Note: This interview in the Innovation Spotlight Series originally aired on October 9, 2023 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Tim Renick:
The problem of DFW rates is chronic and universal, and we've worked with institutions that are quite elite, have retention rates above 90%. We've worked with community colleges that have retention rates in the 50% range, but DFW rates are a common issue. Part of your question brings us back to the issue that Ian was raising a second ago, which is why is now the right time to run some RCTs and collect better data? Because part of what we need to do in this space is convince people that they need to change. If you believe that DFW rates are beyond your control, students are now coming to us with learning loss because of the pandemic, and that's the only and sole reason why our DFW rates are going, then you have no grounds to think that you can change it, so there's no reason to adapt the accelerator program or try layering chatbots into these courses or anything else.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to Innovating Together, a podcast produced by the University Innovation Alliance. This is a podcast for busy people in higher education who are looking for the best ideas, inspiration, and leaders that will help you improve student success. I'm your host, Bridget Burns. Each week I partner with a journalist to have a conversation with a sitting college president, chancellor, system leader, or someone in the broader ecosystem who's really an inspiring leader, and the goal is to have a conversation to distill their perspective and their insights gathered from their leadership journey. Our hope is that this is inspiring and gives you something to look forward to each week. Welcome to today's episode of Innovation Spotlight from the University Innovation Alliance. I'm your host, Bridget Burns.
Ian Wilhelm:
I'm your co-host, Ian Wilhelm with the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Bridget Burns:
Innovation Spotlight is a show designed to elevate cutting-edge ideas, interventions, and innovators who are helping to shape the future of higher education. Each episode we share insights from working with institutions across the country from the UIA as well as interviewing an innovator who we think is doing work or leading work that will help you and your day-to-day life on campus as you think about the new cutting-edge ideas that will help you better serve students. So that's why we call it Innovation Spotlight, and that is definitely what's going to happen today.
Ian Wilhelm:
Yes, indeed. Later we're going to hear from the founder of the National Institute on Student Success, Dr. Tim Renick, someone we at the Chronicle, and you as well, Bridget, talk to quite a bit in terms of these issues around student success. I'm excited to talk to Tim about what he's doing.
But I am going to take a little bit of a moment here, Bridget, to also talk to you sort of in real time. You're seeing when it comes to innovation broadly in the field out there, because as you know, it continues to evolve, colleges continue to face big challenges. So I'm kind of curious, what do you think is on top of mind right now when it comes to the issue of innovating for student success or for other areas?
Bridget Burns:
The topics that I'm hearing the most urgency when I go to campuses, I'm hearing a lot of, obviously the chatter about enrollment numbers depending on the institution, but also DFW rates that they, depending on the institution and at which time of year, why are they increasing the unpredictability of them to some degree? And the lack of a real solution that feels like we're learning from the past. So that's part of why it's so topical to bring Dr. Renick on. But in terms of when it comes to interventions and what's actually getting in the way of innovation in the field and topics that I would tee up for you, it would be two things. And they are also connected to who we picked as a guest.
The first is the positionality of the person who is tapped to lead implementing an innovation on a campus. Too often, the person who is being asked to lead whatever the new technology or the new solution is, rarely does that person, if it's a -- Most interventions don't just stay in one lane, but rarely does that person actually have the authority over all the lanes necessary to drive that change. And that is a real problem because they're wasting a lot of time negotiating with their peers. Right?
What I found to be such a powerful example of how to solve this is what you're going to learn happened at Georgia State and has now scaled to the University of Central Florida, which is the idea of a senior vice president or executive vice president for student success who has a portfolio that is expansive enough that whatever change they're trying to lead, the people who need to do that work for them. And so they don't have to spend all that time trying to negotiate with people and try and convince their colleagues to move in a direction, they can actually lead the change. So that's one.
And then two, that I also think is a great example of why to bring on Dr. Renick that is getting in the way everywhere I go, how people talk about innovations. Right? So I'll go to a campus, they want to tell me about their cool idea, that's fine. I don't really work on a campus, so I always just kind of have outsider ears. When I watch them talk to another campus who they want to try and replicate their ideas, the format in which they tell that information, the architecture of how they describe what they're doing gets in the way. And here's what the architecture is, whatever the solution is, we did X, we served X number of students, and here's more nuts and bolts, more inside language. Do you want to do it? Right? That is not an invitation for me to care about your solution or to think that I have anything in common with you. The way that you have to pitch or talk about an innovation or a solution is start with the problem, be very crisp about it, be accessible about it, and actually admit that you had it.
So some campuses want to talk about a problem, but they're like, don't want to say they had it, "Some campuses might have X problem." No, you need to say, "We were failing our students. We, my campus." Number two is you need to say the following words, "We didn't know how to solve it." Right? That means that you, as the listener, you have something in common with me. I also didn't know how to solve it. You had that problem? Cool. And then walk through the things you tried along the way that didn't work. Because otherwise, what happens is people hear what you have to say and they immediately are like, "Well, that's nice. I'm going to go start my landscape analysis on my own to figure out what kinds of things are out there." So just own, "Here are the steps we took, here are things we tried." And then third or fourth is, "Here's what we did, and here's what we're learning from it, and here are the results that we're seeing that are promising for us." And then just stop there. Don't try and say, "Hey, you should take our idea."
But that architecture is super important, and I think the ownership of the problem first, there's no better example than the way that Dr. Tim Renick talks about the challenges that originally led to the transformation at Georgia State. No bragging, no claims about, "Hey, we're the most this or that." It's, "We were failing and we're not okay with it and we didn't know what to do." And then walks you through that architecture of how you talk about an innovation totally changes whether or not someone is going to actually listen and whether they're going to want to actually pursue your idea or use it.
So, those are the things that are getting in the way right now is the way people talk about innovation and the fact that the people who are tasked to lead are not empowered with the authority they need in order to be successful. So, both of these are an example of something that, a counter example is our guest. So, we're really excited for that.
Ian Wilhelm:
Yeah. Great points, Bridget. Yeah, I was taking some notes here, but on your point about the story of innovation, different context, but for journalists like myself, someone like Dr. Renick has been great about sort of explaining that, as you said, communicating that innovation in a way that's both compelling and sort of claims that the challenges in ways I can imagine, as you said, that's a really compelling and important way to do this. So, let's bring him in now without further ado. We're going to bring in here now Tim Renick again and say, thanks, Tim, for being here.
Tim Renick:
Great to be here.
Bridget Burns:
For folks who might recall him being at Georgia State, he is still there, but he is now the executive director and founded the National Institute for Student Success, as you heard, which I think we've shared on a different show about the NISS. But what we're going to talk about today is going to hopefully elevate the different perspective you now have in your day-to-day work and how you're leveraging what you've done before. So, thank you so much for giving us some of your valuable time.
Tim Renick:
Great to be here.
Bridget Burns:
So I wanted to first start by asking, and this is selfishly, in 2020, you and I are having conversations. We live on Zoom now. And you early on, and this is when the federal money was starting to, I don't even know if it was even, it was probably available or about to become, but everyone was trying to, "How are you going to spend this money? How are you going to try and solve these problems in COVID?" And you came up with an idea with working with your colleagues around you called the accelerator model, and I would just love for you to explain to folks the problem you were trying to solve and what your approach was, because I think the accelerator model now is going viral, at least in our campuses, and I just want folks to be able to learn this cutting-edge solution that you and your colleagues identified.
Tim Renick:
Yeah. Bridget, like a lot of the so-called innovative practices we've adopted here at Georgia State, this came about largely by accident and by need. So, we do track data carefully, and I'm always looking at the data to see how we're performing on a, really a week-to-week basis. And what we saw at the onset of the pandemic was troubling.
That first summer, the end of the spring term, first summer during COVID, our students did just fine. In fact, our GPAs went up compared to previous terms, and there's interesting speculation about why that would've been the case, but students did just fine those first couple semesters. But the fall of 2020, when we brought in our first COVID first-year class, we began to see problems. And one of the ways they manifested was in the, so-called DFW rates, the percent of students who were taking courses and not getting passing grades, but getting grades of D, F or withdrawing with no credit for the course at all.
We didn't see small increases. And we were used to fluctuations of a few percentage points one way or another. But across both our bachelor students at the Atlanta Campus of Georgia State, and then the community college we oversee, Perimeter College where we have five campuses with associate-degree students, we began seeing 20 and 30 percent increases in distressed behavior. First students dropping courses in unprecedented numbers, and then those who didn't drop their fall courses and got fall grades performing at much lower levels. Even that as the first year of COVID played itself out, we didn't see the problems in our upper-class people, in our juniors and seniors and so forth. This was largely our first-year students. And by the end of that first year, we were facing a first-year class where their credit hour accumulation, their average GPAs, and their ability to progress to what they needed to take in the sophomore year was severely hindered.
