This episode of University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast originally aired on May 5, 2025, appearing live on YouTube, 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.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to the Innovating Together Podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Burns from the University Innovation Alliance. Today, I'm thrilled to bring you another fabulous episode that brings one of my favorite people, Dr. Allison Calhoun-Brown, and she's going to be able to share some insights about the actual, how you do proactive advising and how you can do it – Not just how she's helped support this work over time at Georgia State, but also, helping in partnership with the NISS and their coaching to other institutions to implement it.
First, you should know that this is sponsored by Mainstay who – their mission is directly aligned with the topic of today. They focus on providing scalable personalized communication strategies. And by engaging students proactively, they help institutions address challenges before they escalate. (Hint: hat tip to today.) You should check out more at mainstay.com.
So today, we're going to dive into the transformative journey of Georgia State – but 2025, 2024 – and this is going to come from Allison Calhoun-Brown, Senior Vice President of Student Success. She's going to share the inside story of how GSU moved from just merely just tracking appointments with hash marks on paper to the story of how they became a national model for data-informed and proactive support. Her message is very clear. It doesn't matter how behind you feel in this world, in this space. Transformation is possible, and you're going to hear just nuts and bolts, practical steps, ways to clean up your data, align your advising practice, and engage students in a way that really will help close gaps and drive success.
So, we're really excited to be able to share this, and I think it's a fabulous episode. It comes from the UIA National Summit, and I think one of my favorite quotes from what she shared was, "Good leadership matters. You can do good and do well at the same time." And she also shared that proactive advising and predictive analytics are not the same thing, and don't conflate the two. And I think that's a perfect tee-up for this rich conversation. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Allison Calhoun-Brown.
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
Hi, I am Allison Calhoun-Brown. I'm the Senior Vice President for Student Success at Georgia State University. It is my pleasure to talk to you today about Data to Action: Navigating Challenges to Implement Predictive Analytics and Proactive Advising. Tim did a great job talking about what goes on at Georgia State in terms of predictive analytics.
Let me pause first, because I've got Nyasha Hamilton who is here with me. She is our University Innovation Alliance Fellow, and she does a great job, and she has helped me every step of the way. She is going to pass out a worksheet that we are going to use for our workshop. So, she's going to come along, she's going to pass it out. We're going to go over a little content, but we're also going to have some time to think through some questions. And if you're working with your team, it should be some productive time to strategize about how to implement or expand the use of proactive advising and/or predictive analytics on your campus. So, thank you so much, Nyasha, for passing those materials out. They're coming around to you.
Carol Cohen is also passing them out. Carol is the director, but actually, she's the Associate Vice President for Student Success and Academic Advising at Georgia State, and also a wonderful resource. So, I wanted to pause and thank my team because nothing gets done without a good team.
But anyway, back to Tim. Tim was talking about Georgia State and talking about some of the wonderful transformative changes even that have taken place at Georgia State in the area of academic advising. And whenever we talk about academic advising at Georgia State, sometimes people will look and say, "Wow, they're doing some great things." And we have done some great things, but I always power back to 2012.
And in 2012, at Georgia State – I am not kidding you when I say this – we were keeping track of advising appointments with hash marks on a piece of paper. And so, to go from this is the national model of student success, we started with hash marks on a piece of paper. So, no matter where you are in thinking about what to do with academic advising at your institution, you are not farther behind than we were when we started. When we started, we had no idea the number of students we actually supported. We knew what the population was, but if you actually asked how many people were being seen, we could not tell you with any confidence. And if you don't know how many people are being seen, you can't ask any more sophisticated question like: How effective? How often? How strategic? You can't ask any of those questions if you can't answer how many. We couldn't answer how many.
