Becoming a student-ready college

Dr. Suzanne Walker, Associate Provost and Chief Retention Officer

Dr. Suzanne Walker, Associate Provost and Chief Retention Officer

Look to your right, look to your left. Only one of you is going to be here next year.

“That was mindset in higher education,” says Dr. Suzanne Walker, Associate Provost and Chief Retention Officer, “Only one of you is good enough, smart enough, mature enough to make it — and you’re on your own. We know that doesn’t work; we know it never has.”

Professor Walker, who started out at Marietta teaching in the Communication Department, has been working with teams of faculty, staff and students on an initiative based on the book, Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success, by Thomas Major, Nicole McDonald, Susan Albertine, Michelle Asha Cooper, and Tia Brown McNair, who is the Vice President in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The book was first read and discussed among Marietta’s Enrollment Management team, and then spread through Academic Affairs to the entire College.

“Becoming a Student-Ready College is going to involve all of us because all of us — faculty and staff — are educators in some way and it’s going to take all of us to help our students have success,” Walker says.

In 2015, the Fall-to-Fall first-year retention rate at Marietta bottomed out to only 63 percent. As a result, the College focused on implementing the John N. Gardner’s Foundations of Excellence program to help boost first-year and transfer student success. By Fall 2018, retention of first-year students jumped to 79 percent. Within two years, the Fall 2020-2021 retention rate dropping to 67 percent.

Even before the drop, Walker and others were preparing the counter-approach to shrinking enrollment and retention numbers.

“It’s interesting because most people think this is a response to COVID, and it’s not,” Walker says, adding that the College invited McNair to campus in 2021 to talk with groups about the AAC&U research that went into the book. “The research that they were doing on student readiness was because our education system is so inequitable — how K through 12 is funded, the quality of education, and the opportunities for students really depends, in many states, on what neighborhoods they’re in. It’s so economically inequitable, so Student-Ready College was researched and designed to help move the mindset from ‘What can K through 12 do to make sure students are ready for college?’ to ‘How can we as colleges be ready to support students however they arrive at the door?’”

Walker says becoming a student-ready college isn’t solely about academics. Marietta’s approach to becoming a Student-Ready College touches on every aspect of the student experience. This approach goes beyond customer service — being able to point a student to the right person or place. It makes sure staff and faculty are ready for the student, their questions, their concerns and their goals.

“It’s looking at the policies, practices, procedures focused on how we help students holistically succeed. How do we provide mental health support? How do we provide senses of community? How do we provide — yes — academic support in places where they’re not prepared, either because of the interruptions now to COVID or from inequitable opportunities in the educational landscape? It’s really: How does every person on this campus — whether you’re housekeeping or the business office or financial aid or branding or faculty — how do you see yourself as a person who helps our students be successful in and out of the classroom?”

In the past, Marietta enjoyed a large population of students from New England, as well as international students. With the demographic cliff, which will drop the number of college-aged people, plus the trend of students not wanting to go to college far from home, Marietta is preparing for its options: more students from Ohio and Appalachian regions, and first-generation students. So, what demographic is Marietta trying to reach?

“All of them,” Walker says.

During the Spring 2022 semester, separate staff, faculty and student groups worked on each of the Student-Ready College book’s five chapters (In search of the Student-Ready College, Leadership Values and Organizational Culture, Making Excellence Inclusive to Support Student Success, Building Student Readiness through Effective Partnerships, and Demonstrating Belief in Students). Each group focused on one of the chapters and wrote recommendations, resulting in about 90 recommendations.

Over the summer, a task force led by Professor John Tynan and Amanda Haney-Cech, Director of the Academic Resource Center (ARC), looked at the recommendations and compiled them into 65, which were prioritized by the group in terms of highest need and impact. The recommendations also included a timeline for completion and as well as owners of each task.

Academic support, mental health support, helping student acclimate to campus better, boosting the Career Center, Diversity & Inclusion training and support, customer service training, and even improving signage on campus are included in the top 10 initiatives for immediate action.

Associate Professor Rick Smith was part of the SRC Task Force and a member of the Planning Committee that worked on tightening up the recommendations into actionable items for campus to work on. Reviewing research taken during Marietta’s new student onboarding event, PioSOAR, was alarming but educational to Smith. The incoming new students surveyed noted that 42% of them were assigned 0-10 pages of reading each week in high school and 69% replied that this came in the form of worksheets, followed by short fiction pieces/excerpts as the second type. Some reported not having deadlines in high school or not turning in assignments.

“I have realized that becoming and being a ‘student-ready college’ is not lowering our standards or compromising our curricular integrity, but rather taking a different approach to educating,” Smith says. “The ‘college way’ is reading textbooks, taking exams, doing projects, listening to lectures, etc. But as high school teaching and assignment expectations change, I perhaps can’t expect students to come to my classroom ready to read a 25-page peer-reviewed article with statistics as a first-semester freshman; while other classes are doing the same thing. Their high school reading of 0-10 pages a week jumped to 10-15 PER class in college, and they are taking four or five classes. Instead, I’ve taken the approach of working with the students to understand the reading in bits and pieces, engaging in discussion, and then assessing for comprehension.”

Haney-Cech keeps her first report card from her freshman year of college framed on her desk. As the Director of the ARC, she wants her students to know that anyone can struggle.