And so, what we did the summer of ‘21 was very quickly pivot to a new program. Yes, we were beginning to get some federal funding to come in, and what we quickly did was create what we now labeled the accelerator program. This was a program where we invited back first year students who had failed critical first-year classes. So, if these were elective courses, my own academic discipline as religious studies, if they didn't do well in a comparative religions course, probably not a big problem for their progression. But if they didn't do well in basic math, basic English, these are issues that were going to hold them up in their progression and their ability to proceed. So, we took those courses, we re-offered them in the summer, but with a whole wraparound set of supports.
We handpick the instructors to teach these classes, looking at instructors who are particularly effective in teaching introductory level courses. We connected each section with supplemental instruction, so a near-peer tutor was embedded in every one of the sections we offered. We had proactive advising where we were tracking the students on a very intense level, looking at engagements through online technology platforms, looking at course attendance when we could get it, tracking quizzes and reaching out to students proactively. We had coaching going on, we had advisors proactively involved. What we basically did for these sections is everything we'd love to do for every section at Georgia State, but quite frankly, don't have the resources and don't have the staffing to allow us to do that. And the idea was let's try to get these students through before their sophomore year begins these critical courses so that they succeed.
And the first year we did it -- we've now done it three times, three summers -- it wasn't fully realized, but we saw very promising results. Over 60% of the students, and mind you, all of them had basically failed the course in their first attempt, over 60% got through. This past summer, we got that closer to 80% of the students getting through in their second attempt. But more than that, we saw a really sobering data. 15% of the students who had failed the course the first time got A's in the course the second time that they attempted the course. So, what we've tried to do is find some new interventions that can help deal with these really crippling DFW rates that not only hold up students from progressing academically, but down the road also interfere with their eligibility for financial aid. And we could talk about that as well.
Bridget Burns:
Today's episode is sponsored by the University Innovation Lab, which is a digital ecosystem designed to help higher ed professionals just like you and I accelerate innovation with a wide array of tools, trainings, resources, and community all in one location. If you also want to drive change and advance student success on your campus, but feel like there aren't enough hours in the day, and frankly, you don't always know where to start, the University Innovation Lab can help. It was created with tools and templates and professional development uniquely generated by the UIA. The Lab helps student success administrators and innovators advance student-centered change and improvement more effectively with more clarity, collaboration, and impact. To join our wait list, go to theuia.org and click the resources page.
Ian Wilhelm:
Tim, that's fascinating. And I think what's also interesting here is not just that you all have done it, but you've also worked with other campuses, it sounds, like to move ahead with this. I want you to talk a little bit about that, but also what are the first steps you recommend for those campuses out there? Because they all might say, "Hey, how do I get started on this because it does sound like you've got the data to show that it's successful?" But where do they start? So first just kind of where are you also working with this and how do you get folks started on it?
Tim Renick:
Yeah. Well, the first thing to say is one, this problem's not going away. There are considerable impacts from COVID that continue, and even though a lot of our day-to-day operations on a campus like Georgia State looked more like they did prior to COVID than they did a couple years ago, our students have not recovered, right? There's significant learning loss, there's significant mental health challenges and stresses on the students. And the DFW rates, not just at Georgia State, but nationally, continue to be much higher than they were prior to the pandemic.
Secondly, it's another area where there's a bifurcation of impacts based upon socioeconomics. So, what we're seeing at Georgia State and seeing at the partner campuses we're working with is not that DFW rates have gone up across the board. If you are a well-resourced high-school student who comes from a academically rigorous high school with high graduation rates and so forth, you probably weathered the COVID pandemic pretty well. It impacted everybody, but you had the academic resources to succeed. We know from our local partners in the Atlanta area, some high schools in the Atlanta area during the pandemic when they were entirely online, were shooting for attendance of 50% on any given day. So, half the students weren't there to learn.
So what we've tried to do is find ways in which we can respond to what is really a national phenomenon, just not a phenomena at Georgia State. And what we advise campuses to start with is track your data. The first thing you need to do is understand who are the students that are struggling and where are they struggling. May not be the same on your campus. We've seen particular increases in DFW rates, in math courses, in STEM areas and so forth, but also in basic skills courses like English composition. And we have to know who these students are.
You have to know who these students are, because these are the students you need to encourage to do something different than they've been doing in the past. And I will say it's a heavy lift to get students, especially if they're kind of worn out by the pandemic, to come back and take the same course over again during the summer. And so, part of what we work with campuses to do is understand how you message that to students and how you create the incentives so that they can come back and get back on track again.