We had very high ratios, right? Georgia State is an urban research university, about 50,000 students, a little bit more than 35,000 undergraduate students. Many of them are low income. About 60% are low income, 30% are first generation, 80% are underrepresented minorities. In our largest college, we had one advisor for every 1200 students. You don't do anything but put out fires when you have one advisor for 1200 students. We had a very complicated structure where, basically, students stayed with central advising until the 42nd hour. Why 42nd hour? It seemed like a good idea at the time, not a real solid rationale for that. So, we had a very complicated structure through 42 hours, and then they went to the colleges.
And in the colleges, there was no consistency. Every college did its own thing. You want to have faculty advising, that's fine. You want to have some professional advising, that's fine. You want to have peer advising. That could be fine. Just no consistency whatsoever. Very unclear expectations. We never explained to students what they should expect from academic advising, when they should expect it from academic advising, nothing. There was little tracking. Whatever notes we had were usually taken on pieces of paper. They went into those manila envelopes, those envelopes went into a room. And that's what happened. So, if the student transitioned to another college, we need a new envelope, right? It's like the medical records, old medical records. Just, there was nothing. There was no tracking, there was no communication, there was no coordination, nothing. None of those things existed when we got started.
Today, we are easy and happy to boast. We have over 100,000 student visits. This is visits, not emails, not communications, not chats, not text. Visits, right? Either in person or virtual, but where one student meets with one advisor. We have been able to drive down time to degree by 11 semester hours. That translates to $21 million saved for this most recent class compared to the class a little bit more than a decade ago. We simplified the structure, we centralized in our case, but we centralized up through the junior year. And then the senior year, they went to the colleges. Every student is now tracked for progression. Lots and lots of wonderful things happened. We could go into a lot of detail about that.
Just want you to understand tremendous change is possible in a relatively short period of time. We moved to a student-centered advising model with individualized education planning where every student, based on who they are and what they want to do, receives an individual plan that will allow them to accomplish their goals with proactive risk targeting. Right? Before they get into trouble, we try to reach out to them. The most ridiculous thing, we were doing it right? You wait for a student to be almost out of the university, and then they're compelled to come in. It's not going to work. And if we're trying to raise our graduation rates, who comes in for advisement? We have policies at universities that drive students with less than a 2.0 usually. So, students who are struggling academically, they have to come in. And then the really great students, probably most of you in this room, who they're going to come in one more time. That's for you to tell them what you told them about two weeks ago that yes, they're doing the right thing. You don't increase the graduation rate with either of those populations. Great students are going to graduate anyway. Struggling students, takes a lot to get them moving in the right direction. We really have to think about how to alter the behavior.
You've heard people talk about it, the murky middle, those kind of B, C students who are flying under the radar screen. Those are the people. And to develop some strategies, some interventions that actually work so that we can organize advisement in a way that gives students the information they need to make timely decisions that will lead to increased retention, progression, and graduation. So, what did we do? Because first state was a struggle, second state is much better. How did we implement these changes and how were we able to implement them quickly?
I got a playbook. There are four steps in the playbook. We're going to talk about them and probably, we will – what will we do? We will go through this content and then we'll give you some time to work as a group or work with yourself, or you can join up with your neighbor to talk through the challenges on your own campus. And then we'll leave some time at the end where we can discuss and run around the room with the microphone so that we can share my goal, and my great hope is that you feel better about implementing some of these changes on your campus by the time we're done. All right? Fair?
Playbook. There are four steps in our particular playbook. Number one, get the data. And we're going to talk about what does that mean when we're talking about get the data. Number two, establish a standard of care. What is your institution trying to accomplish with academic advisement, and how are we going to do that consistently across all of our student populations, all of our colleges, wherever they're found? Number three, generate buy-in. You've got to get this campus community on board with these changes. Hear from them, integrate their perspectives, but we've got to bring that together into an actionable plan, and it takes buy-in to do that. And then number four, support student engagement. Because we do all this stuff, if we don't get the students to utilize it, it's not a good use of time. All right, so let's first talk about get the data.
