Priorities that were identified in 2016 and current updates to these efforts.
1. Improving First-Year Experiences:
In 2015-16, we established “The Klamath Connection,” a year-long, place-based community model program of science and general education courses and activities focused thematically on the Klamath River. The program includes a four-day summer immersion experience, cohort block scheduling for the fall and spring semesters, major-specific, first-year seminar courses with field trips, and co-housing experiences. The Klamath Connection targets students in a number of STEM majors, including Biology, Botany, Zoology, and Wildlife. For academic year 2016-17, the program has expanded, with 118 students enrolled in a selection of 14 courses, with three additional STEM degree programs.
First-year results for the program indicate success in engaging and retaining students. To broaden this success to non-STEM majors and to reach many more students, faculty in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences are developing a similar but broader program called “Global Humboldt” that targets undeclared students. “Global Humboldt” will provide guaranteed first-year enrollment in General Education courses across the University, and, like the Klamath Connection, it will focus on aspects of our local environment and communities and our place in a globalized world.
In 2023 the university established the PBLC office to centralize the first year experience with staff and coordinate faculty participation and course coordination. This includes coordination with immersion and welcome week activities, block scheduling and major and themed based learning communities grounded in place.
Other first-year programs include our student-peer-mentor “Retention through Academic Mentoring Program” (RAMP), which was piloted in 2013 and is now expanding to include nearly all of the incoming freshman class. RAMP has demonstrated increases in term-to-term GPA for participants, and student mentors report a higher level of academic confidence and connection to campus. HSU also offers an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) Fall Bridge program. The one-year retention rate among EOP Fall Bridge participants, representing Pell-eligible, First-Generation college students from traditionally underrepresented groups, has been slightly higher than the retention rate of all HSU first-time-freshman (76% vs 74%, respectively). The two-year retention rate among EOP fall bridge participants (57.4%) is approaching that of all Humboldt students (59.9%). If these numbers continue to improve, we plan to expand both RAMP and our EOP Fall Bridge programs.
In 2022 RAMP became an official department and the director position was elevated to a SSP-IV. They are organized with Academic Advising, CCBL and the PBLC office to provide a united and coordinated support system for first year and continuing students.
2. Intentional Academic Advising and Pre-Major Pathways:
During their time at HSU, approximately 75% of HSU’s students will change their major at least once, making career and academic advising a crucial element in reducing unnecessary classes taken and improving retention and graduation rates. HSU is currently transitioning to a new advising model that will provide all first- and second-year students a professional advisor with specialized experience in their department. This relationship-based model helps students (1) understand the purpose and requirements of their degree program (including guidance on course selection with the goal of reducing enrollment in unnecessary units), (2) learn academic success strategies that contribute to persistence, and (3) develop plans to achieve academic, personal, and professional goals that match students’ values, skills, and interests. Even with intensive academic advising, however, some students will continue to change majors.
To address this, we plan to develop general but flexible course pathways along clusters of disciplines (such as pre-Science or pre-Arts/Humanities) so that students will be able to more easily change majors without increasing time to degree. We are utilizing HSU’s new Graduation Progress System (GPS) to find common course enrollment patterns within and across disciplines for both first-time and transfer undergraduates, and we will use these data to develop this Initiative.
During the 22-23 academic year we continued to robustly invest in academic advising including hiring 9 additional professional advisors and investing in advising faculty fellows.
3. Enrollment Management:
We are developing a new Strategic Enrollment Management Plan (SEMP) with four priorities: (1) reducing time-to-degree by employing new practices like corequisite remediation, (2) increasing and evaluating targeted student support efforts geared toward retention (e.g., intensive advising, parent onboarding), (3) using predictive analytics to identify prematriculation factors related to student success, and (4) recruiting and retaining students for an appropriate mix of programs. Our new SEMP will align with the campus’ Academic Strategic Plan (under development) and our existing University Strategic Plan, and it is supported by an updated Facilities Master Plan and Strategic Budgeting Plan. A key element of our SEMP rests on clearly understanding student flow at the programmatic and university levels. By better understanding how student migration in and out of majors and the university itself impacts time to degree, we can provide interventions to reduce attrition. It will also help us anticipate demand for section offerings, provide proactive advisement based on student migration patterns, and develop strategies and processes to improve student retention at the institution. We have created a series of Sankey Flow Diagrams to visualize this information - these are directional flow charts where the width of the streams is proportional to the quantity of student flow (e.g., enrollment, attrition, changing majors), and where the student flow can be traced through a series of events or academic years.
In Jan 2023 the Strategic Enrollment plan was updated to address plans to recover enrollment and plan to include the Polytechnical mission. This plan includes both retention and recruitment.
4. Success in Low-Completion-Rate Courses:
Humboldt research demonstrates that students who do not complete their degree in four years often fail or repeat certain gateway/bottleneck courses and may repeat the course multiple times. HSU will commit the resources to help our students graduate by further examining why students are failing certain bottleneck courses and by enhancing mechanisms to improve these rates. We also will ensure high-repeat/low success courses are available for those needing them in the short-term. In addition, we are piloting two types of support for students who have not yet demonstrated their readiness for college-level mathematics: (1) “ALEKS-PPL,” an artificial-intelligence-based learning and assessment tool that provides students an opportunity to optimize their math placement prior to attending HSU, and (2) a co-requisite remediation model that supports student learning while enrolled in an entry level college math class.
5. Digital Learning:
The College of eLearning and Extended Education (CEEE) is focused on alleviating “bottleneck” course issues through increasing course accessibility and achieving greater scheduling flexibility. Since fall 2013, our online course offerings have increased 300% (35 to 145) and the total online enrollment has increased 72% (3,239 to 5,579) as well. Humboldt will continue to expand online course offerings to meet student demand and enhance course accessibility by developing online counterparts for high failure rate courses.
Humboldt is the first campus within the CSU system to provide an online General Education package, allowing students to fulfill the first two years of course requirements completely online, but our success rates in online courses in two of our three colleges need to be improved. Our goal is to eliminate the current success rate gap between online and face-to-face courses by 2020 in all three of our colleges by increasing the types of learning experiences within each course, creating more successful discussions and enhancing instructor feedback to students, increasing social interaction among the students enrolled in online instruction, and including “wrap-up” activities for every online course offered.
6. Enhanced Data Capabilities:
This fall, we have created a new Office of Institutional Effectiveness, which expands the scope and function of our Institutional Research Office. We have a more robust and integrated data repository to track trends and patterns, and we are currently implementing a 7-step continuous improvement and assessment process campuswide. Student success is now tracked not only by sub-groups (e.g., Pell-eligible students) but also through program pipelines (e.g., MAPS and migration patterns) and through sequences using “Reverse GPS” (Graduation Progress System). This work significantly strengthens both our Strategic Enrollment Management planning and Academic Program planning, allowing us to more effectively manage resources to fulfill our student success mission.