Bridget Burns:
That is super helpful. And for folks, the idea of the first steps, figuring out what your high DFW courses are. So first off, for those at home, 11 campuses in the Alliance are currently trying to replicate this approach across their campuses. And they chose different courses because they tried to vet and identify which courses drive DFW rates on their campus are the highest, and they're trying to implement this in real time right now. I'm just wondering about the things that you heard from those other campuses and any others that you might be seeing with the NISS who might be interested in this, the first hiccups that people have to wrestle with. I can imagine that depends on the discipline, depends on the faculty, depends on the dean, depends on the level of interest.
Tim Renick:
Yeah. There's always resistance to change. And so, one of the resistances you're likely to face, and we've seen some of this across our University Innovation Alliance campuses, is resistance to even talk publicly about DFW rates, right? It's not a badge of honor that 20 or 30% of your students, in some cases higher. We've seen DFW rate courses as high as 50% at some of the partner schools that Georgia State and the NISS are working with outside of the University Innovation Alliance. It's not a badge of honor, and so there's a reluctance to talk about it. More than that, there's a deep-seated belief that somehow the DFW rates for an individual course are the private domain of the faculty member teaching that course, and somehow, you're kind of interfering in their privileged space if you're publicly talking about the fact that 44% of the students didn't get through the statistics or college algebra course and so forth.
So, part of what we've worked on at Georgia State, but also at partner campuses, is to demystifying these numbers. These are institutional numbers. It may be a faculty member or department who is most directly involved in teaching the course, but if 44% of your students are not getting through college algebra, that's not just a problem for the instructor or even just a problem for the math department. That's a problem for the institution. It means that students will not be progressing in STEM fields, in sciences, in business, in economics and so forth because they haven't gotten through these math foundational courses. So, what we want people to do is think about the ways in which we need to be a lot more open and straightforward about the sharing of data. And then, you're right, we need to also talk about this in a way that doesn't make faculty feel defensive. This is not an indictment of faculty.
The fact that these numbers have gone up at some institutions by 20 or 30 percent since the pandemic is evidence that it's not all about the faculty, that external influences are at work here leading to students struggling, but we've got to take this on as a collective problem. And the way we do it, as you mentioned in the introductions, Bridget, is to be honest that we've got a problem as an institution. We're failing our students right now, and I don't in this instance mean it just in a figurative sense. We're literally failing these students in their classes, and we need to take this as a common responsibility to work out a cooperative solution across the whole institution rather than saying, "This is on the faculty member teaching the class to figure out a problem that is national in scope."
Ian Wilhelm:
Appreciate that, Tim. Again, getting back to communications both with the students, as you mentioned about the messaging, about the coming back to some courses, but also messaging to the faculty and everyone and how you talk about the innovation and the project itself. I just think that's something continues to always be key in these conversations. Something that I think is also really interesting here is you're going to have some randomized control trials for this. You're going to include that I believe next summer. I kind of want to understand why that's the right time to do it and why this might be a more effective approach for multi-campus work like this. So, I'm really curious about that since you don't see enough, I think, of those types of trials in these types of experiments.
Tim Renick:
Yeah, Ian, it's a great question. We've run a lot of randomized control trials at Georgia State. In fact, we're just releasing data from some of our randomized control trials that took a different attack on trying to reduce DFW rates. This is not our summer accelerator program, but we begin to integrate the use of an AI enhanced chatbot as a tool in specific academic courses with high DFW rates. We just did microeconomics this past spring. We saw, and this is incredible, not just better grades overall in microeconomics with students who had this tool that was available to them 24/7 that nudged them and supported them to get through the course requirements, but also was able to answer basic questions, which we programmed into the knowledge base. We not only saw better grades overall, if you were a Pell student in this class, your likelihood to drop or withdraw from the course went down by 50%, 50% lower drop and withdrawal rates for our low-income students. More evidence that these are not faculty issues as such. This is not the faculty member teaching microeconomics that is the problem. There are a lot of things that can drive success or failure, and some of them don't have to do with what a faculty member actually says and presents.
Now, in the case of the use of the chatbot, we've had the luxury of being able to roll it out over really five or six years. We first launched a chatbot at Georgia State in 2016, so we've been able to kind of carefully design randomized control trials. The challenge with the accelerator program, which emerged out of an emergency that was completely unexpected during the pandemic. 12 months before, we had no clue that we would be facing DFW rates that were 20 or 30 percent higher in some first-year classes. We had to scramble with a very different approach. We knew the students were struggling, we knew they were going to drop out, lose satisfactory academic progress in their financial aid if we didn't intervene. So, we did something quickly. But now we've had the opportunity to kind of for a couple years look at this program, and we think it's desirable to collect more rigorous data about its impact and its effects. It's a relatively easy circumstance to set up randomized control trials, because not all sections that we offer of these courses will have all these wraparound supports.
