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Four Tips for Improving Undergraduate Student Success

Here are four things academic departments can do this year to improve undergraduate student success:

  1. Invite new students to join your department’s undergraduate majors club. New students are looking for opportunities to connect academically and socially to their peers.
  2. Review course syllabi with students during the first course meeting. The concept of a course syllabus can be intimidating or foreign to first-time college students.
  3. Ensure that your lower-division courses have frequent early low-stakes assignments. This helps new students evaluate whether the study skills they relied upon in high school will suffice in college.
  4. Reach out to students who have not accessed a course’s Canvas site in the first two weeks of the term. Students who don’t access course Canvas sites in the first two weeks are substantially more likely to leave the university at the end of the semester.

Thanks to the efforts of the entire campus community, our retention rate for first-time first-year students has reached an all-time record high of 86.8 percent!

Your efforts really do make a difference.

These offices are just a few of your partners in supporting undergraduate student success: