Ball State University

Joel Whitesel focuses on student success and retention through curriculum design, stakeholder collaboration and data-informed intervention. His work brings together faculty, advisors, students and campus partners to identify barriers early and create practical pathways toward persistence and career readiness.

Listening Across the Student Experience

Improving student success requires more than reaching out to students after attendance problems or academic difficulties emerge. Institutions need a fuller understanding of what shapes the student experience.

For the past six years, I have worked on improving student success for business majors. The experience has reinforced how important it is to listen to the people who see different parts of the student journey.

Students, alumni, employers, campus partners, faculty and advisors each bring a different perspective on the challenges students face. Bringing those perspectives together can reveal problems that may otherwise remain isolated within individual departments or offices.

An advisory board made up of representatives from those groups has helped us pinpoint challenges and inform curriculum decisions. One result was the removal of a required three-credit course from our core curriculum and its replacement with three one-credit courses.

Designing Around Critical Transitions

The three courses focus on major transitions that students experience, but that can fall between the cracks of traditional major coursework. They address the movement from high school to college, from college to an internship and from graduation into a first year of employment.

Those transitions also provide opportunities to develop durable skills that students need beyond their academic programs. Curriculum can support those skills while giving students clearer preparation for what comes next.

Students also need to visualize where their work is leading. When the payoff from that effort is difficult to see, maintaining motivation becomes harder, particularly during the early stages of college.

First-year classes, therefore, require careful attention to the faculty members assigned to them. Personable faculty who connect with students can help establish the sense of belonging that encourages students to remain engaged.

Finding Problems before Students Struggle

Student connection extends beyond the classroom. Bringing faculty together to discuss challenges can help identify issues that need attention, while partnerships with student organizations, Housing and Residence Life, financial services and mentoring programs create additional sources of support.

“Student success grows when institutions listen, address challenges early, strengthen support systems and use data to create the conditions students need to persist and thrive.”

Data provides another way to understand where students encounter difficulty. High DFW rates, problematic course combinations and withdrawal patterns among particular student populations can reveal areas where changes may be needed.

Our most general major, which is also the largest in the college, was 15 percent less likely to be retained. That finding has prompted a review of the curriculum, additional instructional support and special sections of our durable skills courses for students in that major.

Tools such as EAB Navigate can help identify students who may be at risk, but identifying systemic problems before students encounter them is equally important. Hidden prerequisites, courses that contribute to stop-out patterns and informal student warnings about certain courses or faculty can all point to issues requiring attention.

Addressing Financial Barriers Early

Timely intervention remains important, but preventive work can have an even greater effect when institutions already know where students are likely to encounter difficulty. The goal is to address problems before they become reasons for students to leave.

Finances represent another significant challenge. We have increasingly seen students hesitate to take out loans, which can appear sensible in the short term but may ultimately lead some students to leave before earning a degree.

Leaving college without graduating can also place students into loan repayment without the higher earning potential that a completed degree may provide. Financial decisions, therefore, need to be considered within the longer-term context of student success.

Frequent sessions with the financial aid office can help students understand what they are working toward and how short-term choices can affect that path. Those conversations are particularly important for first-generation and Pell-eligible students who may need additional support in navigating the financial side of college.

Turning Insight into Coordinated Action

Many people within an institution know part of the challenges students face. The opportunity is to become a clearinghouse for those insights and turn them into coordinated action rather than leaving individual problems within separate areas of campus.

We have had success building curriculum around identified needs, revisiting prerequisites, revising high-DFW courses and working with advisors to avoid problematic course combinations. We have also focused on placing the right faculty in early classes and helping students establish connections with their peers.

Data analysis of majors and student demographics, alert tools and other technology can help determine where additional action is needed. Technology becomes more useful when it follows a clear understanding of the underlying problems rather than serving as the starting point.

Student success depends on addressing fundamental issues before they become crises. When institutions combine stakeholder insight, curriculum changes, targeted support and data analysis, they can move from trying to salvage students after difficulties emerge toward creating conditions that help more students persist.