All right. Step number one under get the data is make sure your data quality is together enough to support whatever you're trying to do. At Georgia State, our data quality, when we started this, was not very good, and we used to argue as an institution about the data. We didn't argue about what the data said, we just argued about the data, right? Because I had my data. You have your data, he has his data, shadow systems all over the place. This is not effective. You cannot roll out any kind of proactive advisement, let alone predictive analytics with bad data. So, evaluate your data quality, the confidence that people have in the data. Make sure that the data is clean and organized.
At Georgia State, we didn't have good data quality practices, and so anytime an I and an E in science got transposed, another major was created. So, when you go talk to a department chair about their majors, they look for their favorite student who is not found on your list and that just delegitimizes the whole conversation. So, it's just really important. I know that you probably know this, but if you don't do a good job making sure you have great data quality, it's really hard to move forward from that.
Number two, decide what you want to know. Now, I know, this is a session about predictive analytics and people usually want to hear, “Well, what about the predictive analytics?” Don't start with predictive analytics. Start with what you want to know about the students and how you can be proactive in that knowledge, because you can go a long way without predictive analytics if you understand: What do we want to know? Are we tracking withdrawals? Are we tracking how students perform in prerequisite courses? Are we tracking whether or not students register for the next semester in a timely manner? Are we checking whether or not the students are under-enrolled for a particular semester? Are we tracking whether they're meeting their milestones? Are we checking whether they're meeting the milestones in a timely manner? Are there any early alerts that the faculty are issuing? Is anybody doing anything with any of this information? Long before you get to predictive analytics, what do you want to know?
When Tim and I first started to implement these systems on our campus, we wanted actionable academic information. That's what we wanted: more visibility around actionable academic information. You can actually do a lot of that. Sometimes, schools that perhaps don't have a lot of resources think, “How will we ever make progress? We can't afford to purchase one of these huge packages.” If you decide what you want to know, you can have institutional research run toxic course combinations in problematic – you don't need a fancy statistical system to do that. It helps. I'm a believer in the fancy statistical system, but I don't ever want anybody to think, “Well, we can't afford that. We can't do that. We don't know how to do that. I can't get the buy-in for that.” So, there's nothing that we can do that's not true. You have to be a little bit more intentional in our approach to academic advising, but if we can decide what we want to know about the data, that's great.
Proactive advising versus predictive analytics. Proactive advising is different than predictive analytics, and I know that you know this at a conceptual level. But proactive advising is really just a structured way to implement a deliberate intervention that will increase the probability of success and educate students about the options that they have to pursue that success. Proactive is a little different than the actual predictive analytics. The predictive analytics is a method of data analysis, you know that. It often ensures machine learning. It can involve all kinds of statistical modeling to predict failures. It can be a very effective outreach. But the two things are conceptually distinct. And if you start with, “Okay, we're going to go talk to EAB, we're going to go talk to Civitas, we're going to go talk to some of these big companies that are selling all kinds of products,” but you don't settle what it is that you want to know, you kind of got the cart before the horse a little bit. So, think through the kinds of things that you'd like to know, and then you can start to develop a strategy to share the information.
And for me, in a lot of ways, the technology is a strategy to share the information. That's how we – And we partnered with EAB. And we partnered with EAB very early, and we continue to be partnered with them. And it allows us to have all kinds of insights, because it is literally predictive modeling and using statistical analyses that we wouldn't be able to just do easily on our own. But we're able to share that through the platform. And I've heard so many people have the platform. They're not using it very effectively. And sometimes people say, "Well, it doesn't work." It does work. It does work. If you give it the data, it will work, right? But that's not the magic to put improving academic advising on your campus.
So, second thing, establish a standard of care. You've got to designate a way to collaborate on advisement across the university. In Tim's presentation, he talked about establishing a university advisement board or some kind of committee that will talk across the colleges about academic advising. Most of the time, that's never happened, where people who are involved with advising actually talk about what is an advising appointment? What constitutes an advising appointment? Because what are the elements that actually should be in every advising appointment? When should students get advisement? What could you communicate to all the transfer students, all your new first-year students, that they can expect about academic advisement? And that's going to vary across our institutions, but we have to engage the people at our institutions to figure out what that looks like so that there can be some consistency. Because all of us, every single institution – and that's hundreds of thousands and, most of us, millions of dollars in academic advising – but we never really define what that is.
