I’ve always loved the Todd Rundgren song “The Want of a Nail.”  In addition to a jumpin’ soul groove that could levitate a gospel choir, syncopated piano, punchy horn arrangements, and the legendary Bobby Womack singing call-and-response with Rundgren’s lead vocals (as if that weren’t enough!), the lyrics relay the old proverb “For Want of a Nail” that laments the loss of an entire kingdom due to the seemingly minor detail of a missing nail that would have kept a horse’s shoe attached to a lone steed during a fleeting cavalry charge.

After I wrote last week’s post comparing a couple of major pre-college predictors of first year success, I wondered again about whether there might be other key predictors of first year success that tend to fly just under the radar. I guess I’m thinking of the kinds of traits and attributes that, although they might not dominate a first impression, might just tip the balance for a student teetering on the edge of academic survival. In addition, by “under-the-radar” I’m referring to the type of variables that might normally get overshadowed in large-scale statistical analyses of college student success. These almost imperceptible influencers are often (for lack of a better term) predictors of predictors; like the way that a regular sleep schedule might increase the ability to focus when studying, which in turn increases one’s cognitive stamina during extended test-taking and ultimately improves the likelihood of a higher standardized test scores. Whether they are called “soft skills” in the popular press or “non-cognitive factors” in the academic press, it has become increasingly clear that these attributes matter for college success. So if we could figure out whether any of these attributes play a similar role among Augustana students who fell into that muddy middle of maybe when we were considering their application for admission, we might know a little bit more about teasing out just the right details in the process of trying to decide if a person is a good fit for Augustana or not.

Fortunately, we already collect some of this kind of data through the Student Readiness Survey that incoming freshmen take before attending summer registration. Although the Student Readiness Survey was primarily designed to better inform early conversations between advisors and new students, this data mirrors several of the soft skill traits and is ripe for testing as a predictor of first year success. To make sure we avoid the brute force effect (AKA when a typically powerful predictor like test score or high school GPA drowns out the more subtle impact of other potentially important factors), we took into account high school GPA throughout our analyses so that we could focus on the influence of these attributes and traits.

As a quick reminder, the Student Readiness Survey collects data on six non-cognitive factors or soft skills:

• Academic Habits (e.g., using a highlighter, planning ahead to do homework)
• Academic Confidence (e.g., belief in one’s ability to learn)
• Persistence and Grit (e.g., tendency to fight through difficulty to achieve a goal)
• Interpersonal Skills (e.g., tendency to consider multiple views in navigating conflict)
• Stress Management (e.g., perception of one’s temper or ability to be patient)
• Comfort with Social Interaction (e.g., ability to make new friends)

Sure enough, we found that two of these traits stood out as predictors of cumulative first-year GPA even after taking into account high school GPA.  Can you guess which concepts rose to the top?

Although it might seem obvious, academic habits held up as a significant predictor of first year success. In other words, if you took two prospective students with similar high school GPAs, the one more likely to succeed would be the one who takes a more deliberate approach to academic habits, plans ahead, and studies actively rather than passively.

The second significant predictive trait turned out to be interpersonal skills. Specifically, we found that the more a student was inclined to consider another’s perspective as well as their own when negotiating a disagreement, the more likely they were to succeed as a first year student. Again, this finding took into account high school GPA. So if you were to consider two students with similar high school GPAs for admission, the one that seems to exhibit more sophisticated interpersonal skills may well be the one who is more likely to succeed. It’s important to note that this is not the same as leaning toward the student who seems more comfortable socially. In fact, our data suggests that there may be a small negative relationship between comfort with social interaction and first year success after taking into account high school GPA.

So what should we do with these findings? First of all, tread carefully. Applying these findings is sort of like fixing watches – one wrong move and you’ve turned a nifty time piece into an expensive paper weight. Moreover, these findings will only be useful when you put them in context with everything else you might know about a prospective student. Yet, when straining to find some whisper of evidence about a student’s potential for success, these may well be exactly the veins that you ought to mine. That doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily find what you’re looking for, but it does mean that you know just a little bit more about where to look.

