Abstract
Nearly two years of intensive research into the daily work of twenty institutions may finally put to rest any doubt that building cross-campus collaborations to facilitate student success is essential.
Highlights
Team members of Project DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practice) spent almost two years immersing themselves in the daily work of twenty campuses.The institutions studied during the project are small, large, urban, rural, historically black, majority white, commuter and residential, highly selective, and not selective at all.Their common denominator is that they all have participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and have scored better than predicted across some or all of this survey’s five benchmarks of effective educational practice: level of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student interaction with faculty members, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environment.All twenty enjoy a graduation rate that is higher than predicted after taking into account relevant student and institutional characteristics
AT SOME OF THE INSTITUTIONS, the president leads the charge for student success initiatives; at others, the provost or dean of students is the key player; and at still others, faculty members are the champions of change
The Project DEEP team used student engagement as a proxy for quality because engagement has been shown to be the best predictor of student success, after controlling for past academic performance and preparation
Summary
Two years of intensive research into the daily work of twenty institutions may put to rest any doubt that building cross-campus collaborations to facilitate student success is essential. The Project DEEP team, working through the NSSE Institute, used student engagement as a proxy for quality because engagement has been shown to be the best predictor of student success, after controlling for past academic performance and preparation. At the University of Michigan, creating an undergraduate experience on par with graduate and professional programs has been the focus of senior administrators, including the president, provost, and academic deans In his introduction to the Report of the President’s Commission on the Undergraduate Experience, former president Lee Bollinger summarized the “Michigan Way” of pursuing academic excellence at the undergraduate level:“[It is] my belief that the very health of a university, broadly speaking, is connected to how it cares for its students, and perhaps especially its undergraduate students because of their special vulnerability to being neglected. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models—that is, they are responsible for learning” (p. 340)
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