And it's hard to measure how effective it is because it varies dramatically sometimes, from college to college. And we want to get at that in some meaningful ways. What interventions will you use in your college? Where will the notes and the records be stored so that they can be easily accessed? How coordinated are the supports? What does the training look like? How does that change over time? Most of these discussions, again, this is some basic stuff, and you think, “Huh, yeah, this is not rocket science.” No, it's not. But if you really think about your college, may not be happening at your university the way we want it to happen, so determine what should every student be able to expect from the university? And then what are we doing to set that up?
Next thing: generate buy-in, because if this is going to be a transformation in your campus, you're going to need buy-in. At Georgia State, we had the actual president of the university. I can remember this day. He brought everybody, all the leaders of advising and their boss. And their boss was usually a dean of something. And we sat at this long stereotypical table. He was at the end of – it was a stereotypical table. Long. It was probably 30 or 40 people sitting around this table. And he said, "We are going to do advising differently, and this means you."
And that's really all he said. And he said, "We're going to have some reports, and if everybody's not participating, we're going to come back together. That can't happen." It focused the university community on doing things differently. And we did do things differently. So, a senior-level sponsor is very helpful. You want to be able to build the case for the ROI. There's a lot of data out there now, kind of on the return on investment. The business people love this model because people initially are saying, "Oh, you know that EAB product, it's going to cost x. That's a lot." And it is a lot, but it's going to pay for itself many times over, right? At Georgia State, it paid for itself. I don't even know what the function was, because we were able to increase retention in the first year about six or seven points.
Now, at Georgia State, six or seven points, we have 50,000 students. You can do the math. That's going to add up. So even if we're two or three hundred thousand for this particular product, we are reaping multiplied times that in the retention benefit. And again, this has happened so many times, it's relatively easy to build the ROI for this. We went with the professional advising model. It was easy. We're a research one institution to suggest that, “Hey, this is not the best use of faculty time.” And again, we were able to build that in. So, we got to think about how to generate the buy-in, how to change the culture to support the advisement changes. Sometimes, that’s structural change. At Georgia State, we made structural changes. We centralized a whole bunch of advising.
I know some of you, that's not an option, and I'm not suggesting that centralization is the only way. But what has to happen is that you have to signal that we're doing things differently, and that we have a strategy for doing things differently, and that there's some cultural changes. We created some new positions. We did some things in HR to create career ladders for academic advisings. Again, it's not just, we're going to implement the system. And I know you know that, but there's a lot of things that go into generating buy-in. How are you involving the faculty in these changes? How are you involving the staff in these changes? Don't forget about the faculty. How are they going to fit into the loop for all of this? We were able to secure some different space, partnered with the registrar, and IS&T really built a whole campus collaboration. Generating the buy-in is important. And then supporting student engagement. Don't forget the students.
And to tell you the honest truth – and again, this is a big room, cone of silence – we didn't do the best with incorporating the student voice to begin. We're like, we got it. We've got some advisement, we have revised it. We've got new structure, we've got new space, we've got – We check, check, check, check, check. Did anybody talk to the student? Not necessary, right? Well, that's ridiculous, right? Because we would've done so much better to talk to the student and to understand what are their expectations? How would they like us to communicate those expectations? When should we communicate those expectations? Did anybody ask them when they want advisement? How long? This is so many different ways. We didn't do a great job with that to start. So don't forget the students. You want to be transparent about what you're doing.