Although I’ve harped on this point in previous posts, I think it is worth repeating – a mountain of research demonstrates that the experiences during the first year are critical to student success, notwithstanding all sorts of pre-college characteristics. So nothing we might know about a prospective student before they start college rises to the level of slam-dunk proof of their future success or failure. But knowing just a little bit more about traits and attributes under the radar might help us make better decisions about students who seem to cluster at the margins.

Make it a good day,

Mark

No matter how solid the overall academic characteristics of a first year class, by the time spring rolls around we always seem to wish that we could be just a bit more precise in identifying students who can succeed at Augustana. Yes, there are some applicants who are almost guaranteed to succeed and some who are obviously nowhere near ready for the Augustana experience. But most applications fall somewhere in between those two poles. And even though this is an exceedingly complicated and imperfect exercise, every bit of information we can tease from our own data can help us perfect our efforts to pick out those diamonds in the rough.

Standardized test score (i.e., ACT or SAT) and high school GPA have always been the big dogs in predicting college success. In the not too distant past, these two metrics were often the only numbers that a college used to make admissions decisions. But (at least) two problems have emerged that make it critically important to test the veracity of both metrics among our own students. First, the test prep business has become an almost ubiquitous partner to the tests themselves. ACT or SAT preparation resources (be they online or in person) are often strongly encouraged and sometimes are even offered as a part of the high school curriculum. As a result, one could argue that standardized test scores increasingly predict test taking skills rather than academic preparation. (Given that the average ACT composite score has remained the same from 1997 to 2016, I’m not exactly sure what the growth in the test prep business says about the industry or the people who pay for those services . . . but that is another story). When we add to the mix the correlation between socioeconomic status and available educational resources, test score becomes an even more suspect measure of academic potential.

Second, high school GPA has become an increasingly “flexible” number as high schools have added more and more weighted courses and varying academic “tracks” for different types of students. As a result, high school GPAs sometimes appear much more tightly clustered for certain types of students, making it more difficult to claim that a moderate differences in high school GPA between two applicants represents an actual difference in college readiness. In addition, these patterns of clustering quickly become specific to an individual school or district, making it even harder to compare applicants between schools or districts. For these reasons Augustana decided a number of years back to generate for each applicant a recalculated GPA that removes much of the peculiarity of the GPA initially provided by the high school.

Given the increasing murkiness of these two metrics, it makes sense to test the predictive validity (i.e., trustworthiness) of each among our own students. In addition, since students almost always submit both a test score and a high school GPA, it would help us a lot to know more about each metric in the context of the other. For example, what if a student’s test score seems much stronger than their high school GPA, or the other way around. Should we place more value on one over the other? Should we put our trust in the more favorable of the two metrics?

To conduct this inquiry thoroughly, we tested the effect of high school GPA and standardized test score on three different measures of first year success: cumulative GPA at the end of the first year, retention to the second year, and the number of credits completed during the first year.

In short, it isn’t much of a contest. The recalculated high school GPA significantly predicts first year cumulative GPA, retention, and number of credits completed. Standardized test score only predicts first year cumulative GPA, while producing no statistically significant effect on retention or number of credits completed. In addition, when high school GPA and test score were analyzed head-to-head (i.e., both variables were included in the same statistical analysis predicting first year cumulative GPA), the size of the high school GPA effect was two and a half times larger than the effect of the standardized test score.

This would suggest that one ought to prioritize the recalculated high school GPA over the standardized test score when evaluating a prospective student. But remember the questions I posed a few paragraphs back about an applicant whose test score and high school GPA don’t seem to match up? We felt like we needed to run one more test just in case.

To test the phenomenon of a test score and a high school GPA that appear to “disagree” with each other, we created a variable that reflected the relative gap between test score and high school GPA and tested the relationship between this variable and the first year cumulative GPA (I’ll gladly explain in more detail the steps we took to build this variable off line. Suffice it to say that, “We got our stats nerd on, and it was awesome.”) Interestingly, our findings closely mirrored our prior results. As the test score exceeded the high school GPA (i.e., as the test score represented an increasingly higher academic potential than the GPA), the first year cumulative GPA tended to drop. Conversely, when the high school GPA exceeded the test score, first year cumulative GPA tended to rise. Although there is a point at which this variable is no longer useful (e.g., if the test score is 35 and the high school GPA is 1.5, one starts to suspect something more nefarious might be at play), these findings corroborate our earlier tests. For Augustana applicants, recalculated high school GPA is a more accurate predictor of first year success than the standardized test score.

So if you are advising first year students, be careful about making assumptions about your students’ ability based on their test scores. Likewise, when there appears to be a gap between what the test score and the high school GPA might suggest, which metric exceeds the other might tell very different stories about the needs of a given student.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Although every weekend before the start of a fall term seems to bring a surge of energy to campus, this fall feels just a little bit different. I’m not sure I can put my finger on it just yet, but what usually seems like a low hum of electrical current has been elevated to a palpable buzz throughout the quad. It’s almost as if we’ve crossed some sort of invisible threshold where a confluence of undercurrents have achieved a synergy that is about to burst into a kaleidoscopic firework display of sparkle and color.

Over the last 10 years, the Augustana student body has grown more diverse on a variety of dimensions. The graph below shows the growing proportions of students from five different demographic groups since 2006. The race/ethnic line (blue) represents the proportion of non-white students. The socioeconomic line (red) represents the proportion of Pell Grant recipients. The religious line (green) represents the proportion of students who identify with a belief system that is not Protestant or Catholic. The out-of-state line (purple) represents the proportion of students who are from states other than Illinois. And the international line (light blue) represents the students who are coming to Augustana from a country outside of the United States.

These demographic shifts don’t happen by chance, and we ought to recognize and applaud the policy decisions that helped to bolster these trends.

But without a concerted and sustained commitment to make the most of this blossoming tapestry of difference, we leave ourselves vulnerable to a devastating missed opportunity. It would be terribly disappointing if all of this effort to bring such a wealth of diversity to campus produced nothing more than larger groups of homogeneity sitting in separate corners of the Gerber dining hall.

Weaving our varied demographics into a single diverse tapestry will take a continual effort to create, cultivate, and sometimes even coerce meaningful interactions across difference. This will mean that all of us will have to recognize our very human tendency to find comfort in familiarity. Although I’m not suggesting that we shun the familiar, we must humbly recognize our frailty and make the choice to open ourselves to new relationships, new ideas, and new experiences.

I know that helping young people navigate such a complex challenge is not simple, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. And, to be clear, I’m definitely not suggesting that we should shove our students into situations that are beyond their capability or maturity. But if we are to weave the diverse tapestry that we imagine, then we will need to put our collective shoulder to the grindstone and push, steadily, kindly, and purposefully; especially when the conversations turn difficult and and our vulnerabilities and insecurities feel exposed.

We have gathered the resources together on this campus to make difference one of our most powerful assets. Now let’s get to work.

Make it a good day,

Mark

As you have almost certainly seen by now, the number of tuition deposits received by the end of last week for next year’s incoming class had almost surpassed 740; well above the number we had cautiously hoped to reach at the beginning of this recruiting cycle. In the context of a shrinking population of high school graduates in the Midwest, this is a genuinely impressive feat.

So, for the last Delicious Ambiguity post of the year, I thought I’d share some numbers that spell out the enormity of this effort.

From June 1, 2016 through April 29, 2017, 3,123 prospective seniors (i.e., students who would start college in August, 2017) visited our campus. Averaged over that 47-week period, this works out to about 66 visits per week. Given the extended planning required to host any of the several Saturday admissions events, and given that prospective students visit campus even when classes aren’t in session or many of us might be enjoying a holiday week, it seems pretty clear that this office is running at a high clip all year long.

Moreover, the nature of recruiting students to a campus seems to have slowly shifted in recent decades so that relatively more time is required to recruit students after they have already been accepted for admission. This is where I found two numbers to be pretty astounding.

Between December 1, 2016 and April 29, 2017, the admissions counselors and student ambassadors sent 2,868 emails and made 6,145 phone calls to accepted applicants. That averages out to about 137 emails and about 293 phone calls per week. All of this communication happened on top of the multitude of in-person campus visits.

