contact hours from 1 hour to two without increasing the course credits hours has been beneficial, but we still have trouble scheduling both the college-level class and the co-requisite support class with the same instructor. In addition, the instructors teaching sections of ENGL 0999 have observed that many of the students have reading as well as writing deficiencies. We have a plan to schedule the college-level classes and co-requisite classes with the same instructors that will be implemented for the fall 2026 schedule. We are exploring ideas to include embedded reading tutors in ENGL 0999, as well as writing tutors. We will pilot having both embedded reading and writing tutors in spring 2026.

Plan for the Year Ahead: 

Pending the results of the embedded tutoring in ENGL 0999 and the results of MATH tutoring for MATH 1111 and MATH 1120, we will consider continuing or scaling these efforts in more sections or in additional courses.

Challenges and Support: 

Finding tutors is always an issue since the institution is often unable to pay as well as outside employers. Funds from the Institutional Effectivness & Planning budget are being used to offer a more competitive wage for embedded tutors and the Math Tutors are being paid from the grant. Funding requests were made during through the internal budgeting process.Bryan Davis

Contact email: 
bryan.davis@gsw.edu
Primary Contact: 
Bryan Davis, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of English
Michael Moir, Department Chair, Professor of English
Chadwick Gugg, Department Chair, Professor of Mathematics

Student Degree Planning – Providing Students with clear degree pathways (Georgia Southwestern State University-2025)

Strategy/Project Name: 
Student Degree Planning – Providing Students with clear degree pathways
Momentum Area: 
Pathways
Category: 
Advising
First Year Experience
Math Pathways
Pathways
Strategy/Project Description: 

Every incoming freshman is being trained on the use of the Student Educational Planner (SEP) in Degree Works in their UNIV 1000 the GSW Experience, first-years seminar course. Creating and submitting a registration plan is an assignment in all sections of UNIV 1000.

Activity Status: 
Refining/Maintaining
Evaluation/Assessment plan: 

Data shows that students who create a degree plan in the Student Educational Planner (SEP) are more likely to be retained at the University. Among first-year students in the Fall 2024 cohort, those who developed a plan in SEP had a retention rate of 70.2%, compared to the overall cohort retention rate of 63.8%. We will continue to track and monitor students with plans in DegreeWorks to further assess the impact on retention.

Progress and Adjustments: 

To increase the number of students with a plan in the Student Educational Planner (SEP), the requirement was integrated into an Academic Progress and Planning Project for all first-year students enrolled in UNIV 1000. Course instructors and Storm Spotters (peer mentors) received training from the Registrar’s Office on how to create and utilize the SEP effectively.

Plan for the Year Ahead: 

Once students have created their plans, the next step is to ensure all advisors are familiar with the Student Education Planner to support more effective advising conversations. The Office of the Registrar has been conducting SEP training with various academic departments this fall and will continue to do so in the spring.

Challenges and Support: 

Gaining instructor buy-in can be challenging; however, making the SEP a course requirement and providing targeted training are strategies we believe will help address this issue.

Primary Contact: 
Rachel Abbott, Interim Provost, Dean of the College of Education, and UNIV 1000 Co-Director
David Jenkins, Director of First-Year Experience and Student Success and UNIV 1000 Co-Director

High Impact Approach to Integrative Learning (HAIL) (Georgia Southwestern State University-2025)

Strategy/Project Name: 
High Impact Approach to Integrative Learning (HAIL)
Momentum Area: 
Mindset
Category: 
Co-curricular Pathways
Course Redesign
Focus Areas
High Impact Practices
Learning Communities
Program Maps
Summary of Activities: 

GSW’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), High-Impact Approach to Integrative Learning (HAIL), is a broad initiative to facilitate integrative learning and student social belonging at GSW.  We are currently in our second year of implementation.

Activity Status: 
Refining/Maintaining
Evaluation/Assessment plan: 

HAIL has three learning outcomes and three goals that are evaluated on a year-to-year basis.  These are:

SLO#1: Students will be able to recognize connections between some combination of the following: general education course work, their major, their co-curricular experiences, experiential learning, and their life goals or experiences.

SLO#2 Students will be able to apply structured reflection principles to reveal insights between their learning and life goals.

SLO#3 Students who complete a HAIL block or station will be able to transfer or synthesize skills and ideas from one academic or professional situation to another so as to engage in complex problem solving.