So we can look at like-sections of the same courses, in some cases even taught by the exact same instructors, that don't have the accelerator wraparound supports and compare it to those that do. But whenever you run a randomized control trial, there's a lot of fidelity that needs to be enacted. And we think, at this point, having run the program a few times and now having this partnership with the 11 or plus institutions that are participating through the University Innovation Alliance, we're at the right point to begin to collect some truly rigorous data.
Bridget Burns:
The UIA has previously scaled a really complex solution from Georgia State where we rushed to doing RCT right away. And one of the things we learned was you got to have a first implementation period where people are figuring out the bumps and the hurdles and how to adapt a concept from a different ecosystem, a different governance structure, a different leadership model, different entire entity into their environment. Because if you just start tracking right then, you're not really judging the intervention, you're not assessing the intervention. You're assessing how messy implementation is. And so, we're giving ourselves kind of a buffer year to implement across these different campuses.
And for those at home, the reason why this is valuable is every one of our campuses are different. They have different centralized, decentralized, different governance, different leadership, all that kind of stuff. And so ideally, the goal is to figure out how this intervention where you need to modify it to make it work in any ecosystem or do you need to at all? Because, I mean, I think the basics, the bone structure of this innovation is just so rock solid, the idea of, "Hey, retake the class, but this time we're going to wrap around supplemental instruction to your peer coaching," it's simple, but genius and those numbers, I just haven't seen something where someone is truly testing and pushing on a topic that affects all of higher ed. The way that we have treated DFW rates up until now is our only strategy is hope. We hope that you will get better next time, we hope that you will figure it out, and that is not an approach that is really going to serve these students. So, I love that they're doing this. So, thanks for letting me give that TED talk about why I'm such a fan.
So I just want to ask, I don't know honestly where this question goes, but I just was curious that you're consulting campuses around the country, and you're providing them this expert support, and I'm sure that talking about the accelerator might come up because you're running into campuses that need a variety of things. And I'm wondering if any have been disinterested in this or have kind of written it off like, "This isn't a problem for them," or, I'm just wondering, is there anything like that that I should just know exists when talking about this?
Tim Renick:
Yeah. I think that's a great topic, Bridget. The NISS, the National Institute for Student Success that I direct, is working with about 50 campuses now. We work with them for a minimum of five months and up to three years, helping them implement evidence-based solutions to student success problems and reduce their equity gaps, raise their graduation rates. And the problem of DFW rates is chronic and universal. And we've worked with institutions that are quite elite, have retention rates above 90%. We've worked with community colleges that have retention rates in the 50% range. But DFW rates are a common issue. I think that part of your question brings us back to the issue that Ian was raising a second ago, which is why is now the right time to run some RCTs and collect better data?
Because part of what we need to do in this space is convince people that they need to change, right? That if you believe that DFW rates are beyond your control, students are now coming to us with learning loss because of the pandemic, and that's the only and sole reason why our DFW rates are going, then you have no grounds to think that you can change it. So, there's no reason to adapt the accelerator program or try layering chatbots into these courses or anything else.
What we need to do is make the case and make the case at a high level at the institution, I mean president, chancellor level, and say, "This is something that needs to be dealt with." So the better data we have, it's one of the reasons Georgia State for the past decade has collected so much data and run so many RCTs and so forth, is to be able to convince stakeholders. It's a tough audience we deal with on a day-to-day basis in higher education, and Bridget knows this better than probably anybody nationally. That you're trying to convince really smart people with a lot of degrees who with some reason think that they know what they're doing to do things in a different way.
And what we've found to be the most effective way, and this started at the micro level when I would go into faculty meetings and try to convince my fellow faculty at Georgia State to do things in different ways, and now we're seeing at the macro level across the University Innovation Alliance, or of course across the NISS partner institutions is going in with data, and evidence is a really effective way of convincing degreed people with a lot of education who've been taught that they need to base their decisions upon evidence to maybe think of things in a different way. And these kind of data, if we can show for instance, that those seemingly intractable DFW rates can actually move with these wraparound services in a positive way, then we can open some doors and help more students.
