[Faculty] CALS Student Success Strategy

Tue Jan 31 18:11:15 MST 2023

CALS colleagues,

Nearly three weeks into the Spring 2023 semester, I’d like to share with you an update on CALS efforts to support our undergraduate students in their journey toward degree completion.  Sometimes it is easy for us to become jaded by the seemingly endless thousands of students we see walking through campus daily.  We can lose sight of their individual struggles toward graduation, often over many years.

So, I’ll begin with a quick reminder of a startling and unsettling fact:  for all the emphasis we put on graduating in four years, barely half of our CALS students (51.1%) complete their degree in that time (by comparison, the UA average is 49.9% as of May 2022).  Even more sobering:  just under two thirds of CALS students (65%) complete in six years or less.  I often tell students at our senior sendoff event each May that they’ve beaten the odds.  I ask them to recall their first college-wide orientation the Friday before classes started in August of their first year.  If they said hello to the classmate on their right and again to the classmate on their left, the odds were that one of those three wouldn’t make it through within 6 years.

We simply must do better.  Since 2017, ABOR’s goal for the UA is a 6-year graduation rate of 75% by 2025.  Currently, the UA is at 67.9%.  Obviously, both the university and CALS have a long way to go, especially given that the 2025 graduating cohort has already been with us for several years. But, this isn’t just about hitting an arbitrary ABOR target.  Our entering students take their admission letter from the university as affirmation that they are capable of getting their degree.  They make enormous investments of time and effort.  They incur significant financial expenses (the largest of which are lost salary/wages from their time out of the workforce) to pursue their degrees. And thousands of them fall short of finishing.  Our job is to remove as many barriers to their completion as possible.

Attached you will find a document that lays out our CALS Student Success Strategy.  Our goal is straightforward:  100% of our entering students will complete their degree.  Unrealistic?  Perhaps, but that’s not really the point.  Our aim is to treat each of them as individuals and do what we can to maximize their chance of finishing.  This is the equitable outcome that our student support programs are scaffolded to achieve.  Toward that end, we will monitor success rates, watch for disparities in outcomes across student groups, and modify our support levels/programs to try and reduce those disparities.  In short, our programs are designed to level the playing field as best we can to reduce or neutralize the specific obstacles to graduation that confront so many of our students.  This is the mission of a land grant university, and we take it seriously.

I invite you to read through the strategy, take special note of the role that diversity and inclusion play, reflect on our three strategic pillars, and become acquainted with the dozens of specific program examples.  While many of these programs are administered by the superb team in the CALS Office of Career and Academic Services (CAS), we are the first to acknowledge that our success in CALS is through partnerships with faculty and staff across all ten of our academic units.  All of us have a role to play, and it is hugely important (life-changing is not an overstatement)  to the students and families we serve, as well as to the economic development of the entire state.  I can’t think of a more inspiring reason to come to work every day.

Best regards,

Mike

Michael Staten | College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Bart Cardon Associate Dean for Career and Academic Services
Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics
The University of Arizona
Forbes Hall, Room 211
The University of Arizona
PO Box 210036
Tucson, AZ 85721-0036
PHONE: 520.621.1932
statenm at email.arizona.edu<mailto:statenm at email.arizona.edu>
www.mikestaten.com<http://www.mikestaten.com>

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