Goal #1: Provide faculty development opportunities to ensure that majority of faculty can incorporate integrative learning into their teaching.

Goal #2: Increase the opportunities for faculty and staff to collaborate in teaching and learning.

Goal #3: Increase students’ sense of belonging through engagement in co-curricular experiences with integrative components.

SLOs are evaluated using the AACU Value rubric on integrative learning with initial targets around 75% of milestone for the majority of students. (This target was selected when HAIL was initially developed for general education classes).  Each goal has its own target and these are being adjusted to be appropriately ambitious.

Goal #1 asked us to have roughly 20% of faculty trained at this time and we are well above that rate.  We are looking to train an additional 5% of faculty on a year-to-year basis and have added a new element to this goal—support for the scholarship of teaching and learning.  The target for goal #2 is to have at least 12 blocks by the end of the year and 15 HAIL-designated courses.  We have over twice as many courses and will likely just hit our goal on blocks this year. Goal #3 is assessed in part by participation in HAIL designated events.  Unfortunately, attendance at events varies considerably from year to year and we are currently reevaluating how we may meet this goal.

Progress and Adjustments: 

HAIL has become rapidly established at GSW and appears to be helping students engage in integrative learning in a variety of classes. Per the above discussion of assessment, we’ve added a variety of courses and are slowly expanding our offerings. A majority of faculty have engaged with some form of faculty development, and we are incentivizing additional opportunities.

We need to work on ensuring consistency and a clearly sequenced approach to HAIL that goes beyond general education.

Plan for the Year Ahead: 

Per our response above, we are working to adjust our targets and goals in an appropriate manner.

We are currently developing HAIL pathways to ensure that students will be able to enroll in program-appropriate block classes while in general education.  We’ve found some evidence that these classes help foster a sense of academic belonging and we’ve had logistical challenges getting these working beyond students’ first semester. Students are encountering HAIL classes throughout their time at GSW but we can only provide a limited number of blocks.

 A group of roughly 15 faculty members are meeting on a regular basis to engage in scholarship related to HAIL. Faculty have expressed interest in developing a conference on SoTL in general education and the director of HAIL is investigating this possibility.

Challenges and Support: 

We’ll need the collaboration of various academic programs to make sure HAIL pathways are successful as well as successful advisor training to make sure these things work.

Continuing to value SoTL research through events like the Teaching and Learning Conference and beyond.

Contact email: 
paul.dahlgren@gsw.edu
Primary Contact: 
Director of HAIL: Paul Dahlgren

Increasing Credit Completion (Georgia Southwestern State University-2025)

Strategy/Project Name: 
Increasing Credit Completion
Momentum Area: 
Pathways
Category: 
Advising
Co-curricular Pathways
Credit Intensity
Program Maps
Strategy/Project Description: 

Increase the number of freshmen completing fifteen credit hours in their first semester at GSW. Freshmen students are enrolled in classes for their first semester by FYE advisors that include 14-16 credits. They are advised by FYE advisors at early registration for spring classes to register for enough hours to accumulate 30 credit hours during their first year.

Activity Status: 
Scaling
Evaluation/Assessment plan: 

We are tracking the percentage of students in the FTFT cohort who attempt 15 hours each semester, as well as the overall average hours attempted for all students in the cohort and for those attempting 15 or more hours.  We are also tracking average completion percentage of all students in the cohort and students with 15 or more attempted hours. Our target is for all FTFT students to complete no less than 67% of their attempted hours (to maintain SAP), and hopefully more than 75% to ensure that completing a degree in four years remains possible.

 

Currently, the results are disappointing. For the fall 2024 cohort, only 45% of the students attempted 15 or more hours. The average number of attempted hours for the cohort was 14.5 with an average of 9.7 hours completed, or a completion percentage of 67%. For spring 2025, only 40% of the 2024 cohort attempted 15 or more hours. The average number of attempted hours was 12.6 with an average completion of 8.4 hours, or 67% completion percentage. For the 2024-25 academic year including summer term, 29.1 hours were attempted, while 19.9 hours were completed, or a completion percentage of 67%.