“I graduated third in my high school class,” Haney-Cech says. “I thought I was a big deal. I had taken CCP classes and had an Associate’s Degree when I was 17 years old, so I thought when I went to the University of Cincinnati, I’d be fine. I keep my first report card right on my desk to show my students that I thought I knew what I was doing, just like them; and I managed to get miserable grades — grades I had never seen before. I had to figure my life out pretty quickly. Now I use some of that seat of empathy to work with my students to help them understand that we’re all human, too. When you use our resources on campus, we’re not judging.”

ACT Research released findings from a February 2022 student that showed 43 percent of incoming college freshmen were not prepared to access college resources such as academic support or mental health. It also showed that 33 percent of those students weren’t prepared to build relationships with classmates and professors.

Amanda Haney-Cech and Gavin Long ’23 spend time catching up on the semester.

Amanda Haney-Cech and Gavin Long ’23 spend time catching up on the semester.

Dr. Cheongmi Shim, Program Director of the Communication Fundamentals and the Communication Resource Center, spent weeks helping to prepare a handful of students to serve as peer consultants.

“One of the goals of the Communication Center is to make it an inviting environment,” Shim says. “I train the consultants to be welcoming to new students. We want our students to access all of the resources that we offer — helping them prepare for class or Capstone presentations, or for job interviews.”

Shim says her student consultants complete a public speaking course, and she also considers their communication specialties such as speech outlines, delivery, or their video design. She also says the center is useful for students whose first language isn’t English to practice speaking with native speakers in a comfortable setting.

In Haney-Cech’s office, academic coaches develop close relationships with their students as they help strengthen their organizational, planning and study habits. Students like Gavin Long ’23, who once relied heavily on academic support services, continue to visit the ARC because of those relationships.

Long ’23 came to Marietta from Surrey, England. The Broadcast Journalism major and Soccer player struggled to adjust to higher education and his schedule.

“My classes, the culture — it was a combination of things,” Long says. “I was a freshman and my head coach put me in touch with the ARC (Academic Resource Center). That’s where I learned how to work my way through classes and time management and how to stay on top of tasks, it prepared me for the outside world in a way, so I’m ready to get started in the real world.”

Though he was doing well at Marietta, Long decided to transfer to a Division I school to play soccer. There, he saw an immediate shift in academic culture.

“Communication was different at the larger school,” Long says. “One scenario I had was we made playoffs that year. At Marietta, if you were going to miss class for an event or something like that, you would email your professor and say, I’m going to miss class, can you please let me know what I miss so I can catch up? At the larger school, I emailed a professor, who had been at that school for 25 years, and she said I was the first athlete to email her about missing a class in that time. At that school, it felt like everything was up to me; where at Marietta, if you’re stuck, you have someone to reach out to.”

Returning to Marietta, Long sees the ARC, the Writing Center and all the resources he has available to him for free, as valuable as his classes.

“Being a part of a sports team and having gone through it myself, my teammates, my coach and I make sure our freshman players know to come in and see the ARC,” Long says. “It’s going to help them further down the line and you get to be with people like Amanda, who’s great. Marietta is small enough that you can’t slip through the cracks. There will always be someone who will notice you’re slipping and then you’re brought in to get help.”

Dr. Cheongmi Shim trains her Communication Resource Center Consultants on how best to help clients.

Students practice "Goat Yoga" at Soul Pastures Farm.

As part of Self-Care Sunday, the Center for Health and Wellness organized a trip to Soul Pastures Farm.

Self-Care Sunday is one effort by the Center for Health and Wellness to help students prioritize their mental health.

Students enjoyed spending time with the animals at Soul Pastures Farm.

Playing in a creek was a perfect way to spend Self-Care Sunday.

Over the summer, Suzy Zumwalde, a mental health counselor in Marietta’s Center for Health and Wellness, provided How to Help a Student training to staff and faculty from June through September, and continues to give that training during onboarding of new employees. The training helps identify students who might be struggling emotionally, and gives the resources that employees can direct students to who need help.

“I’ve had staff and faculty approach me to let me know that helped them with a student,” says Zumwalde, who also provides How to Help a Friend training to students. “I’ve given that training so far to Ras, EXCEL leaders, Women’s Lacrosse, and soon to Women’s Rowing, Alpha Sigma Phi, Esports. I hope to get more Greeks and Athletics trained also.”

Zumwalde’s office also received grant money to provide events and activities for students to get them out of their residence halls and outside interacting with other students. The Feel Good Fridays events often include meals, desserts and prizes, as well as informational material about caring for your mental health.

“It is absolutely imperative that we are all working together to try to help,” Haney-Cech says. “Clearly the pandemic is hot on everybody’s brain. There are deficits that were created because we had a universal shift in what everyone was doing. So, the K through 12 experience was interrupted and for another 10 to 15 years, we are going to see the results of kids in kindergarten who didn’t finish learning in the classroom or how to interact with their peers.”

Shifting Marietta’s approach to being more student-ready will ensure the support those kindergarten students will thrive when they get to Marietta.

“We are never going to make college easy,” Haney-Cech says. “It shouldn’t be easy. It’s only going to be easy when a student is interested in what they’re learning and want to know more. We don’t have to take rigor away from the classroom, but we might think about ways to introduce the same idea — and I’m going to get to the same point with my students, but I might have to take a different road or an extra day or path to get there.”

With all staff and faculty on board to make this initiative a success, Walker is recharged.

“At Marietta, it’s ‘Look to your right, look to your left,’ how do we help all three of you be here?”

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