Moreover, all of this communication likely doesn’t include all of the emails and phone calls that faculty and coaches made to prospective students all year long.

So, at least for a few minutes this week, let’s lose the good ole Lutheran Midwestern reservedness and congratulate ourselves unabashedly for a job well done. In addition, I think that the admissions staff and the crew of student ambassadors deserve a giant shout out. Well done, y’all!

Make it a good day, everybody . . . and have a wonderful summer,

Mark

In the midst of all the inevitable end-of-spring-term craziness, the thought of contemplating one more semester design vote doesn’t seem all that appealing. Arguable, the question of whether or not to include advising within our calculus of faculty load is the most complicated of the many decisions we’ve made this year. I don’t fault anyone one bit for feeling overwhelmed, or even a little crabby, about this last vote – no matter what you think we ought to do.

But in the midst of all this, I think it is worthwhile to step back a little and have a look at what we’re on the verge of accomplishing. You might not be in the mood for hyperbole at the moment, but the truth is that we are about to complete something that almost no other institution has done. We’ve actually designed an entire semester calendar and curriculum framework out in the open, step by step, modeling the implications of all the competing issues from the very beginning and then remodeling the implications of each decision on the larger picture at each step along the way. That isn’t to say that we’ve done everything perfectly – after all, we are no more than a bunch of imperfect yokels trying to pull off extraordinary, something that few schools have ever done in a way that most wouldn’t dare to try. Call me a Pollyanna, but after zooming out and having a look back at what we’ve accomplished this year, you’d be hard pressed not to be impressed.

What have we done since September?  Here are the decisions faculty have made that set each of the major elements of the new semester design in place.

• Voted for an immersive term 140 to 26
• Voted for a 4-credit course base instead of a 3-credit course base 126 to 37
• Voted for the immersion term to occur in January instead of May 136 to 35
• Voted for 124 credits to graduate instead of 120 credits to graduate 92 to 71
• Approved the structure proposed for General Education 109 to 31
• Approved the second language requirement unanimously
• Approved a framework for major design and footprint unanimously

Other than the vote about the total number of credits to graduate, each vote seems to reflect a clear sense among the community about the direction that is best for us.

In addition, two faculty votes have provided advisory positions to the Board of Trustees, the body that makes the final decision on these two specific issues.

• Voted for a pre-Labor Day start to the academic year 67 to 59
• Voted that tuition should cover a relatively higher number of credits per year rather than a relatively smaller number of credits 98 to 62

All in all, the amount of intellectual and emotional work that we have successfully sorted through to accomplish all of these decisions is truly extraordinary. It’s hard to imagine anyone NOT feeling at least a little bit more tired than normal these days.

So even if you’re feeling like you are running on fumes these days, try to take a second, breathe deeply, and look at how much we have accomplished. I, for one, am truly amazed and humbled. It’s an honored to be able to call myself a member of the Augustana community.

Make it a good day,

Mark

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve almost certainly seen some of my posts about the data we’ve collected to assess and guide our advising practices at Augustana College (here, here, and here). However, those posts only get at part of the story. Since all of those posts drew from senior survey data, we can be almost sure that those findings primarily reflect our students’ advising experiences in their major(s). But we also know that first-year advising matters a lot. Many would argue it matters at least as much as major advising. So I’d like to dive into some of the advising data from our first-year students and see if there’s anything that we can learn from it.

In this post I’d like to focus on two items that we know are important for a successful first-year experience. First-year students answered these questions late in their fall term.

1. My first year adviser connected me with other campus offices, resources, or opportunities (offices like Student Activities, the Community Engagement Center, the Counseling Center) to help me succeed during my first year.
2. My first-year adviser made me feel like I could succeed at Augustana.

The table below presents the average response scores to these items over the last four years. The response options were strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree. These responses were converted to a 1-5 scale where 1 equals strongly disagree.

