Over 230 faculty, staff, students and administrators from various NSU departments and colleges gathered on Oct. 31 for the 2013 Undergraduate Student Retention Launch Meeting to discuss student retention and the undergraduate experience.
Though the issues discussed were detailed and complex, they all had one thing in common: increasing the undergraduate student retention rate — the percentage of students who stay enrolled at the university year to year — through enhancing the NSU undergraduate experience. The launch meeting also marked the start of a year-long self-study of the university.
The meeting started with an 11:30 a.m. lunch at the DeSantis Building Courtyard Atrium and included a presentation from President George Hanbury, interactive discussions, a brainstorming session and other elements, before concluding around 5 p.m. at the Rose and Alfred Miniaci Performing Arts Center Theater. An additional 30 to 50 faculty and staff of regional campuses watched the meeting via live broadcast.
Brad Williams, vice president of student affairs and dean of the College of Undergraduate Studies, began the meeting by expressing his enthusiasm for the turnout, before explaining the launch’s importance.
“There are big days and big deals in the life of a university and we are at a crossroads right now, I believe, relative to looking at this very important topic,” he said. “We define our success and what we do by ‘Do students stay with us?’ and ‘Do they graduate?’ Every department, every division, every office is just a backdrop to helping students succeed, stay and graduate.”
Currently, 42 percent of students who enter the university stay and graduate within four to six years, and 29 percent of students who enter each year do not return the next year. Hanbury hopes to increase the graduation rate to 60 percent by 2020, while retaining 80 percent of freshman students for the start of their sophomore year.
As Williams spoke, a projector displayed the faces and names of undergraduate students who have left NSU since enrolling this fall, putting a face to the statistics.
“Sometimes, when you get caught up in retention, it’s easy to just think about numbers and statistics,” Williams said. “But these are all young men and women that came to NSU with hopes and dreams and ambitions.”
Williams then introduced Hanbury who emphasized the vital role that undergraduate programs play in the reputation of a university, including NSU, even though it’s composed of 80 percent graduate students.
“The quality of a university, no matter how great the graduate and professional programs are, no matter how many hospitals you have — and I hope we get one, no matter how many research grants you get, the university is ranked by its undergraduate programs,” Hanbury said. “So, we’re letting this university be judged by 20 percent of its students. Don’t you think you’d want that to be the excellence that we strive for in our graduate and professional programs?”
Vision 2020, Hanbury’s vision for the university by the year 2020, was also a major theme of the meeting and the president recited it word for word:
“By 2020, through excellence and innovations in teaching, research, service, and learning, Nova Southeastern University will be recognized by accrediting agencies, the academic community, and the general public as a premier, private, not-for-profit university of quality and distinction that engages all students and produces alumni who serve with integrity in their lives, fields of study, and resulting careers.”
But, Hanbury said, it’s vital to not just know the vision; administrators must lead purposeful steps to make it a reality, with the launch being one of those steps.
“That vision is not just words,” he said. “We need to, as I tell students, not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.”
Part of that walk will be in uniting NSU’s various division into a collaborative team, or as Hanbury calls it: “one NSU.”
“NSU’s never been one NSU and that’s what I’ve been promoting since July 2011, when the trustees asked me to succeed Ray Ferrero as president,” Hanbury said. “I don’t want 18 separate college and schools, 18 separate units. I want one NSU where we all work together as a team to see this university succeed, not just each individual college and school.”
Hanbury also discussed U.S. News & World Report, a news magazine that publishes annual rankings of top American colleges, universities and their programs. NSU’s ranking is not published, meaning that it is not among the top 200 national universities.
Though Hanbury criticized the publication’s methodology for not fully capturing the quality of each institution, he acknowledged that parents and students read the rankings, using them to aid in their decisions to attend, or not attend, a university. So, increasing the university’s rank can help reach the goal of national recognition, which is part of the 2020 vision.
Hanbury presented research complied by Donald Rudawsky, interim vice president of the Office of Institutional Effectiveness, that shows that NSU is actually doing as well as or exceeding the universities ranked in the top 100 in several areas that the report uses to determine its rankings, including class sizes, student/faculty ratio and financial resources per student. However, in order to increase its rank, NSU needs to improve its undergraduate academic reputation, as judged through other university administrators and high school counselor assessments, along with its graduation and retention rates and the percentage of alumni who donate to the university.
Though NSU’s graduation rate will need to increase significantly to compete with the universities that Hanbury cited as “aspirational”, which retained 89 to 97 percent of new students from fall 2011 to fall 2012 — including the University of Miami, Duke, Tulane, Vanderbilt and Baylor — the president expressed pride in the percentage of retained students who graduate within four years, instead of longer.
“Those students who stay with us and graduate, the great majority graduate within four years — which is a heck of a lot better than the state university system, in which many students don’t graduate until five years or in many cases, closer to six years,” he said.
To meet Hanbury’s vision, the university will consult with the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, a company based in Brevard, N.C. that, through its Foundations of Excellence model, has helped more than 250 two-year and four-year college and universities meet their goals for improving the so-called “first-year college experience,” a term coined by President and Founder John Gardner.
Though Gardner typically has another staff member serve as a university’s primary consultant, he has chosen to consult with NSU himself, as he has special interest in its unique makeup and history. Most universities start out as undergraduate colleges, before slowly beginning to offer graduate programs; NSU did the opposite — starting out with professional and graduate schools before adding an undergraduate division.
Gardner, who participated in the launch via video conference, said, “Your culture is clearly developed in graduate higher education and now, it’s much more recently, that you’re attempting to develop a unique undergraduate culture.”
During the launch meeting, participants broke off into groups to brainstorms ideas for each of the nine “foundational dimensions” that are part of the Foundations of Excellence model: philosophy, organization, learning, faculty, transitions, all students, diversity, roles and purposes, and improvement. Representatives then presented their group’s thoughts on what resources, programs and policies NSU has to support that dimension; what challenges NSU faces in supporting it; and what new initiatives or changes NSU can implement to improve itself. At the launch’s conclusion, participants filled out cards, indicating their interest in serving on committees that will work to develop a plan related to that dimension throughout the year.
Daniel Sullivan, interim associate dean of the College of Undergraduate Studies, explained that a steering committee will then work with each of the dimension committees to prioritize actions and make additional recommendations, with Gardner consulting with everyone involved — to aide in the process, without forcing any decisions.
Sullivan said, “The large steering committee is going to be the provost, vice presidents, deans, athletic director, the director of housing, myself — about 30 of the top administrators, faculty and some students … to say ‘here are some things that we think we can do next year. Not sometime in the future, but next year, to start making a difference.’”
Sullivan explained what the steering committee will then pass their thoughts on.
“We hope to have a final recommendation by the end of May, which we’ll give to the provost, to the executive team, then to the president, and they’ll help to set priorities of what we need to do,” he said. “Some things may require additional funding, so we may need to look at how we’re allocating resources in order to accomplish these goals.”
In addition, students who entered NSU for the first time this fall will be invited to review their experiences at the university, via a nine-page survey to be distributed on Nov. 11. Survey participants will be eligible to win prize money, totaling $2,500, though the amount per winner is yet to be determined.
To learn more about the 2020 Vision and view the research presented via PowerPoint at the launch, visit nova.edu/president.