When we're tracking information, Tim was showing the LMS data, and we do track data from our LMS. How many times do the students sign in or not sign in? We track all that. The data from the LMS is really important, but we should tell students that we're tracking the data from the LMS, right? We should tell students how we're utilizing their data. Some of you guys are tracking them in the dining hall. We're not tracking them in the dining hall, but we do track swipes. But dining hall is not actionable academic information for us. But again, the privacy considerations are important considerations. You want to be able to evaluate your efforts and refine strategies. And that means breaking out the data all kinds of different ways, looking for the equity gaps. Who's coming in? Who's not coming in? Who's really benefiting from these outreaches? Who's not benefiting from these outreaches? Sometimes, there're demographic implications.
And the last thing I'll share is to develop a narrative to explain the impact. Tim is a grandmaster at the narrative to explain the impact, because you need to be able to build the momentum in your campus community. Sometimes telling stories about Austin. He was talking about Austin in the chatbot, but there's a myriad of Austins in academic advising. I can talk about Austin, I can talk about increases in their return on investment. I can talk about decreases in time to degree, but it's very important to have someone who's going to the senate committees and who's talking to the cabinet and who's talking to the president, to the provost, and to the deans about the success, because it will start to build on itself.
All right, so, we'll pause there because we handed you the worksheets. Everybody has a worksheet. We're going to take about 10, 15 minutes, and I want you to think about some of the questions there on the worksheet, because answering those questions will help enable you to move forward with this on your campus. So just get together with your group, or if you're by yourself, you can get with the neighbor. If you don't feel like being neighborly, you can stay by yourself. I'm all about whatever you want to do, but please do answer the questions. We're going to come back in about 10, 12 minutes with a debrief on what we come up with in response to those questions. And if you have any questions, you can just wave your hand. Me or Nyasha or Carol will come around to talk to you.
[time lapse edit]
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
Okay. I hate to interrupt you. Some of you look like you're making some really great progress, but we do want to have a bit of a report out so that we can capture and share some of the good ideas. All right? So, we are going to start with the data and technology challenges. Did anybody spend a little bit of time talking about data and technology changes? Some of the challenges in gathering and maintaining and analyzing the data? How your institution could build the data infrastructure? Anything in that area? She's like, "No." Got nothing over there. Anybody will have anything to share about data? Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 1:
We'll take one for the team.
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
Great.
Speaker 1:
We actually were talking about our university is in the middle of a major merge. So, two universities come into one. So, our real challenge right now is just data integrity. They're coming from multiple sources, multiple locations. Some of our systems are a little defunct, so the data within them isn't accurate. We're actually pretty lucky that this is an area of focus where we've been trying to make corrections. So, you're starting to see the university launch a data governance panel to start really aligning data definitions, really flow through, and then also, make an investment in a unified system, because that's going to be key at this point. One of the systems was using Homegrown. One was using a system that is really popular, but they had Frankensteined a little bit. Shocking. So, we're actually in the process of launching a single SIS. But in that process, doing it with data-informed decision making as the platform. So, there's a unified group that's coming together to define those data definitions.
For the next 18 months, it'll be a little bit more challenging from an advising perspective, but I think that's one of the things we're tackling the most. We don't have the challenge with getting people bought in on data-informed decision making. It's really the integrity of the data that we're tackling today.
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
That's so good. Thank you so much for sharing. That data integrity is crucial. Georgia State went through a consolidation back in 2016 and, oh my word, those intersecting students, I still dream about them. Students who had been at both institutions, and all you had to do to make sure that we weren't harming them in setting up our data definitions. So, thank you for that. Another thing that you can do that might be helpful is, at Georgia State, we've really tried to democratize data. Some institutions, and this used to be the way we were, data only existed in institutional research. And they had the data. And if you had a question, you had to go talk to them and six months later, they'll get back to you with the response. Not because they're not good. But if we all were asking them questions, my goodness.
