I’m here at Georgia State.
It’s a university that’s really taken
seriously the idea of finding out why some
of the kids don’t complete college and really
helping them along that progression
and they’ve had some amazing results.
Ten years ago, Georgia State had a graduation
rate of about 30 percent.
The U.S. has the highest college dropout rate.
We’re number 1 in terms of the number of
people who start college,
but were like number 20 in terms of the number of people who finish college.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve been able
to get our graduation rate up to 53, 54 percent
which is the highest increase over that time
period of any institution in the country.
As significantly, there’s no achievement
gap here at Georgia State.
The African-American students, the Latino
students, the white students, all graduate
at about the same rate.
They’re leading the way.
I wish other colleges would do some of the
same.
We spend a lot of time really thinking about
at-risk students.
Two-thirds of our students are coming from
low income families.
They face special challenges in terms of being
admitted, financial aid, and academic challenges.
You really have to negotiate all these things
successfully in order to get to college,
in order to stay in college, and then in order
to graduate from college.
Georgia State they take some of the students
who they think are most at risk
and have them come in the summer.
They immediately get immersed in a social
group.
They start to get credits, and get some positive reinforcement.
They engage kids in what they call a meta-major
early on, picking a general area
and making sure your courses are largely on track for
whatever your choice might be
so that you don’t waste credits.
That’s very important.
The heart of what we do is looking at the
data.
We use predictive analytics to identify the
factors that take students off the academic path.
When a student does something that suggests
that they’re going to go off path, an alert
goes off, and somebody can reach out to them
to help them get on the right path.
They did have to invest in more advisors and
training those advisors to work with these
systems so it wasn’t like a software substitution
effect.
It led to more advising sessions.
But the incentives were there for both the
students and the school to really analyze
what’s off track and solve it as soon as
possible.
Hearing the students I met with, how they
got enough help to overcome those things
that’s always inspiring.