Bridget Burns:
I just had a conversation with someone about this the other day, but each campus has a culture around what they think is the cause of DFW, yes. But also, we're talking about AI and algorithm bias and all this. Higher ed has a bias to some degree because many of our faculty, not all, I mean, I feel like a lot of faculty might have struggled with college in the way that I did, and the reason why they are in higher ed is because they actually want to make it better for others. But there might be a bias of if faculty are teaching a course and they see students get a D, F or W, is it possible that that faculty member actually never had a D, F or withdrawal, that they were actually, that college was pretty easy for them? And that might be the bias is that we think it's something wrong with the student. Unchecked, that can create a culture where that is the story believed on that campus, that these are bad students or there's something wrong with them, and therefore it just shuts down creativity in terms of coming up with innovative solutions.
Where again, the thing I think is really powerful about Georgia State is there's an underlying cultural story, which is, what if we're the problem? And that is immensely powerful, because it basically gives people the freedom to pursue solutions and to not feel like they have to hide the ball or sweep things under their carpet. So just in general at home, think about what is your campus culture around DFW rates? What is the norm? What do you guys say about people who get DFW rates and is there a belief that this might be something that is not, the institution does not play a part?
Tim Renick:
I think that's on point. I'll add, I think the bias you're talking about from faculty is not just that many of them, yeah, never saw a D or an F in their academic careers because these are by definition people who were able to succeed in college and go on to graduate school and so forth to get a credentialed. But I think there's also another bias here, which is if it's not the student's fault, if it's not the pandemic's fault, if it's not intractable, then maybe I'm to blame, right? Maybe I'm not as good. It's easier to say if a student doesn't succeed, "Well, they didn't succeed because they didn't engage sufficiently."
Really interesting example from the microeconomics trials we were running this past spring, a wonderful faculty member who's responsible for teaching these classes and running the whole program of micro and macroeconomics introductory courses at Georgia State. But we looked at some of our early data, and it was about a third of the students who were disengaged in the first couple weeks to the point where she was telling us in past semesters they would get a failing grade based on the fact that they weren't participating in the first couple weeks. And her initial response was, "Yeah, what can I do? I put the assignments out there, I tell them to engage. They don't engage. Got to fail them. Right? What opportunity is there?" And what we've been able to see through these wraparound services, her approach to the course as an instructor may be similar, but by having an embedded near-peer supplemental instructor, coaches available, the chatbot now in the microeconomics course nudging the students and so forth, go figure, the participation rates in those first couple of weeks went up for students who in the past had been disengaged early on, and all of a sudden a lot more students started succeeding in the class.
So we need to, again, find ways of demystifying some of this so that it doesn't become personalized. What we do see at Georgia State is we are not only part of the problem, we still are the problem because our students haven't changed. Right? Our students over the last decade, their SAT scores on average are going down. We have twice as many Pell students as we used to have, but we're graduating 3,500 more students every year than we were ten years ago. If you need evidence that we're the problem, that's it right there. The students didn't change, we had to change, and they're succeeding at higher levels.
Bridget Burns:
Ian, do you have any final questions about the accelerator? We have a couple hot seats that we could ask.
Ian Wilhelm:
Well, I just want to pick up on Tim's point. Yeah. One more question in the sense of, you're talking about faculty changing, making sure they're tweaking. What did you have to tweak? And when it came to the accelerator from 2020 to 2023, what did you have to change? What did you learn along the way? I know you could probably tell us a lot. Just briefly, what's something that you learned along the way as part of that challenge?
Tim Renick:
Yeah. Obviously, lots of lessons learned, and as I say, we got this summer, the success rates in some of the accelerator courses above 80%, which is the best we've achieved. So, we are constantly looking at the data. One really critical thing was to take control as much as we could over who would teach these sections. Early on in the process, because it was on the fly, the program was launched on the fly, we in some cases had department chairs assigning adjunct faculty and temporary faculty to these sections. It didn't teach us the lesson that these all have to be tenured full professors, far from it, but we need to do a better job of looking at who's successful with teaching the kind of students who are going to be in these core sections, and who wants to be there. That's going to be critical. And how do we train the staff, the tutors, and so forth?
When we offered these courses for the first time, summer of 2021, to my knowledge, it was the first time that Georgia State ever offered course sections where every student in the course had previously failed the course. Previously, we had students who failed and they'd have to retake, but they'd be mixed in with other students who were taking the course for the first time.
