In this episode of the podcast we're joined by UW Tacoma Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Success, Bonnie Becker, and Senior Director, Student Transitions and Success, Amanda Figueroa. You may have already guessed (judging by their titles) that Becker and Figueroa do a lot of work around student success. We'll talk about what we mean when we say "student success." We'll also get into why college is important to individuals and to society. Research suggests that having a college degree impacts everything from social mobility to health. Becker and Figueroa will also outline UW Tacoma's revamped approach to student success including the importance of HIPs (no, not the thing connect to your torso).
Resources & Programs for students:
First Generation Initiatives
Office of Student Advocacy & Support
Teaching & Learning Centers
In this episode of the podcast we're joined by UW Tacoma Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Success, Bonnie Becker, and Senior Director, Student Transitions and Success, Amanda Figueroa. You may have already guessed (judging by their titles) that Becker and Figueroa do a lot of work around student success. We'll talk about what we mean when we say "student success." We'll also get into why college is important to individuals and to society. Research suggests that having a college degree impacts everything from social mobility to health. Becker and Figueroa will also outline UW Tacoma's revamped approach to student success including the importance of HIPs (no, not the thing connect to your torso).
Resources & Programs for students:
First Generation Initiatives
Office of Student Advocacy & Support
Teaching & Learning Centers
We want you to be at UW Tacoma, but we really genuinely care about the success of all of our students and understand that that looks different for different students. There are times where stepping away from college for a little while is probably the best path for an individual student, and that is something that we will help with and encourage and cheer lead and all of the things that we would do for a student who is staying at UW Tacoma.
Speaker 2:From UW Tacoma. This is Paw'd Defiance. Welcome to Paw'd Defiance, where we don't lecture but we do educate. I'm Eric Wilson-Edge Today on the pod a conversation about student success with Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Success, Bonnie Becker, and Senior Director of Student Transitions and Success, Amanda Figueroa. We'll start with the why of college, specifically why college is important and what impact it has on both individuals and society. From there, we'll talk about who goes to college and why, and perhaps more importantly, why some students leave college. Finally, Becker and Figueroa discuss the importance of belonging and purpose to success in college and how they're creating a culture of belonging and purpose at UW Tacoma. Amanda Figueroa Bonnie Becker, welcome to Pod Defiance. It's good to have you back. Both of you have been here before.
Speaker 3:It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for inviting us here today.
Speaker 2:So we are going to talk about student success and lots of things within student success. So my first question, Amanda, I'm going to throw it to you first. Here's a weird one for a podcast from a university why is college important, both to an individual and to society in general?
Speaker 3:Yeah well, thanks for the question. I actually do think it's a fundamental question that we should always be asking ourselves as practitioners what is the point of higher education, what do we think it is, what do students think it is? But some of the things that we know are a benefit to both individuals and society from higher education degrees is definitely around social mobility, and so there's tons of studies out there that show that when you earn a four-year degree or a post-secondary credential, that it's one of the most accessible routes to socioeconomic mobility. In the United States there's still access issues, there's still equity issues, but across both racial and gender demographics, we know that if you are a college graduate, you're going to earn more in your lifetime, you're going to experience less unemployment, you're going to be more likely to have health insurance, have a longer life expectancy, better health outcomes, and by all of these objective measures, we know that a college degree has an impact on individuals in that way and that that benefits society.
Speaker 3:Now I also, really, when I'm thinking about this work, one of the things I like to focus on is the idea of economic security, and this is some new framing and new thinking that's come to me based on a publication from last year from Mathematica, and they define economic security as when individuals have the income and assets needed to attain and preserve their economic independence, that they possess power and autonomy or over their lives and they feel the respect, dignity and sense of belonging that comes from contributing to one's community. And I think that I like this definition so much because it helps to capture another part of higher education that really matters again, both to individuals and to society, which is that it's a space that can nurture critical thinking and a critical consciousness, that empower students to say like they can identify problems in society and then also help to solve those problems.
Speaker 1:One thing that we often get questions about when we talk about this is around other types of post-secondary credentials, like trade schools, and I think something that Amanda and I talk about a lot is that this is not the only pathway to social mobility, socioeconomic mobility, but it's a really important one. It's important one for our culture. It's one of the most obvious and accessible ones for most folks.
Speaker 3:Yeah, especially if we look at folks who receive Pell grants the Georgetown Center for Workforce I'm going to mess up the name. Anyway, there have been studies that have called the Pell Grant the workhorse of socioeconomic mobility in the United States, because we have mechanisms for students who come from lower earning families to gain an education and to really gain access to being middle and upper class income households.
Speaker 2:I'm going to ask maybe two cerebral of a question we may not have a clear answer for, but what is it about college then? Is it just the process of learning, of being pushed to explore or see things differently? Do we know what it is about the college going process and obtaining a degree that influences your life so much?
