Student success: A conversation with Claudia Lampman

UAA faces some hard facts: retention and graduation rates are low. Recent data paint a discouraging picture. In 2012, roughly 30 percent of first-time, full-time, degree-seeking freshmen disappeared from the university after their first year. Only about a quarter of the starting cohort graduated six years later.

Numbers are even more staggering for associate degree seekers. Their drop off after the first year is the same; two years later, almost none of them (about one in 10) graduate.

Psychology professor Claudia Lampman has been studying facts like these since taking on her new role November 1 as interim vice chancellor for student success. Her focus is tied directly to the university's current strategic plan, UAA 2020. Student success is one of four core values embraced by the plan; the other three are excellence, access and affordability. Because accreditation rests on graduation rates, Lampman's role - as she succinctly put it - is to "move those numbers."

Lampman relocated from her psychology office in the Natural Sciences Building to Admin 211 in the chancellor's suite. She began to analyze all the information she could gather to bring UAA's student experience, good and bad, into crisp focus.

Lampman says her new job is to tell this story to the whole campus, and to discover tools and strategies to turn around unsuccessful trends. She's hiring a new director of first-year advising and student success to help with the mission. The successful candidate should be on board by the end of March.

Our conversation was edited for clarity and space.

Are there ways the university needs to change, or are there ways students need to change? 

We do. For many years I have heard faculty say that our students are coming in more underprepared than they are elsewhere in the nation. So I have been looking at data. And this does not appear to be true. For high school seniors in the U.S., only 25 percent of them are at or above proficient in math, and 37 percent are at or above proficient in reading. According to ACT college readiness benchmarks, our freshman class looks similar to those across the nation.

At nonselective open-access institutions, 60 percent are not college ready. Those are similar to the numbers we have here. And if 60 percent of our students come in underprepared, 60 percent is the norm, not the exception. It is the rule.

Instead of thinking our students are coming in underprepared, we need to think about what we can do to be prepared for the students coming in. These are our students. How do we teach them?

So where do you begin?

There's a lot of work to be done at the front end. When you apply to UAA, one of the first questions on the application is: 'What is your college?' You have no clue. Then it asks: 'What is your major?'

What ends up happening is students pick something. The big ones are biology,  pre-nursing, psychology, accounting, engineering. They've heard of being an engineer, or a nurse or a doctor. So they sign up their first semester for some of the hardest classes, whether or not they have the math or English requirements. At this stage you need a lot of advice, but we don't require that they get that advice.

My biggest goal right now is a really comprehensive first-year advising program where, once you are admitted, someone contacts you to say, 'Welcome to UAA! I am your first year advisor. I am going to help you with everything you need. I'll help with financial aid. I'll connect you to resources - like military and veterans, disability support, health and counseling. And, I'm going to help you get mandatory academic counseling as well.' We need to welcome students to UAA and let them know that we care about their success - even before they step on campus.

You can stay with this first year advisor for 30 credits. This is the first thing we need to do. We need to onboard people well. We'll start with first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students first. We have about 1,700 of them coming in the fall. We won't be fully operational this fall, but by 2019 we will be.

So you don't want incoming students to pick a major and try to make it work, ready or not?

I don't want our students to be asked: 'What is your major?' I want to ask them: 'What is your area of interest? Is it health? Is it science? Business? Education? Engineering?'

Think of these areas as meta majors. Then advise them on that larger category, as well as on their level of preparation.

This helps solve that problem of picking something without being well informed, and then taking courses that might not count if you switch majors. If you start your first year taking courses that will pretty much count no matter where you end up in that meta major, that is going to help a lot. This isn't a new idea. It has been successful at many schools across the nation.

An example: We have a limited number of nursing slots. That category of interested students is huge. But students might not be exploring all of the other options in the College of Health. The vast majority who start as pre-nursing majors will not end up in the nursing program. We need to show them early on that they have many other options for careers in the health field.

And we need to ask, 'Are they ready for this class?' If you fail two classes your first semester, and you are paying all this money for college, I can see why you would say, 'Uh-uh, college isn't for me...'

Too many of our students are starting off on the wrong foot. In the wrong classes. We need to start people off where they will be successful.

So what tools will advisors have to guide students who are still trying to figure out what they want to study?

The university is adopting a data-driven academic advising tool, called the EAB Student Success Collaborative. It takes a database of the past decade of student data right out of Banner. That allows us to build a predictive model.

So when a student says, 'I want to be a psychology major,' and after the first semester they did not pass their statistics class or the math class that is a pre req for statistics, this model will help them see if there is a better major or a better path. It looks at student vulnerabilities and strengths. Where do they need extra support, and it helps us have a realistic conversation about what other options might be a better fit.

This will be accompanied by a mobile app, called Seawolf Tracks. The app will have the student's schedule, campus resources, all the important to-dos and deadlines, campus maps. It will give them nudges, 'Oh, your FAFSA is due.' Or, 'You have a hold on your account, here is how to resolve it.' They can make an appointment with their advisor on it. They can access scholarship opportunities on it. All those things that are overwhelming and hard to keep track of.

Much has been written about the value and support that comes when students are organized in cohorts. Is UAA looking at that?

Yes. We have moved all first year general education classes out of Arts & Sciences and into the Community & Technical College. The move means we are trying to create a "front door" for students.

It's our version of what is often called a University College, the place you enter. Similar initiatives have been taking place on campuses across the country for decades. The new college will have all those courses scheduled in two classroom buildings on the west side of campus, near the Learning Commons. Students will take classes in blocks, and enhance their opportunities to form community. We know a sense of belongingness is very important to student success.

 

Do you have a mantra for your approach to revising student success at UAA?

I would say the biggest reframe for me is "student-centered campus." We need to change the culture to be student-centered. For me, as a faculty member, it means not thinking just about the class I am teaching, but thinking about the future success of the people in that class. What is their goal, not what is my goal. That is a big reframe for a lot of people. It's not about what I want to teach you, but about what you need as a student to succeed in my class and beyond. For my first 20 years here, I never thought about graduation rates. Now it is constantly on my mind. When one fourth of my General Psychology students failed my class every semester I just chalked it up to students being unprepared or not caring.  I didn't think about the cost of failing for so many students. In the fall of 2017, there were 8,000 failed classes. That's about $5 million in lost tuition and financial aid. We need to do a better job of putting our first year students into courses that are a good fit for them given their goals, interests, and readiness.

What are the obstacles in your way?

I think mindset. I know because I had it. A mindset that we have one way of doing things, we have information to deliver. I think the mindset is that if our students don't pass our course, it is because they can't, or they don't care, or there is a deficit there. We need to shift from thinking in this student-deficit model to a model where we become a campus that is student-centered.

We have everything we need to succeed. We don't lack caring, compassion, smarts, talent. But we need to be creative. And we need to be open to change. That is the only barrier I see.

Written by Kathleen McCoy for the Office of University Advancement