So, what does that mean differently about the way we equip our supplemental instructors and our near-peers and so forth to coach and so forth? So, I think all of these, whatever the innovation is in this segment, we're talking about the accelerator, but whatever the innovation is, it's going to have to go through a constant process of iteration, and that means assessment is not a one-time thing. You are constantly running data. You're constantly looking at it to see what's working, what's changing and what not.
Bridget Burns:
One thing that I will share that we've only been implementing for a little bit of time, but one thing I'm noticing that I think we're going to want to address is I picked up an anecdotal observation that a faculty member on a campus, it made me realize that we hadn't been smart about rolling out the accelerator in a way that people should be excited to be a part of this.
If you're being tapped to do this, it's not because there's something wrong with you or that there's going to be, I heard the word surveillance around data for a faculty member. It just means that we're doing a bad job, and this is something that goes beyond this work that I think generally there is a disposition where faculty can feel like innovation is something that's happening to them instead of something they are invited to be a part of, and that it feels good. It feels like there's a way to do this where it makes the faculty member feel like they're being experimented on, they're being surveilled, or this is a punishment, when in fact, what I think is happening, this is the most groundbreaking work happening in higher ed. I think five to seven years out, this is going to be considered a norm. This is the new high-impact practice.
I think that to be on those front lines is a signal for me of confidence that we think that you can actually do this, right? If you don't enroll a faculty member to be excited about being part, give them a chance, and you just tell them they're being assigned to something, that can have a real blowback. Because we've done that before where I don't think we enrolled people enough in the broader kind of excitement and the bigger picture vision of the innovation work.
So that's one thing I think anecdotally. So, I just want to quickly go to a quick hot seat before we wrap. I know we're a little long, but I can tell this is going to be an episode people are going to be loving. What's the biggest challenge you're seeing right now? You're working with campuses around the country. Any campus who gets to work with the NISS is lucky, and people are lining up, and they pay, and it's a very high-value experience. I'm just wondering what are the biggest challenges you're seeing right now for campuses who want to implement change work from the perspective you're now in of helping all of them?
Tim Renick:
Yeah. Having worked with about 50 schools over the last two years, it has changed my view. That most often what we hear campuses say they need is new technology and more staffing. They're understaffed and they're not at the cutting edge of technology. My assessment of what mostly they need is to overcome their silos, and if they overcame the silos, the staffing levels would be more effective because they would be more efficiently deployed and the technologies they already have, which may not seem to be cutting edge, but would be more than adequate. But the problem is getting the buy-in across the silos. The bigger, the more powerful the campus is, oftentimes the deeper the silos. In fact, we've had more success in many instances, moving the needle quickly on improving graduation rates at our community college partners than some of the institutions that are best resourced, which I think, again, is an indication that it's the silos rather than the number of staff members or the cutting-edge technology that really is the issue.
Bridget Burns:
Well, I know this isn't planned for, but do you have anything that you've seen that helps with that, or is it a type of leader who just has the intestinal fortitude to push through? If that's the thing, I'm just curious if you're seeing anything initially about, I mean, obviously not having silos would be nice.
Tim Renick:
Yeah, there are tools in place. You talked about one of them early on in this broadcast, which was to talk about the way you organize yourselves, right? If advising is in seven different colleges and there's no coordination and there's no common training and there's no common platform, the problem is not that you don't have this technology or that technology or you need to hire a few more advisors. The fact is, the problem is that it's all entirely under or uncoordinated.
We try to, through our analysis, and we spend five months with a campus just looking at their data and interviewing their staff, we try to highlight that. And we've had success. I remember distinctly in the presentation of findings I delivered to a president of an HBCU, he confessed about three quarters through the presentation that he'd been pulled in two directions for the better part of five years with some who think that the campus needed to move to professional advisors and some who said, "No, we have to have the faculty do all the academic advising." And he was convinced during the outlining of the data that we were sharing with him that, "No, that, I guess the problem really is that we don't have the right coordination and training and so forth across our advising staff."
So bringing that information to bear can be a really, really helpful tool in the process. But sometimes it is a matter of leadership and having the kind of the guts to do some things that might make some people unhappy.
Bridget Burns:
That one can do that. I don't want to miss this chance to ask this. It's a quick answer, but I doubt it is, for readiness for working with the NISS. I know a lot of people say they want to, presidents text you and tell you they want to join it, so great, very cool, but then don't actually deliver. I'm just wondering, is there something that you notice that indicates that a campus is truly ready to work with you?