Progress and Adjustments: 

While we met the lower end of our completion percentage target, we are not making enough progress in getting students to attempt an average of 15 credit hours per semester or 30 credit per academic year, even when including summer term. We will need to reconsider our strategies for advising students to register for 15 or more credit hours per semester and for advising students on withdrawing from classes.

Plan for the Year Ahead: 

Since we are in the first year of implementing a NISS recommendation on Proactive advising, we will make it part of our planning to explore ways of increasing the percentage of students who attempt 30 credit hours or more during their first year.

Challenges and Support: 

Training faculty advisors and getting buy in from them on encouraging students to complete 30 or more credit hours per academic year.

We will consult other members of our NISS Implementation cohort on strategies for encouraging students to register for 30 credit hours per academic year.

Contact email: 
David.jenkins@gsw.edu
Primary Contact: 
David Jenkins, Director of First Year Experience and Student Success

Supplemental Updates

GSW participated in the first year of a three-year engagement with the National Institute for Student Success in the 2024-25 academic year that culminated in the delivery of a Campus Playbook. The playbook included four recommendations: Coordinated Communication with Students, Proactive Academic Advising, Use of Student Financial Data, and Use of Academic Outcome Data. This academic year, GSW begins implementation of these recommendations which we anticipate will have significant impact on our success strategies going forward, especially the recommendations on Advising and Academic Outcome Data. We expect all the recommendations to affect our ASPIRE and Momentum planning in the spring.

Observations and Next Steps

While our efforts to increase the completion of ENGL 1101 and Major Appropriate Math courses have seen increases in the percentage of both within the first thirty credit hours earned, additional gains need to be made, especially for students with co-requisite support requirements. During the rest of the 2025-26 academic year, we will continue our efforts to strengthen the supports in ENGL 0999 and MATH 0999. We will add embedded reading tutors to section of ENGL 0999 during spring semester to give these co-requisite students support for both reading and writing. We will also monitor the progress of the USG STEM Initiative Supplemental Funding Grant with an eye to expanding this support to more sections of MATH 1111, and to sections of MATH 1001 and MATH 1401.

We have seen increased retention and progression numbers for students with an academic plan in the Student Educational Planner (SEP), although the numbers of students with a plan are not as high as we would like. During fall 2025, the training in the use of SEP in UNIV 1000 has been incorporated into a three-part project required in all sections of the course. In addition, all UNIV 1000 instructors, both faculty and peer mentors, have received additional training in the use of SEP. To continue the planning process beyond the first semester, the Office of the Registrar is offering SEP training to any advisors or departments that request it. Since developing a training program for academic advisors is an essential step in implementing GSW’s NISS Recommendation on Proactive Advising, SEP training will become a part of that training program.

GSW has made significant progress towards the implementation goals its High-Impact Approach to Integrative Learning (HAIL), but there is still work to do. Specifically, more progress needs to be made in developing and implementing HAIL Station Courses. HAIL Stations are intended to help students bridge the gap between their general education experiences and their major curriculum and to help start their professional journey. Most HAIL Stations will be a 2000-level courses designed to initiate students into their degree programs. As part of the effort to develop more HAIL Stations, GSW will also develop degree-specific HAIL pathways that intentionally make a seamless move from general education curriculum to major curriculum possible. Training faculty advisors to facilitate students following and staying on course with these pathways will be considered as a part of the training program to be developed by the Academic Advising Council that is part of GSW’s NISS Recommendation on Proactive Advising.

The strategies we have been using to increase attempted credit hours and completed credit hours have not increased these metrics substantially. The question of how to increase these progression metrics through advising will be one of the prime questions considered by GSW Academic Advising Council during the first year of NISS implementation and we will continue to work on this problem beyond the end of GSW’s NISS engagement as necessary. What data needs to be provided to advisors to help them track advisees and advise them on their degree progression will require collaboration between the Academic Advising Council, the Financial Aid Data Recommendation Working Group, and the Academic Outcome Data Working Group. For instance, the Financial Aid Data Working Group will consider how to provide advisors with data on hours attempted and hours completed, as well as percentage of hours completed to help them advise students considering withdrawing from a class. The Proactive Advising Working Group will then incorporate training for advisors on the use of these data into the advising training plan. Since our NISS cohort concentrates on proactive advising this year, we will also learn about successful strategies for improving these metrics from our cohort partners, other USG Institutions and a group of Public Institutions from Maine.