Speaker 3:I don't know that. We know I think I have a partial answer, and some of that has to do with the changes in the American economy. So we used to be an agriculture and manufacturing based economy and we've really switched over to research and development and services, which does require a different level of training and education, and so as the proportion of those jobs have increased in our workforce, then the required credentials to obtain those jobs has changed over time, and so when you get a higher education degree, you have more access to more of those kinds of jobs which tend to pay better, have health insurance and be more stable and also be sectors that are growing.
Speaker 1:I've also heard people talk about some specific skills. They used to call them soft skills, but I think the framing around essential skills is a little bit more positive in the way of thinking about it. But things like critical thinking, cooperation and communication are things that we sometimes explicitly, but often implicitly, are developing while we're in college, and a lot of interviews that have been done in different contexts, with employers, for example, will often say you know, I can do this, I can teach a specific skill on the job, a specific program or a specific procedure, whatever. The thing that's harder to teach are things like critical thinking, communication and cooperation, and college is really well set up for teaching those things, often when you're not paying attention. There are some efforts to make that more explicit, but a lot of it happens in a very sort of natural and organic way.
Speaker 3:And I think there's some interesting work at UW across all three campuses happening around the impacts of higher education on civic engagement, and so I know there's a concerted effort across the three campuses to really elevate and expand opportunities for students to get civically involved, which we know the more that our students are participating in civic life, the better we all are.
Speaker 2:So, amanda, let's stay with you for a second. So what does the typical and I'm using air quotes here college student look like? And let's start maybe big picture in the United States and then maybe zero in at UW Tacoma.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, we know that overall college enrollment has declined over the last decade or so, and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. So I think that's an important trend that we all need to be paying attention to. And last fall there were about 8.3 million students in the United States seeking an undergraduate degree, and there were far more women enrolled than men. So if you're a college student in the United States, you're more likely to be a woman. That's been true since 1979.
Speaker 3:And I should also note, when I cite that statistic, that those data come from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which, at this time, does not capture any data on non-binary students. And so when we think about who students are, who college undergraduates are in the United States, white students are the largest demographic group by race, and that's followed by Latinae students at 17.5%, and then black students at 10.6% of enrolled students. If you're going to have a full-time as an undergraduate, your average age, or your median age, is 20, and if you're part-time, your median age is 23. So skewing a little older. And then we also serve a lot of first gen students at UW Tacoma. So the best data available about enrollment of first gen students goes back to 2016, but at that time, 37% of undergraduate students were first in their family to earn a four-year degree and, as noted earlier, if your family is either middle or higher income, you're more likely to enroll in college.
Speaker 1:A couple of things that I think often surprises people is that the vast vast majority of college students are not living on campus, they're commuting to college, and that the majority of I don't know if it's the majority, but a big chunk of college students are going to two-year schools. So when we talk about college students we're really talking about. I often like to use the example movies you think about, like Animal House, or there's so many movies about the college experience and very few of them are capturing what the average college-going experience is like today for the average student. There's no average student. They're all above average, but especially ours.
Speaker 2:How does that big picture hold true compared to what the student demographic is at UDEPT-Tacoma?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the UDEPT-Tacoma student does not look like a typical college student in the United States, and so one of the things that is similar is that, among our students, white students are the largest racial demographic group, but they only comprise 34% of undergraduates, compared to 42% of students nationally, and I think that our student body really reflects our access to admission, because when we look at gender representation, we had a really interesting phenomenon last fall where we actually had more men than women enrolled for the first time. In that I can remember. I looked back at data back to 2014 and it was the first time that that had been true.
Speaker 1:It's also the first time the male retention rate is higher than first time I've ever seen that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're enrolling more men, which is great. Our average age of our undergraduate students is 23 years old, so we're a little older than the national average. Over 55% of our undergraduates are first to earn a four-year degree in their family and to come from lower income families, so that's a big percentage of students that are really bucking national trends. And also, since we've joined the National NASPA First Scholars Initiative a few years ago, I've really been taking to the saying that we are a first-gen campus in a first-gen community, because when you look at Pierce County, 28% of adults 24 years or older have a four-year degree or higher, and so really first-gen is a pride point for our campus and it is a hallmark of our community at this point.
Speaker 1:I think another thing that makes our campus very unique is our history starting as only for transfer students. So I started at UW Tacoma in 2006 and that was the first year that we admitted first-year students, freshman students, and so that history is still sort of reflected in our students in that the numbers have shifted over time. But you can think about like half and half we about half of our students are coming straight from high school. Half our students are transferring from another school, which is sort of a unique student body, not unusual across the country, but sort of unique in just how many transfer students we serve and how sort of again, naturally and organically we work with transfer students because it's sort of part of our long-term history.
Speaker 3:But certainly unique in the percentage of undergraduates that are first-gen compared to other four-year schools, I would say so. So Bonnie and I had an opportunity this past March to go to Boston and be part of the first ever NASPA First Scholars Leadership Academy, where we got to meet with colleagues across the country who have demonstrated success in serving students who are first-gen, and we didn't have a lot of peers who had the same percentage of first-gen students who comprised their student body.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's another thing that we do sort of organically. We're really used to working with more than used to working. We love working with our group of students, and so sometimes when Amanda and I get to go elsewhere, we're sort of reminded that it's kind of unique. The student body of Udip to Coma are unique in this way and just a wonderful group of students to work with.
Speaker 2:And maybe this isn't a question that can be answered, but I'm going to ask it anyway because we have the magic of editing. So I've worked here almost eight years, which is not as long as the two of you, but long enough to be surprised by the fact that I've never thought about this myself. You know, I know that we have a large first-generation population and I guess until listening to the two of you, I've never really stopped to ask myself why that might be. Is it a reflection of the population, like you were saying, amanda, in Pierce County? But I imagine that could explain some of it. But there are, you know, tons of schools in the up and down I-5 in Washington and thousands of schools around the world. We know why so many first-gen students come here.
Speaker 3:So there definitely has been some research in Washington State that shows that more students are choosing to stay local. So I think that geography is a big component of the reason why Everything else is conjecture. But I'm happy to conject, do it so I? What I have observed in my 11 years of working at UW Tacoma is that our first-gen students are masters of the friend referral Right.
Speaker 3:So when you start to gain a reputation with communities that have been historically marginalized and harmed by higher education and you graduate them and they get out and they're getting careers and they're experiencing that socioeconomic mobility, then they start to tell their friends and their cousins and their aunties tell their friends. I mean, I really there's so much word-of-mouth referral that happens that I've observed at UW Tacoma. That's my conjecture as to another reason about why is folks know that they're going to have a good experience here, and I've talked to other service providers who are brokers within different K-12 educational spaces and they specifically say I want to send my first-gen students to UW Tacoma because I know they're going to have a good experience.
Speaker 2:Okay, bonnie, your turn. Yeah, so what does the research say about why students leave college? And I imagine that could be complicated. A lot of reasons, but you know, same, same, maybe idea that when Amanda talking about who students are, maybe start big picture and then work down to UW Tacoma.
Speaker 1:For sure. So I think the word you used was complicated, I would say is a good way of describing Any one individual student we talk to often has multiple intertwined parts of their stories. But, that said, there has been quite a bit of research done about this. So the biggest study that's been done is talking to 30,000 Americans who left college through Gallup. So it was a real big, big study, and the most common thing that they heard was around balancing school and work. So to Amanda's point, you know, when we talk about the typical college student, it's there are 18-year-olds going straight from high school living on campus from upper middle class families. But the typical college student is coming from a range of different experiences and so they might have family that they're caring for, they might have their own health issues. So balancing school and work, financial pressures, life events and personal challenges all sort of rose to the top. And then a common theme that Gallup heard, which you'll hear in our story when we talk about UW Tacoma, was seeing the connection between why they're in college, the connection between college and future career, or just the return on investment what was the purpose of being in college? So when we ask this question at UW, tacoma. We get some very similar answers and again, one student might have multiple sort of intertwined parts of their story. But we hear things about financial, mental and physical health, family and personal circumstances, especially since COVID. We hear a lot about flexibility. It's like this balance between wanting flexibility of online learning with the need for that in-person connection and sort of how do we balance those things for our students. But then there are some sort of deeper parts of stories that we often hear about. So we hear about belonging and that can be socially or academically or both. Do I feel like this is a place where I belong? Back to Amanda's point about really feeling like a place that, as a first-gen student, you're going to be well taken care of but also able to interact with a lot of students with a similar background to you, a lot of faculty and staff with the same background as you. So belonging comes up quite a bit. We also hear from students who might not be doing as well as they would like academically. I mean, it lets the reality. It is college and there are certain threshold. Students need to stay above to stay in college and again these things are intertwined.
Speaker 1:Often we find when a student is struggling academically. When we take some time to talk with them, some of these other factors are often coming into play, so really being able to show up and bring their whole selves. And then again we get to this question of why, this question of purpose, why am I in school in the first place? So it's challenging. It's challenging to be in school. We know that, sadly, a large number of our students struggle with food insecurity or housing insecurity, mental health issues. And when you've got these challenges, resilience can often come from purpose right, like yes, I've hit some challenges, but here is why I'm here, which I wanna be really careful. It's not. We feel UW Tacoma works really hard to work with students through some of those more sort of non-academic life challenges and we can talk about that if you're interested.
Speaker 1:And fundamentally, this question of why often ends up coming up. Fundamentally, why am I here? Why am I in college? Why am I taking time away from my family? Why am I pushing through? So those are the kinds of things that we hear. It's sort of similar on a national level and on a local level, but every story is unique. Every story is sometimes can be really heartbreaking, sometimes can actually be really inspiring that balance of thinking about looking for these sort of big picture patterns and then focusing on the individual and that individual's story and their individual circumstances. ["the Story of the Man"].