You can see that we’ve improved on both measures since 2013-14. I know that our first-year advising program has emphasized the importance of connecting students with the campus offices that can best help them, and it’s heartening to see that this effort may be producing results. With that said, it looks like we might still need to improve since our average score hasn’t quite surpassed “agree” yet. By contrast, in each of the last four years, on average our student’s “agree” that we have made them feel like they could succeed at Augustana.

Interestingly, while the improvement in referring students to other campus resources seems fairly consistent, the improvement in making students feel like they could succeed seems to have plateaued over the last couple of years. But digging a little deeper, there is a wrinkle in our 2016-17 data that both seems to explain this plateau and may further emphasize the value in moving to the first-year advising structure that the faculty has now approved to implement next year.

This year (i.e., during the fall of 2016), about a third of our first-year student advising groups were enrolled in an FYI-100 course instead of merely meeting informally with their adviser throughout the term. For the students who were enrolled in this class, the average response score to the statement “My first-year adviser made them feel like they could succeed at Augustana” was 4.34. For the students who were not enrolled in this class (about 2/3rds of the whole group), the average response score was 4.17.

Many long time advisers said that the FYI 100 format helped them develop stronger relationships with their advisee. These advisers indicated that the stronger relationships allowed them to engage in more substantive conversations that, in turn, helped the students think more deeply about the nature of their college experience and the ways in which they could make the most of it.

As wonderful as it is to hear that we seem to be making improvements in our advising practices, It is even more exciting to see data confirming these bold strides toward even better first-year advising.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Even though most of us only wonder about retention in the fall, down here in the belly of the data beast we’ve been paying closer attention to our term-to-term retention rates for each cohort of students. Although those numbers can fluctuate more, they can also give us an early hint about whether we might be trending in the wrong direction, in the right direction, or if we are just holding steady. More specifically, in the context of last year’s excitement over a record high fall-to-fall retention rate for first year students, it makes some sense to have a look and see if our broader retention efforts are continuing to hold strong … or if all of last year’s hubbub was just that.

So now that we’ve locked in our enrollment numbers for the spring term we can calculate fall-to-spring retention rates for each cohort. Although we also record winter-to-spring retention rates, it seems like it’s a little easier to make sense of fall-to-spring numbers since winter-to-spring rates are, in essence, a percentage of a proportion (i.e., the number of students enrolled in winter term is only a percentage of those who enrolled in the fall, so a winter-to-spring retention rate by itself can be deceiving).

To put our present numbers in context, the table below shows last year’s fall-to-spring (2015-16) retention rates, the prior three-year average (Academic Years 2013, 2014, 2015) fall-to-spring retention rates, and finally our most current fall-to-spring retention rates.

A couple of things jump out. First, our first-year fall-to-spring retention rate is down slightly from last year’s high. To put this difference in real terms, we would have needed to retain three additional students to match last year’s percentage. However, we did manage to beat the prior three-year average by a hair, which is often a good way to tell if we are headed in the right direction. It’s also good to remind ourselves that a few years ago, we estimated that if everything went perfectly with a first-year class, the best retention rate we could hope for would be 90%. Last year we hit 88.9%. So we are already close to banging our heads on the proverbial ceiling. We will just have to wait to see how this translates into a fall-to-fall retention rate for the first year cohort.

Retention within the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year cohorts is a different story. In each case, our fall-to-spring retention rate clearly beats both last year’s rate as well as the prior three-year average. Some folks have rightly suggested that we should be careful not to lose touch with the needs of upperclass students as we strive to bring up our first-year retention rate. These numbers seem to suggest that we might have managed to maintain that balance pretty well.

And if you are wondering if all of these increased retention rates translate into more students on campus this spring, indeed they do. Last year at this time, we had a student FTE of 2345 (FTE stands for “full-time-equivalent” and is calculated by taking the number of full-time students and adding a third of the total number of part-time students – supposedly, three part-time students roughly equals one full-time student). Coincidentally, the prior three-year average spring FTE is also 2345.

But this spring, our FTE is 2399. That’s the largest spring FTE we’ve ever recorded.

Congratulations to everyone for your hard work on behalf of our students! In the face of all the budget pressures that we can’t control, it’s really heartening to see us so successful on one metric that we can influence.

Make it a good day,

Mark