But what we tried to do was to train some people up in data. In the Student Success division, we have a data team and I've got a data – my data guy, he comes to all the meetings with me, and he hears the discussions and then goes back and says, "Oh, we got data to answer this." And sometimes in the meeting, sometimes right after the meeting, he can share. And as you democratize data and develop data experts in different places, they're close to the data practice, and they can inform the data definitions and make sure that there's really good integrity. So, thanks for sharing that. But yeah, data technology challenges. Nyasha?
Speaker 2:
Yes, in our university, over the last two years, we've implemented a new data system to try to be more proactive to use predictive analytics. One of the challenges, though, I think, in our group that's here, we're all spread in other areas. Now, get back to campus, how has Georgia State been able to train up their advising community to be able to use the technology tools in an efficient manner where they're all using it? Rather than, oh well, we're still going to use this system for this. To get away from the notes that you were talking about earlier and all that, how have you all done that?
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
Yeah. Sure. So, we have mandated the use, right? So, it's not appropriate to have notes anywhere except in the system where we have established notetaking. So, just managing against that has been a very important component. But it's not just a matter of managing against that. We developed very extensive training for our academic advisors and have rolled this out. And we tried to roll it out in a really sophisticated way because some of our older advisors, they had really good people skills, they had really, really excellent advisors in some ways, but they had no data facility. And so, we would highlight them for the people skills part of the training. But we had to develop data infrastructure. And over time, not only did we develop the training for the data infrastructure, we changed the hiring standards and qualifications to still hire people with good data, with people skills, but also, to hire people who had data facility. And over time, this has allowed us to strengthen our ability to really do well with the systems.
So, it's not just a matter of getting the system. It's not even just a matter of mandating the system. We put training around the system, and then we start to, as we hire more people, change the skills that we're looking for. And that's really allowed us to get to the point that we're doing well now with our data and academic advising. I hope that's helpful to you.
All right, any other questions about technology? All right, we just have a few seconds then. Prioritizing student care. What support systems are needed to train advisors on using predictive analytics? And he kind of touched on that, and how can our institutions ensure advisors are not overwhelmed? Maybe we'll just put a check mark by that unless somebody has something else they'd like to share? All right, we'll go to the third one. Leadership and institutional buy-in. How can you build a case for leadership support and funding? And what kind of cultural shifts are needed to prioritize data-driven advising at your institution? Has anybody done this already? I'm sure some of you have built the case. Anybody have anything they'd like to share?
Speaker 3:
I'm sorry. I'd say that the only thing that we would say is it's been the inverse. We have new leadership have come in and said this is the iconic moment of what they want to change.
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
Awesome.
Speaker 3:
So, for us, it's not making the case to them, it's them making the case to the university. Is that fair?
Speaker 4:
Yes.
Speaker 3:
There we go.
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
That's awesome. Good leadership, right? And a motivated leader. We've seen a couple of motivated leaders. We saw Dr. Crowe, we've seen the president and the team from Fort Valley State. Congratulations, by the way. They're over here. Good leadership does matter, right? And so, if you have a good leader who says, "Hey, I want to do some things differently in advising," you can go make that case. And that kind of takes the onus off of you. But if you have to dig in and make the case, go ahead and make the case. Be bold in making the case, because there's a financial case to be made, there's a student success story case to be made. If we're going to realize our collective missions, it takes doing things differently to do that. And most of us went into higher education, in fact, most, I think college administrators, most professors, most professional staff go into higher education because we believe in the difference that education makes. And so, it's easy to lean into that, particularly when you can point to, hey, you can do good and do well at the same time.
So, all right, we'll go to the last thing on our worksheet. And again, the worksheet is just meant to give you some things to think about and ways that you can organize your thoughts. But student engagement and equity. How can you ensure students engage with advising interventions, and what measures can be taken to ensure equity in proactive advising? Anybody got any tips on engaging students in making sure that we set up systems that they will actually utilize? Nyasha, I know while you're walking over, maybe you can also share. Walk and talk.