Tim Renick:
I'll say that we developed the diagnostic process in order to answer that question with greater clarity. Because prior to the pandemic, we had literally 500 different campuses in the years leading up to the pandemic that came and sent teams to Georgia State, said, "Oh, we want to spend a day with you. We want to spend a couple days. Teach us what you have to teach us." And a lot of times, nothing came of that.
So, when we got funding for launching the NISS, one of the conditions from some of our funders, which I supported, was, "Let's do a better vetting process to determine who's going to make use of these resources effectively." So now we have a detailed diagnostic, and it's helpful both for us to get a baseline of where their data is, what's working and what's not working on the campus. We're looking specifically at systematic issues, admissions, financial aid, advising, student communication platforms and so forth, and what's working, what's not. It's really helpful to get a baseline set of data, but it's also helpful in seeing how much effort it takes to get that baseline set of data. Because if a campus is cooperative and really willing to change and be self-analytical and so forth, that process of the diagnostic goes very smoothly. In other cases, it's a very strained and difficult process, and that tells us a lot about how ready a campus is to change.
Bridget Burns:
This is super helpful and perfect for us, and we really appreciate for joining and providing your perspective about innovation today. I know this went a little longer, but I can tell this is going to be an episode that people will listen to over and over. So, thank you for that.
Tim Renick:
My pleasure.
Bridget Burns:
We look forward to sharing insights from a variety of experts in the field and beyond. So, if you want to suggest other experts that we elevate, please do reach out to Ian or myself. And the audio version of this will be available on the Innovating Together Podcast. So, thanks, everybody. We hope this has been useful for you as you think about your practices, and we wish you a wonderful week.
Bios of Guest and Co-Hosts
Guest: Tim Renick, Executive Director, National Institute for Student Success (NISS) at Georgia State University
Dr. Tim Renick, who has led Georgia State University’s student success efforts since 2008, is the founding executive director of Georgia State’s National Institute for Student Success, and Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State. Previously, he served as Georgia State's Senior Vice President for Student Success, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and Director of the Honors Program. Between 2008 and 2020, he directed the university's student success efforts, overseeing one of America's fastest improving graduation rates and the elimination of all equity gaps based on students' race, ethnicity or income level. Dr. Renick has testified before the U.S. Senate on strategies for helping low-income university students succeed and has twice been invited to speak at the White House. His work has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and CNN and cited by former President Barack Obama. He was named one the 16 Most Innovative People in Higher Education by Washington Monthly, and received the Award for National Leadership in Student Success and the McGraw Prize in Higher Education. He has served as principal investigator for more than $30 million in federal and private research grants in student success. A summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College, Dr. Renick holds his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University.
Co-Host: Bridget Burns, CEO, University Innovation Alliance
Dr. Bridget Burns is the founder and CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA). For the past decade, she has advised university presidents, system chancellors, and state and federal policy leaders on strategies to expand access to higher education, address costs, and promote completion for students of all backgrounds. The UIA was developed during Bridget’s tenure as an American Council on Education (A.C.E.) Fellowship at Arizona State University. She held multiple roles within the Oregon University System, including serving as Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor, where she won the national award for innovation in higher education government relations. She was a National Associate for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and has served on several statewide governing boards including ones governing higher education institutions, financial aid policy, and policy areas impacting children and families.
Co-Host: Ian Wilhelm, Assistant Managing Editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Ian Wilhelm is a journalist with more than 20 years of experience, covering higher education, nonprofits, and philanthropy. He currently serves as Assistant Managing Editor for Chronicle Intelligence (CI), a division of The Chronicle of Higher Education. CI produces content to inform colleges and universities about national issues and develop ways to solve pressing problems on campuses. Previously at The Chronicle, he was a senior editor, helping manage a team of reporters focused on enterprise and feature stories for its weekly newspaper and daily website. He also served as the international editor and senior writer for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the newspaper for the nonprofit world. As a freelance writer, Ian's articles have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Religion News Service, USA Today, The Washington Post, Newsday, and other publications. He has worked abroad, living in Germany and reporting stories from Africa, China, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.
About Innovation Spotlight
Innovation Spotlight is an event series that happens live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. We feature short interviews with experts on specific interventions and innovations that serve student success, with a particular emphasis on the critical skills necessary to help an institution eliminate disparity. By elevating these cutting-edge insights, ideas, and innovators in the field, who share what they're learning from the front lines, we aim to help viewers identify the first three steps to take, what they need to know to take action tomorrow, and what experts have learned from implementation that they wished they’d known beforehand. We hope that, by surfacing these perspectives and inspirations, along with some tips and tricks to make the complicated business of innovation a little easier, we can help you in your work.
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