Student Success and Retention Committee

The committee was created by Provost Stroble in April of 2006 to recommend concrete actions to increase student retention that would demonstrate the importance, and clarify the meaning, of the five core principles of our academic plan: leadership, engagement, inclusive excellence, innovation and assessment. The committee itself was structured as an innovative approach to campus leadership. It was charged to be a working group made up of administrators and faculty representatives from the Faculty Senate. In our year-long analysis of policies and procedures at The University of Akron that impede student learning and progress toward a degree this diverse group of faculty and staff reviewed numerous reports on student success, studying best practices here and elsewhere, in order to focus on the importance of the thirty-six, immediate and long-term, recommendations contained in our report to the Provost in the spring of 2007.

In developing the recommendations for this report, the committee decided to first focus on the factors related to retention and student success of full time undergraduates. It is our hope, as faculty and staff, that this report will become the foundation stone upon which serious, data-driven, on-going and expanding efforts to better ensure the success of our students will move forward as a campus-wide Student Success Strategic Initiative. As members of the Student Success and Retention Committee we intend to continue to work on removing barriers to student success and enhancing the quality of the curricular and co-curricular educational experiences we offer our students. Leadership at all levels is needed to model and mentor the hard work and open mindedness necessary to successful learning, where rigorous intellectual inquiry is driven by high expectations regarding student learning—from their peers as well as from faculty, inside and outside the classroom.

The quality of our collaboration and recommendations stand as the best evidence of what these design guidelines in our Academic Plan mean: a diverse group of faculty, administrators, and students (inclusive excellence), trying to shape our serious examination of a real-world challenge in ways that would produce innovative ideas, with data collection and analyses strategies to support continuous improvement (assessment) designed to encourage and support campus leadership interested in enhancing student success (engagement) at The University of Akron.