Nyasha Hamilton:
Absolutely. I think one way to make sure that you're listening to your students is to start doing focus groups. And so, we have a session coming up later today about some focus groups that we've done on our campus, another project that we did across the UIA. But yes, focus groups are definitely one way that you can engage your students.
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
Yeah, because predictive analytics is big data, but we don't want to lose the student voice in that big data. Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 5:
So, we don't have a strategy to fix it yet, but I interviewed 99 undergraduates last year, and one big takeaway from that was students wanted – we have to focus on the value added of the advising appointment versus stuff they can look up themselves online. Students can read, “Oh, we have to take this class before this class,” etc. So, if they go to an advisor, then they tell me, "Oh, but the advisor just told me exactly what I already looked up online, so there's no reason for me to go." I know that advisors can provide a lot more value than that, but we have to make that clear and also focus on what is the value added we want students to get out of an advising appointment aside from just, yeah, you got to take Calc one before Calc two.
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
Yeah. That's an excellent point, right? Because while we want to make sure that's clarified, we want to make sure our map is clear. There's a lot more value add that should be coming from academic advisement than just what classes to take. That's necessary perhaps, but not sufficient. And that's not particularly proactive either. Nyasha, are you running across the room to someone else? Yes, please.
Speaker 6:
Good morning, Dawn from North Carolina A&T State University. This is Madeline Martinez, also from North Carolina A&T. She's our associate director. So, one of the things that we are doing, or some of the things that we're doing in terms of engaging students is we have a Qualtrics survey that we actually put in our auto signature. So, any time that our students are coming into our offices and they're actually doing their advising appointments, there is a link that's in our auto signatures that they can click on to give that immediate feedback. We pull that feedback, we review it, we see if there's any issues specifically that the students have been dealing with, and we go ahead and address those issues specifically.
We also do the focus groups, as you mentioned. However, we do focus groups that are specifically targeted. So, what is going on with our transfer students? What's going on with our new freshmen? What's going on with our re-admits students as well? And of course, we also do surveys, but we know that there is a such thing as survey fatigue, so we try to kind of stay away from those. But as needed, we also do surveys and we just actually launched a chatbot from EdSights and that's been really, really helpful also to engage our students.
Allison Calhoun-Brown:
That's awesome. Those are some wonderful tips. Hey, this is always the goal, right? This is our picture of Georgia State's graduation. I know that this is where we're always trying to get students. Every effort moves them closer. Thank you so much for your time and attention this afternoon, or still this morning. I hope it was helpful. Have a great day.
Bios of Guest and Host
Dr. Allison Calhoun-Brown is Senior Vice President for Student Success at Georgia State University. Since 2008, she has overseen many of Georgia State’s success programs, using data to develop strategic initiatives that promote student achievement, facilitate academic progression, enhance the student experience and increase graduation rates. Incorporating predictive analytics, Dr. Calhoun-Brown has implemented new and innovative programming to address issues of effective academic advising, unmet student financial need, curricular progression barriers, momentum year strategies, and support for at-risk students. Her efforts have contributed to the elimination of achievement gaps at Georgia State. In 2019, she became the chief student affairs officer at GSU with the goal of integrating the student success approach across all aspects of student life and engagement at the University. Dr. Calhoun-Brown graduated with honors from Oberlin College and earned master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from Emory University.
Host: Bridget Burns, Executive Director, University Innovation Alliance
As a trusted advisor to university presidents and policymakers, Dr. Bridget Burns is on a mission to transform the way institutions think about and act on behalf of low-income, first-generation, and students of color. She is the founding CEO of the University Innovation Alliance, a multi-campus laboratory for student success innovation that helps university leaders dramatically accelerate the implementation of scalable solutions to increase the number of college graduates.
About Innovating Together
Innovating Together is an event series that happens live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. Every week, we join forces with Inside Higher Ed and talk with a higher education luminary about student success innovations or a sitting college president or chancellor about how they're specifically navigating the challenges of leadership. We hope these episodes will leave you with a sense of optimism and a bit of inspiration.
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