The only thing I hate more than listicles – you know, those catchy “Top 5 things doctors say you shouldn’t eat” posts that are the pure embodiment of clickbait? – are recipe posts that start with a long-winded story rather than just cutting to the quick. So, allow me to violate one pet peeve while forgoing another.
Whether you plan on launching a new student success initiative in the Fall of 2025 or refining something already in place, it’s important to begin that work now. This Spring. I know we’re busy, resource-strapped, and dealing with a lot both inside and outside our offices, but for us to see improvements in those key student success metrics (retention rates, DFWs, students on academic probation, etc.), we need a few effective planning steps.
Thus (gulp, wince) here are my top three reasons why now is a critical time to make sure your student success efforts are effective.
1. It takes a lot more than a good rollout.
If you know me at all, you’ve probably heard me talk about the importance of strategy, operations, and tactics. It’s a lesson I learned from a military history course way back during my undergrad days (thank you to Dr. Ron Spiller and a liberal arts education). The framework comes from military strategy and emphasizes that, when planning, you need to consider three things:
A. Strategy - What is the goal you want to achieve?
B. Operations - What resources do you have to achieve that goal?
C. Tactics – How are those resources deployed?
This leads to yet another pet peeve: the term “best practice.” Too many times to count, administrators will ask me questions like, “What are other schools doing?” or “How did they implement that?” We’ve all been in conference sessions about big strategic initiatives where someone will ask the most inane logistics question, absent the institutional context of how or why that was effective.
Oh, you transitioned your whole institution from faculty advising to a centralized advising model? What did you serve for lunch at the first training for the new advisors?
What truly irks me about this approach is that these same individuals will also tell you how their institution is different than any other one on the planet. “Well, you know… things are a little different here at XYZ college. We have all these other things that make us special.”
So which is it? Are you a unique institution, with a combination and interaction of students, faculty, staff, resources, strategy, culture, budget, and governance that makes you truly different than any other? Or are you just like the next college/university over and eager to adopt precisely what worked for them?
When you think about successful planning through the lens of strategy, operations, and tactics, it becomes clear that searching for “best practices” can be problematic. Best practices generally fall into one of two categories: Operational practices, which seek to change the resources we have to provide more or better capacity, and tactical practices, which refer to changes in our actual processes, procedures, etc.
The reason why we struggle to see effective institutional change – in our culture, strategy, work, and outcomes – is that anything we do cannot be applied in a vacuum. Identifying needs at the operational or tactical level is one thing, but if we do that without also considering the strategic context, other resources, and existing tactics, it’s likely to fall short.
So, whatever your plans are for the fall, here are some important questions to ask:
Is this strategic, operational, or tactical?
If you’re pursuing a tactical change, do you have sufficient resources (operationally) to make that happen? What other capacities might you need?
If it’s an operational change, how do you intend to roll that into practice?
Overall, what is the strategy? What is the thing we want to achieve? Sure, saying something like “higher retention rates” is easy, but how do you want to achieve that? What is the approach?
I’m not a fan of adopting theories outright and saying that’s how the world works. However, when a model can help me interpret or apply information more effectively, I’m all for it. Probably no other model has impacted my way of thinking more than the consideration of strategy, operations, and tactics. Whatever you’re prepping for the Fall, it’s important to consider each aspect individually, as well as how they interact, to make sure your plans come to fruition.
2. You’ll need time and opportunities for training.
Training is like the candy shell on an M&M: without it, everything falls apart and becomes a mess. Operational resources need effective training to make sure they are effectively integrated and applied in practice. Tactical initiatives need training to connect constituents with operational resources and create a standard of practice.
Building effective training programs is difficult. Another advantage of the strategy-operations-tactics (S-O-T) approach is that it provides a context for learning. In higher education, where we change often, work across silos, and tend to be not very nimble, that context is incredibly helpful for fostering learning and change. Whether working with faculty to improve pedagogical practice or training advisors on a holistic approach to student support, training (particularly through an S-O-T) lens doesn’t just say “Here’s what we need you to do,” it also answers the strategic question of “why are we doing this in the first place?” or the operational one of “And what resources will I have to be able to do make this happen?”
It’s important to think about your Fall 2025 changes now to give you time to develop an effective training plan. In fact, the trickier part is simply finding a time for the training to take place. For most institutions, we just kicked off the Spring term. Then come midterms and spring break, quickly followed by finals and graduation. Then comes summer, when many campuses across the country become ghost towns. Many faculty are off and even full-time staff need some vacation. Before you know it, enrollment and orientation rushes will be upon us.
Developing effective training is hard enough, but in our world, sheer delivery can be even harder. Thus, for the purposes of ramping up training and the availability of your trainees, now is a great time to start.
3. Never underestimate the value of a pilot.
The first time I ever administered a big survey was during summer orientation. Even with a sound process and notable effort to integrate the survey into our orientation process, we got a response rate somewhere between 50-60%. The next year, the response rate went up to 80%. It didn’t feel like we did much differently, and I actually hypothesized that, through some social zeitgeist mechanism, students in the second year somehow learned from students in the first.
In truth, it was probably us who learned. Our communications got a little clearer. Our awareness of the goals, resources, and practices grew. While we may not have made any tactical changes, we’d had a first attempt and learned some small lessons that ended up making a big difference.
Having been trained in the social sciences, I find that people often misinterpret the role of a pilot study. A pilot is never meant to produce results. It might, if everything goes well, but the real goal of a pilot is to road test your process, to assess if it’s understood by all parties involved, and to see if it goes the way you’d intended.
Whatever you’re doing in the Fall – administering a new survey, trying a new advising practice, or launching a student-facing software – a pilot this Spring could be invaluable for answering these sorts of questions. There’s a better-than-not chance that you’ll have no meaningful results to evaluate what you did, but that’s not the point. The whole goal of a pilot is to make sure you don’t go through all that effort only for things to go entirely NOT as planned.
The good news is this: you have time. The Spring is a great chance to grab a handful of students, faculty, staff – whoever your constituency might be, including multiple groups – and see how it goes. While it requires a little time and effort, that expense is a far better price to pay than trying to go live in the Fall, only to see things fall to pieces.
…
A boss once told me, “Novices do twice as long as they plan, experts plan twice as long as they do.” Personally, I’m not great at it myself. I love to dive in and see how things go, learn my lessons practically, and move forward. But in working with others, I’ve learned the value of effective planning and preparation.
This need only grows when dealing with complex organizations like colleges and universities. Whatever we want to pull off in the Fall, if it’s going to work, it will likely require effective communication and execution across students, faculty, staff, administrators, and perhaps others. If we want to do that well, we need to get started now.
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