Speaker 2:It's interesting, as I was listening to you, bonnie, I thinking back to when I was, because I graduated high school and then I went to community college and then I quit. And I think about that and I definitely think that my rationale was I couldn't really see why I was going. I think there was also a little bit like I've been in school since I was like five years old and I just wanna take a break and then so I quit, and then I was still living at home and I was working full time and then my mom started charging me rent and I was like, well, I'd rather, I'm gonna go back to school. But I think the point here is that I started thinking about. I think we tend to think of colleges as college and we tend to throw them as altogether, and I can't help but think of an experience. Like you say, you go into a target. Target wants you to have the exact same experience, no matter where you go, right.
Speaker 2:Stores are laid out pretty similarly. Here's this handbook on how to talk to customers, but I think the light bulb that went off in my head is that you don't actually initially want that for college right? It has to reflect the needs of the people you're serving.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It goes back to that feeling of belonging. Right, If something feels too cookie cutter, it's often harder to find that feeling of belonging. So it's, I think, important as a region that we have a diversity of schools with a diversity of feels and specialties and a range of different things I would say that would be true of any college, not just UDip, Tacoma is that you wanna be unique and you wanna have things about your campus that are special, that are well matched to the students who are coming to your school.
Speaker 3:I also often reflect on the fact that teaching is, at its very heart, a relational endeavor. Right, people are built to learn. We learn all the time. We have teachers from all over the place, whether that's a professor in a classroom or my mom or my friend right, and at the end of the day, it comes down to the relationship that you have, and that's one of the tensions I think we have to navigate in higher education is trying to create systems that serve all people and yet having people who are so diverse it's one of the things I love about working at UDip Tacoma is that it's this constant challenge of understanding.
Speaker 3:There's a diversity of story and a diversity of needs, and how do we best adapt to meet every student where they are? It's not easy, but it's exciting, it's engaging and I love all. I have so many stories and I'm sure all of my colleagues do as well about students that they've gotten to know the individual pieces that those students put together to help themselves persist, and then always thinking about who are the students that didn't get to connect and what could we have done differently in order to support them.
Speaker 2:Okay, amanda, let's stay with you. So, the two of you, you do a lot of work around student success and in higher ed there's a lot of like words that have like a sound fancy, or are you like. I don't know what that means. So I'm curious what student success means for the work that you're doing and in your minds, and as for the campus as well, because I can't. If it's just getting people to graduation to get a degree, you can have an absolutely miserable experience and still get your degree.
Speaker 2:But I suspect that's not what we mean by student success is just the degree graduation component.
Speaker 3:That's absolutely right, and whenever we start to define terms like this, I always think it's important that we go back to the individual students, and part of what I think our obligation is to create opportunities for them to tell us what does success mean? Because every answer is gonna be a little different, and part of our job is to help create learning and development experiences that support them in engaging in that question themselves critically and thinking about it through different lenses, because that answer is so highly individualized and if we do our job well, they are able to ask themselves and reflect on that question over their entire lifetime, which is my hope for the purpose of education as well. But we do have an institutional definition, as you may imagine. Well, at least I would say actually not even an institutional definition, we do have a working definition that is going to guide some new efforts moving forward, and we're launching a new effort that is going to help nurture alignment in student success work in ways that emphasize equity and inclusion, the development of students' sense of belonging and sense of purpose, and a dedicated focus on the needs of first gen students.
Speaker 3:And so that's what some new efforts that we're launching, that we've been working really hard on and are excited about, and we're gonna work with a new group of colleagues across the campus who represent faculty and staff and advisors, and we're gonna be focusing on students graduating at higher rates with engaged and meaningful experiences both in and out of the classroom that help prepare them for next steps.
Speaker 3:So, as a campus, we're going to be focusing on collaborative programming and campus structures that encourage academic excellence, degree completion and career readiness in equitable ways for all students. So we're really excited to engage in this question, working with this working definition, with colleagues from across the campus to have perspectives from a lot of different faculty members and colleagues. So I certainly have a perspective about what that might mean, based on the programs and services that I lead within Student Affairs, the research and the reading that I've done, the discussions that I've had with students and my own journey through higher education. But it's really going to take everyone, including students, to do this in a way that closes equity gaps in a sustainable way, and so I'm really looking forward to engaging in this process and I'm excited about the innovation potential that can happen from engaging in this work in this way, and my motto this year is faster learning and faster change. That's what we're going for, I think one thing.
Speaker 1:When we talk about the definition of student success, some of us that have been working in this for a while If I'm being really honest which is always a good thing to do, and you've got a mic in your face might roll our eyes a little bit, and that I have been, I feel, on a number of different initiatives that have spent a lot of time really trying to nail down a definition of student success. When I talk to some of my colleagues from other schools, you know we'll have sort of a similar experience. In the end, student success is about allowing students, or providing opportunity for students, to achieve their dreams. There's a few different ways that we can measure that, to hold ourselves accountable, and then let's sit down and get to work, because you can spend a lot of time, you need to define it and you need to be measuring something, because what you measure is what you will be held accountable to, and so that's it's really important that we spend some time on this, but in the end, it's time to get the work done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say we're moving from defining to doing.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you Be a nice t-shirt.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you should make t-shirts.
