Kuh on Student Success Literature

Kuh’s one of the “big dogs” in the student success field. Here’s a summary of some of his key conclusions.

First, almost all of the key student success information is available for free, so why would you pay a consultant to help you with admissions and retention as many institutions are doing?

Second, there are some pretty specific “high impact educational practices” that all institutions should be working on.

"High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter," published this year by the American Association of Colleges and Universities — include learning communities, writing-intensive courses, study abroad, student-faculty research, and culminating experiences like capstone courses, comprehensive exams, and theses. Equally important, participating in some of those activities seems to have compensatory effects, in that they also improve the performance of students of color and first-generation students.

See also this report - http://nces.ed.gov/IPEDS/research/papers.asp.

Third, if institutions really want to demonstrate support for student success, they should talk less and do more on the topic.

To encourage movement in that direction, such reporting templates as the Voluntary System of Accountability, designed for public universities, and the U-CAN college Web site, for private colleges, could feature a high-impact-practices index: the ratio of the number of students who annually participate in activities with a positive influence on student success to the total number of undergraduates at an institution.

This sounds somewhat like what JBU is doing with its student data warehouse, but we've got a long ways to go before we get to what Kuh would like to see institutions like ours really do.