Clayton State University Campus Plan Update 2017

Section 1:  Institutional Mission and Student Body Profile

Clayton State University, located 15 miles south of downtown Atlanta, serves a diverse socioeconomic, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural student population primarily from the Atlanta metropolitan area and its adjacent counties.  The University’s mission, reflecting this diversity, is to cultivate an environment of engaged, experience-based learning, enriched by active community service, that prepares students of diverse ages and backgrounds to succeed in their lives and career.

The fall 2016 population totaled 6,996 students (5,778 undergraduate, 777 dual enrolled, and 441 graduate). 

Clayton State Student Demographics Fall 2016

Clayton State’s completion strategies, in line with the mission of serving students from diverse ages and backgrounds, are designed to support completion for all students.  Over the past year, the university has especially focused on intrusive advising, increasing the percentage of students enrolling in 15+ credits, and increasing the percentage of new fall starts enrolling in the following summer term.

Section 2:  2017 Strategy Summary

High Impact Strategy

Advsing

Advise students within a centralized structure that capitalizes on predictive data analytics to promote deeper student advisor connections and uses consistent advising practices.

Completion Goal

This goal is aimed at reaching a one year retention goal for the IPEDS cohort to 75% and begin to approach an IPEDS cohort graduation rate of 40% by 2022.

Demonstration of Priority or Impact

Clayton State University has dedicated work to improve our graduation and retention rates.  Prior to summer 2015 academic advising was managed within each of the four colleges and majority done by faculty.  Centralizing advising for our undergraduate students permits us to use an intrusive advising model which has a great potential to impact students retention and graduation rates.  This is a high priority and high impact strategy as it addresses an immediate need for the potential to impact a significant student population.

Summary of Activities

Throughout the 2016-2017 year, the Center for Advising and Retention (CAR) took a number of steps aimed at increasing student interaction.  Interactions were targeted at students who identified as at-risk, were new to the university, or within their second year.  The CAR created a communication strategy that outlined week by week communication campaigns to promote student activity.  Examples include a focus aimed at having all new students meet with their advisor or a focus on reaching out to students who were identified as high risk through our Student Success Collaborative (SSC) predictive analytics. 

Another significant effort to increase student interaction was to utilize SSC in other offices as an effort to connect student interactions.  Within this past year, the Center for Academic Support (CAS), Residence Life, the Writing Center, and the Veteran’s Resource Center were all brought onto the SSC platform.  This connected the CAR’s efforts with the other units to create a more holistic approach to interacting with students.

The third activity the CAR took this year was to reorganize staff in order to provide additional support for reaching out to students while still providing quality academic advising sessions.  The reorganization created new graduate assistant positions who were able to provide support with reaching out to students while the advisors were meeting with students in advising sessions.

Measures of Progress and Success

Clayton State uses the number of student visits to the CAR, IPEDS cohort retention rates, and re-registration rates to assess the outcome of this strategy.

Student Visits to the CAR

Measure of Success: 

We will be changing this reporting category to a percentage of students met with instead of a number of visits.  This will provide us with more impactful data.

IPEDS Cohort Retention Rate

*Draft Rate

Measure of Success: 

Our goal is to reach a 75% one year retention rate.

Re-registration Rate

Measure of Success

Our goal is to reach 91% as the re-registration rate.

Lessons Learned

We are in our second full year of having centralized advising.  During this year we have been able to identify structural issues that need to be addressed in order to ensure no student is turned away from meeting with an advisor.  This has been addressed for the 2016-2017 year.  We have also realized that our focused efforts on the IPEDS rate need to be reviewed.  We have had centralized advising for this population for multiple years with slow increases in retention and a significant drop this most recent year.  This year we will be holistically reviewing our retention efforts as connected to our Strategic Enrollment Management Plan which is stated in a future goal.

Primary point of contact

Eric Tack
Director for the Center for Advising and Retention
EricTack@clayton.edu

High Impact Strategy

Graduate Sooner

Increase the number of new fall starts enrolling in 15+ credit hours per term and the number of new fall students enrolling in the following summer term.

Completion Goal

This goal is aimed at increasing the percentage of students who graduate within 4 years.

Demonstration of Priority or Impact

Clayton State University new students have historically enrolled in less than 15 credits per term.  The path to completing a degree on time requires students to take 15+ credit hours per term.  Focusing on increasing the percentage of students enrolling in 15+ credit hours per term has the ability to significantly impact a number of students graduating on time.  We have found that students who enroll in at least one summer term graduate at a rate of 64% while students who never attend a summer term graduate at a rate of 7%.  Increasing the number of students enrolling in the summer will ultimately have a positive impact on graduation rates.

Summary of Activities

This is the second year that we have used the Graduate Sooner message as a means to encourage students to take 15+ credits per term and to enroll in the summer.  We gathered staff and faculty support to promote this initiative.  We communicated this message through orientation, presentations (freshman English courses, residence halls, student government association, student leadership council, and information tables), and mailings to students via email as well as their home.  Most significantly, we promoted this initiative through the academic advisors during advising and registration for the spring and summer terms at the same time. 

Measures of Progress and Success

Clayton State uses the percentage of new fall undergraduate students enrolled in 15+ credits and the percentage of that same population who enrolled in the summer as a measure of progress and success.

New Undergraduate Students by Active Credits

Measure of Success

Our goal is to have the 15+ category be the majority of the student population.

Percentage of Fall New Students Enrolling in the Following Summer Term

Measure of Success

We have not set a goal to reach for this category. 

Lessons Learned

Throughout this year we were able to identify some structural issues with course offerings that caused a barrier to students from being able to enroll in 15+ credits.  Some of these issues are associated with course offerings and course sizes.   We addressed these concerns in time for some improvements for the fall 2017 new student population.  Student finances continued to be an issue for students attempting to enroll in the summer term.  We are confident with year round Pell that we will be able to see a significant increase this year in the percentage of students enrolling in the summer.

Primary point of contact

Stephen Schultheis, Ed.D.
Assistant Vice President, Enrollment Management
StephenSchultheis@clayton.edu

Section 3.  Reflections, Observations & Plans for Next Year

Clayton State University has gone through significant change over the time that we have been focusing on Complete College Georgia.  Some of this change is due to the centralization of advising, the institutional use of the Student Success Collaborative program, leadership changes in roles associated with enrollment and retention efforts, and the formation of a Strategic Enrollment Management Plan.  It is only within the last two years that we have had a consistent effort to focus on retention and graduation rates with the changes in place.  We are committed to our strategies associated with Complete College Georgia as well as others found in the Strategic Enrollment Management Plan which has been included with this report.

Institutionally, we have developed strategies to improve retention and graduation rates with a goal of reaching 75% one year retention and approach a 40% graduation rate by the end of our Strategic Planning cycle in 2022.  These strategies can be viewed in our Strategic Enrollment Management Plan.  A few significant strategies for the coming year include efforts to advise students into the correct math sequence for their major as well as nine credits of their major area; the introduction of an early alert system aimed at supporting students with advising and academic support resources when identified as in need by the faculty of record; and a new approach to student success which pulls multiple departments together to discuss and support incoming students as at-risk.

There is no doubt that Clayton State continues to have an opportunity to improve our retention and graduation rates.  Our strategies have been developed on data and theory.  We are confident that our institutional efforts will see positive results in the coming and future years.