Speaker 2:I mean I'll take a little cut of it. Well, I have an important and perhaps controversial follow up for you, bonnie and Amanda. So if we, is it possible then to define student success as maybe that student feeling like they could have more success elsewhere, and not necessarily at UW Tacoma which would be great if they do, but they would if they could. But maybe that's not what success looks like for that student 100%.
Speaker 1:Actually, I don't find that question controversial at all Did.
Speaker 1:I just get myself fired?
Speaker 1:No, not at all.
Speaker 1:We're very explicit about this in the various academic success programs and I'm sure Amanda decided the house as well that fundamentally we are concerned about the success of all of our students and we hope that that involves getting a four year degree from UW Tacoma, but it is not always the case that that is the best pathway for a student and there's a range of really good reasons why that would be, and so I've heard the language of we get the assist.
Speaker 1:One thing I've tried to do is when we look at things like our graduation rate which is like if the new Tribune were to ask about student success, they'd want to know the graduation rate like that's, the classic measure is to try and get some information about students who left and then graduated from elsewhere because we get the assist right, like, yeah, we want you to be at UW Tacoma, but we really genuinely care about the success of all of our students and understand that that looks different for different students. There are times where stepping away from college for a little while is probably the best path for an individual student and that is something that we will help with and encourage and cheer, lead and all of the things that we would do for a student who was staying at UW Tacoma.
Speaker 3:We also have 16% of our student body who are connected to the military, and one thing that we know from our work with career development and Pierce College and military connected students is that military spouses we have a lot of military spouses enrolled at UW Tacoma and they don't always have a choice in where they are and what they're doing. And so, to Bonnie's point, having that assist of being a place where they can continue to earn credits, get credit for what they've already done and help set them on a good trajectory for what they want to accomplish is an important path. I can also think of examples not to out myself and get myself fired as well where we had students who came into a career development office and said at that time they wanted to do something that was not an available major at UW Tacoma, that was not a career path where they were best situated to do that on our campus, and one of our ethical guidelines is to make sure that we're giving students the best advice possible to accomplish their future.
Speaker 1:I think any academic advisor, if they were sitting at this chair, would be adamant that Absolutely, absolutely, it's not a controversial question, that fundamentally we are concerned about the success of the individual student more than we are having them be at UW Tacoma.
Speaker 3:Now, that being said, part of what I'm interested in is measuring what happens after graduation. This is an area that our campus will hopefully be investing in more, which is to understand not only what happens six months after you graduate, but five years, ten years, not only your employment rate, but did you earn other advanced degrees? How happy are you? Are you satisfied in your job? Do you attribute some of your success to higher education? And there are some exciting tools out there that have been tested and are well developed that could help us to do that, and I know that's one of the things that I aspire to help our campus to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally, when we're talking about student success, we had this line in the old strategic plan about fundamentally, how successful we are as measured by the success of our alumni, and in a lot of cases that looks like employment. In many cases it's about employment. It is about intergenerational mobility, economic mobility, and I really like that. Amanda mentioned that. It's broader than that. It's employment plus. Did your college education set you on a pathway to thrive, whatever that looks like for you? And that's hard to measure. It's really hard to measure. It's something we aspire to do. I think some of the career stuff is a little bit easier to measure than some of the more thriving elements of this, especially because we are such a young campus. But now that we're coming into our, what are we? We're not teenagers anymore, we're young adults. I don't know. We do have a lot more alumni and a lot more opportunity to think about post-graduation success as really what's driving the work that we do.
Speaker 3:And there are instruments out there that ask students about are you employed and are you happy? Do you feel fulfilled by the work that you're doing? Is it meaningful to you? And I would say, if someone is employed and they're making a lot of money and they're miserable, we probably haven't done our job very well, not probably we haven't done our job well.
Speaker 2:I mean maybe let's not commit to an answer. I mean I would just. I just can't help to think. What I'm hearing from the two of you is that we want, we treat, we don't view our students as product. We view them as people, which feels like kind of how it should be.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 100%, of course, and that goes back to my comment about education being fundamentally a relational endeavor. It's a human endeavor. Learning and teaching and growing is something we have done since forever. Right, it's a part of all of our what's the word I'm looking for? It's a part of all of our heritage. We're all learners and we all fundamentally want to grow, and higher education, in my opinion, should be a space that helps nurture that, whatever that looks like. Now, if it's someone who doesn't make a lot of money but is doing something personally meaningful to them, that's a success.
Speaker 2:So let's, bonnie, let's talk for a second. I think you explained purpose pretty well, so I want to focus on belonging, which I kind of get in a general sense like do you feel like you belong at this place? But let's unpack this idea of belonging and then, as we unpack it, we'll bring Amanda in to talk about how do we create this sense of belonging and purpose at UW Tacoma.
