MSU is coming to life as our students fill the residence halls, classrooms, and a multitude of new student orientation and student life and engagement sponsored activities occurring across the campus in preparation for the new academic year. Simultaneously, the Center for Teaching and Learning, Faculty and Academic Staff Development, Integrated Studies, Undergraduate Seminars, and college-based programs are filled with educators and staff preparing to support undergraduate student success and learning. All these activities and training programs are created by educators and staff with one goal – to ensure every undergraduate student learns, thrives and graduates from MSU.However, the size and complexity of our institution makes it difficult to understand what is happening at any given point in time for which students, and why our efforts work for some students and not for others. This summer, the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, Student Life & Engagement, and college leaders have continued to support the work of 13,000 scholars, leaders, and practitioners building strategies toward a shared vision of undergraduate student success.
Part of developing those strategies includes looking at interdisciplinary research, literature and practices that have proven to be successful in supporting student success at MSU and other similar institutions across the country that have similar goals. This research was collected in fall 2023 and lives in our Undergraduate Student Success Strategy Guide, where it will be updated as new research shapes and informs our efforts.
This fall, we aim to map our activities (co-curricular and curricular) onto the recommendations, commitments and metrics outlined in the Strategy Guide, building on our summer work during the upcoming Student Success Launch on Sept. 17. Once we know our current collective activities in alignment with those recommendations, we will use late fall and spring to identify: 1) connections that need to be built between related activities, 2) duplications of effort and opportunities to connect related activities, 3) students most engaged with these efforts and 4) why some students are not engaging.
The approaches we are taking to solve complex problems for our campus are informed through reading the research produced by higher education scholars of different disciplines, listening to the advice and insights of daily practitioners, and through reflections of our lived experiences as students, scholars, higher ed researchers, teachers, student affairs leaders and academic leaders.
As part of our collective work to map student success at MSU, we invite you to be members of a campuswide learning community and contribute your knowledge, research and expertise to help us discover what MSU is already doing to reach our 2030 strategic goals for closing opportunity gaps in retention and graduation, and continue refining the institutional commitments and metrics for five opportunity areas of undergraduate success outlined in the undergraduate experience strategy guide. The Undergraduate Student Success – Five Opportunity Areas Learning Community will meet monthly in different formats (workshops, lunch and learns, design labs) depending on the topic and participant interest, with our first meeting of the semester on Sept. 25 from 4 – 5 p.m. We hope you will join us as we work as one team, coming together to support student success at MSU.
Have a great start to the year!