Speaker 1:Sure, if you don't mind, I want to. I'd like to just take a step back, just do a little shout out, because you had asked me earlier about what do we know about why UW Tacoma students leave. Some of what I said came from some internal work that we have done, but I want to do a huge shout out to the Student Voices Report, which we are a part of a group called Tacoma Complets, which comes out of the Graduate Tacoma Movement, and Amanda and I have been serving on the Tacoma Complets Board for a number of years now, along with colleagues from Tacoma Community College, staff from Graduate Tacoma, the Foundation for Tacoma Students and folks from a group called Degrees of Change, which is another community group that's focused on college student success, and we did a community-driven interview of 56 students who had left either UW Tacoma or Tacoma Community College. This was done in 2020, like right at the beginning of COVID, which was interesting timing, and, since I'm in the shout out business right now, kelly Baymeyer, natissia McNamara and Kamal Yusuf were the sort of main interviewers for that, for that work, and so I had mentioned things like financial and basic needs, family care, life events, mental and physical health. We also heard a bit about classroom experience and just sort of navigating the college experience, but the thing that really rose to the top was this notion of sense of purpose and sense of belonging, and so we talked a little bit about purpose and how purpose can be its career, but it's bigger than career. It's things of importance to the self and beyond the self, and that is really intertwined with this notion of belonging. I have this quote that I love from a guy who wrote a book about purpose, william Damon, in 2009. The closest thing to a prerequisite for a culture of purpose is a sense of community. So this idea that these things are not independent of each other, that a sense of belonging really comes down to feeling like you are a part of a community, that you are seen as you are, for who you are, and that that community is behind you. That community wants what's best for you and you want what's best for that community.
Speaker 1:So when we talk to students about some of these issues we've done a couple of focus groups or like public roundtables we often hear this narrative. When we talk about like, why are you in college? And there are certain themes that seem to rise to the top Almost always the first thing we will hear is family. I am here because my auntie inspired me. I am here because of everything my mother sacrificed to get me here. Almost always it starts with family, local community, identity, equity, in some cases, faith and making a difference in the world, and so we find it kind of hard to separate this notion of belonging and purpose and we don't really want to separate them. So there are things that we can do that help inspire both in students, that can help develop both in students, and that's really been the framework that, since we got the student voices report from this group, we've been working with that. Amanda and I really tried to shape our approach to student success around the notions of purpose and belonging, these sort of intertwined ideas.
Speaker 3:And we've been really grateful to do that as well with Dr Sharon Lang from New Ducks to become a nursing and healthcare leadership.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Yes, sharon and I are working on a paper that we're hoping to get out Amanda's a co-author and a range of folks from this group about this study around sense of purpose. There isn't as much research around purpose and belonging and how those intertwine, and so we're hoping to the group of us to do some deeper work around that and perhaps, to Amanda's point about innovation, perhaps contribute something new to the field.
Speaker 3:Well, I have a few ideas on this. I actually think I could talk for a couple weeks about things we might be able to do, but some of the things that I certainly think about from where I'm sitting in the institution is developing a greater fluency in using student-centered approaches and how we develop and improve and assess programs and services. I think that's really important. I also think about expanding the spaces and the ways that we engage students in reflective activities about their why in seeking their degrees. I think it's also around expanding access and engagement and high quality and high impact practices like paid internships, expanding our collective capacities to use trauma aware practices in our spaces and working with our employers to know who our students are and how they can successfully recruit and retain them.
Speaker 3:And I think we use a phrase a lot in Tacoma completes about employment ready students and student ready employers, and so it really we're so lucky to live in a community that has embraced collective impact around cradle to career, workforce development and education, because it takes so many stakeholders to really move the needle. And while those are some of my initial thoughts, I also know I don't have all the answers. From where I'm sitting, I don't know all the things that will work for all of the students, and that is partly why we're putting together this student success steering committee. I don't think we have a formal name yet, but we've invited our co-chairs and they've all said yes, which is very exciting, and it's really going to take a collaborative effort that is also not just those co-chairs but staff and faculty from all across the campus to really innovate in ways to do this that is innovative within our means for the resources we have, but also helps us to understand what resources should we be focused on attaining so that we can further the work.
Speaker 1:So to amplify something Amanda was talking about around high impact practices, sometimes called hips in our jargon. When I was on my way here to come talk to you, my son said are you going to go and talk about hips? Of course I am.
Speaker 2:He's maybe heard it once or twice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but things like paid internships, study abroad, undergraduate research, student employment. These are opportunities for students to work really closely with faculty staff and other students on questions that matter to them, and so there's a very rich literature around the positive benefits of high impact practices, not just in college but at sort of all levels of learning. So often it's called something else, like active learning or project-based learning, but there's all sorts of evidence that these are the kinds of practices that lead to deeper learning and student retention and a range of other benefits being more career ready. The thing that's really cool about high impact practices is that they have been shown to improve a range of different things in all students, but they also reduce equity gaps between students who are, say, first gen or students of color. You tend to see less of a gap in whatever you're measuring, the more high impact practices that students are able to participate in. But here's the rub high impact practices are not particularly equitably distributed, so access to high-impact practices often involves money. It's pretty hard to work in a lab. You know many hours a week when you're also working 40 hours a week or you have to get home to take care of children and family. There's often a lot of barriers that are invisible, so the pathways into some of these practices are not always as clear as we would like them to be. It's often the students who are the most sort of upfront and or have a lot of agency that can sort of hunt down some of these experiences, and so one of the things that is important at any school but that we are trying to improve at UW Tacoma is to make those pathways into high-impact practices more clear, more transparent, more fair, to understand that our students will often need some external support in order to participate in those types of activities.
Speaker 1:But that that's kind of like the point. I mean that's, that's what we're here to do. Right, we're here to develop. Amanda keeps talking about how this is relational. That's a that's a key tool for developing those relationships is working really closely with students. So I've had over a hundred students that I've worked with an independent study in my time at UW Tacoma. I still keep in touch with most of them. The relationships that we develop in that research experience or I would say, be the same for study abroad, student employment they tend to be deeper, they tend to be longer lasting. When I sit down to write a recommendation for a student who's been in my lab for two years. I've got some real concrete things that I can recommend about that student right. So there's a whole range of benefits that come from HIPPS, but the reality is that they they have costs and that those costs are not equally distributed, and so we need to be really intentional and mindful about how that experience is made accessible to our students.
Speaker 2:One of the things I find interesting is that the approach to creating belonging here is, you know, because UW Tacoma is often labeled a community campus, which can be a difficult thing to establish like a sense of community and maybe belonging. But from what I'm hearing it, you know, paid internships and that sort of thing is not something you need to quote, unquote traditional college experience for Like it's, not like a dorm or the things that we tend to think of as creating community it's. You don't need those things to make that happen.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:I think it's I, so I'm wrong. No, no, no, that's. I'm not saying that at all. What I have seen in my time at UW Tacoma is I used to ask myself questions like do students want to get an email or do they want a text message? And I no longer ask myself is it or it is? And the answer is always and that's one of the most beautiful things about our student body is that they all come from different walks of life with different experiences.
Speaker 3:I think my hypothesis is that our success is going to be in creating enough modular pathways that students can pick and choose what works for them at that time. The living learning communities that we launched this year in our housing was really powerful for the students that participated and for the students that commute. It might be the Smash Brothers group in the doghouse that which, by the way. If you want a good time, go to the doghouse around the lunch hour and the Husky hour and watch some Smash Brothers being played. It is riveting.
Speaker 3:For other students, it's going to be being part of the Black Student Union, or it's going to be part of being part of a rise cohort with the Center for Equity and Inclusion, or it's going to be about being employed at the Student Activity Board and then being able to use some of your coursework in finance and how you're helping to manage that budget. It really we need to create a really highly customizable, modular way for students to engage, and when we look across the country at how folks are dealing with this question of equity, it's about taking making sure that every student is exposed, no matter what which has to do with curriculum. So we can't rely on all of these experiences to happen outside of the classroom. We should have outside of the classroom experiences because you never know where students are going to develop that community. But the best way to get it equitably across all students is to make sure that we're thinking about what's happening in those classrooms, because that students have to do to get their degree. Everything else they have to make the time for.
Speaker 2:Well said. So we've come to the end of our conversation. I have one last question. Well, maybe I might have a follow up. I'm not just like that. So what's in terms of student success? We've talked about some things that are coming down. So what's next in terms of student success? And then the million dollar question is how are we going to gauge whether that was those things are successful? What metrics are we using? How do we know if it worked?
Speaker 1:So Amanda already mentioned that we've got a group that's going to be working next year on a student success strategy, and when I say group, it's going to touch sort of all parts of campus. So we have co-chairs identified who are going to be working on five different strategies, but within those strategies there's lots of opportunity for faculty staff, students, even community members to get involved. And so we are going to be focusing on five strategies, with one that's sort of intertwined among various strategies. So focusing on the first year experience, the experience of our graduate students, which we didn't really get a chance to talk about today. We were really, at least in my mind, often talking about the undergraduate experience, but the graduate student experience needs some attention.
Speaker 1:This should be familiar to you by now, but high impact practices are one of those strategies, and then two that are maybe not like super sexy to talk about during a podcast, but that really are central to driving student success, and one of those is removing curricular barriers, things around scheduling pathways into majors, class availability really exciting, sexy things to talk about. And then the fifth is the common student data system. So building some infrastructure that we have sorely needed on our campus to better work together in service of students. So those are the five strategies, but sort of weaved among them is the theme of communication how important communication with students and with each other is and is a space that needs a significant amount of attention. But we decided to sort of apply that communication to specific elements of this student success strategy and then overall, we're really trying to take this especially in the first year experience, but I think this applies across multiple groups.
Speaker 1:We've talked quite a bit about how many of our students are first generation students. So thinking about applying a first gen lens to our work and thinking about ways that we can. I was talking earlier about, like all these hidden pathways to success, that one of the best practices when we talk about working with first gen students is making those hidden things more explicit. And if we did that for everything that we did, if we made the navigation process of being at UW Tacoma clear, it will help all students. So we're really trying to keep that first generation lens on all of the work that we do across all of these groups. Do you want to add anything?
Speaker 2:Nope, that was a lot of build up for.
Speaker 3:I'm best at drama.
Speaker 2:Oh nice.
Speaker 3:Thanks.
Speaker 1:I'll have you know, I am famous for being the numbers person and I have withheld. I have not gone too, too deep into rabbit holes with statistics, with y'all yet, but I could.
Speaker 3:She thought that wasn't too too deep. Did I go too deep? You did, I'm just kidding, I have more. I told you I'm good at drama.
Speaker 2:Hit me with some statistics.
Speaker 1:I have a whole folder. Well, you had asked about metrics, like how are we going to know that we are being successful? And I would say that we have some guidance from the strategic plan around some really common indicators. Right, we want to improve our graduation rate, we want to improve our persistence and retention rates and we want to decrease our equity gaps, and so we have some very specific numbers that we are pointed towards in that way. But I think, from Amanda and my perspective, those tend to be what we would call a lagging indicator, right, like, if we do everything right, then six years from now, we will see the numbers going up in our six-year graduation rate, and that is super important, but it's important because of what it implies in that six-year period. Right, so we are working with our groups to generate some shorter-term metrics to help keep us on track, keep us accountable. We're using some tools that we got from the NASPA first scholars that Amanda had mentioned earlier, using some tools to help go with this fast change, fast learning kind of approach, to have some really clear milestones every quarter that we're going to be hitting, to make short-term change but also be moving towards these longer-term strategy.
Speaker 1:Overall, we're trying to. Well, we're trying to decrease our equity gaps in things like one quarter of persistence and one-year retention. We're trying to reduce those to zero. That's the goal and that is always our goal. But we're also talking about improving our six-year graduation rate. For our first time in college students, so freshman students We've been sort of bouncing around in the mid-50s 50%, 55%, 58%, and we would like to bump that up to the mid-60s, and then our transfer student graduation rate, which is always considerably higher than our freshman graduation rate, from the 82-ish low 80s to the high 80s. So we have some clearer numerical goals. But again, it's really more about developing shorter-term ways of measuring and, more than measuring, inspiring change. Right Like we're going to hit this in 90 days, we're going to make sure that we have accomplished X, y and Z and that's how we get to that six-year. Where do you start for trying to change a six-year graduation rate?
Speaker 3:I think there's another intangible piece that it would be hard to measure in a quantitative sense, but I keep talking about how we need to continue to nurture a culture of interdependence at UW Tacoma, that often when I hear colleagues talking about services and programs, things are coming very much from a departmental structure perspective, which makes sense.
Speaker 3:My hope is that we shift that language and natural gravity to thinking about holistically how students navigate our institution and that there is a greater sense that what I'm doing with orientation programs matters to the Teaching and Learning Center they're already great partners so I don't mean to call them out but that we see more of that kind of oh right, what's happening in your major matters to what's happening in advising. What's happening over with facilities and how students are using a common space actually matters to this professor and this program. That kind of interdependence, I think, is a feeling, a sense of how we work together and collaborate together, centering students in our work. That is another piece that we're going to need to move and that we hope to provide some of the conditions, or help create some of the conditions, that that kind of work can really thrive on our campus.
Speaker 1:And to build on that, I mean one thing we have really noted when we talk about sense of purpose, when we talk about anything around student success students are humans, right, and so are we, and so having a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging is important for faculty and staff as well. Something that has been really heartening for me is as we rolled out the student success strategy and put out a call for folks to join these groups is we were I don't want to say overwhelmed with response, because we weren't overwhelmed, we were just thrilled by how much response there was from folks who were really excited to dig in and get going, like get to work on some of this stuff. Most of us are at UW Tacoma fundamentally because we love our students and we want our students to be successful. And providing opportunities for us to work together to Amanda's point, sort of independent of our separate groups, but to work in a more interdependent way towards a common goal I think is important in the sort of post COVID, coming back to work, trying to sort of figure out your own why, why do you come to work every day?
Speaker 1:That's an important basic human need that all of us need, and just always remembering that it's not just the work we're doing around student success, it's the process of getting there. And the process of getting there I'm really excited about and I'm with you. It's a less tangible thing, but that response to me has, just like all summer I've just been bouncing with excitement over the response that we got of people who were volunteering their time. We often heard I am so busy, I shouldn't do this, but I'm going to anyway because this is so important and this is why I'm here and this is why I'm here, bonnie, as well. So it just that's part of the success of it to me is sort of rebuilding that sense of community and sense of purpose and sense of belonging amongst ourselves in service of our students.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. You can't see it on a podcast, but I am emphatically nodding.
Speaker 2:We could hear it though the wind created from that. It's like a gentle whooshing sound. That's how you know you're really agreeing passionately. The music you're hearing is by UW Tacoma Associate Teaching Professor, Nicole Blair. Be sure to like and subscribe to our podcast. You will find us on Spotify, Google podcasts, Apple podcasts, Stitcher and Pucketcasts.