Georgia State U. Made Its Graduation Rate Jump. How?

The college-going population is growing more diverse, requiring instructors to teach students with a wide array of educational backgrounds and skills. Tax-funded support of higher education continues to dwindle, and a majority of states now use some type of performance-based funding to reward — or punish — institutions on measures like graduation rates and job placement. Meanwhile, data and analytics have come to higher education, enabling colleges to track with greater precision who is struggling, and when and how.

Yet colleges continue to see high dropout rates and inequity of outcomes. The Chronicle recently released a special report, “The Future of Learning: How Colleges Can Transform the Educational Experience,” examining obstacles and opportunities around transformational teaching to improve student success — both with and without technology. As part of our research, we looked at how Georgia State University used big data and analytics as a springboard into rethinking undergraduate education, with remarkable results.

When it comes to predictive analytics, Georgia State University is arguably the leader of the pack. An army of advisers there tracks more than 800 risk factors daily, and innovations include in-class tutors, restructured gateway courses, and freshman learning communities. The public research university raised its six-year graduation rate from 32 percent in 2003 to more than 54 percent in 2017.

That’s all the more remarkable considering that many of its students come from groups with higher dropout rates nationally. Georgia State’s population is 60 percent nonwhite and one-third first generation; 58 percent of students are on Pell Grants. And they all now graduate at the same rate as everyone else.

Leading the charge there is Timothy Renick, senior vice president for student success, and an evangelist for “tech-enabled high touch.” Here are some of his insights, as told to The Chronicle.

“Generic” support isn’t enough. Georgia State found that a student’s grade in an introductory course in his or her major is one of the main indicators of future academic performance. Yet tutoring used to be “fairly generic,” says Renick. The campus had a writing center, a math lab, and a language lab. What if a student needed help after failing his first accounting quiz? “It wasn’t enough to say, ‘Go to the math lab,’” Renick says. “That wasn’t going to help with specific course content.”

You don’t need a ton of money to fix that. Georgia State now pays undergraduates — often work-study students — who have done well in particular courses to sit in on more than 1,000 course sections and offer weekly tutoring sessions. “We might have liked to hire all professional staff to do that work,” says Renick, “but we didn’t have the resources to do that at scale.”

Change how you teach introductory courses. Georgia State “flipped” more than 8,000 seats, mostly in introductory courses, using adaptive-learning technology. Another 12,000 to 15,000 seats will go that way over the next three years. That means traditional lecture sections have been replaced with students reviewing new material on their own and applying the concepts, with personalized attention, in class.

This strategy has proved successful in getting students through critical gateway courses into their chosen majors. As the number of students who declare a major in STEM has held steady, the number who complete those majors has doubled.

Remove unintended academic barriers. Using predictive analytics, Georgia State discovered unintended consequences of some academic departments’ policies. The university’s business major, for example, used to require a GPA of at least 2.8 to take upper-level courses. It turned out that more than 1,000 would-be majors were taking courses in other departments to try to hit that mark. Now students must perform well in key lower-level courses to advance.

“Instead of having 1,000 students spinning their wheels thinking they’re going to graduate in business but never getting that right GPA,” says Renick, “we’re making that determination up front.” Underperforming students can pick another major and still graduate on time.

Make pathways clearer. Five years ago, the average student at Georgia State was going through 2.6 majors before graduating. “That’s a deadly recipe for low-income students,” Renick says. “They can’t afford to switch majors two or three times and waste credit hours and create added debt loads.”

The university was already putting freshmen in groups of 25 for core classes, so it began organizing learning communities around meta-majors like education, business, and STEM, and adding elements like departmental open houses and alumni career talks to help students make decisions earlier. Since then, the university has seen a 32-percent drop in the number of students who change their major in their sophomore year or later. The average time to a bachelor’s degree is now half a semester shorter.

Invest in professional advisers. When Georgia State introduced predictive analytics in 2012, it hired a slew of advisers — often entry-level staff members, sometimes recent college graduates — to respond quickly to hundreds of alerts each week. That investment has more than paid for itself through increased retention. Advisers held about 52,000 one-on-one meetings with students last year, Renick estimates. “We get a lot of attention about the fancy tech,” he says, “but what we’re really doing is delivering common sense at scale.”

Information is power. College officials often blame poor academic performance on inadequate preparation in public schools. “What we found, and it’s a hard truth, is that a lot of the fault is our own,” Renick says. “We overwhelm students with choices. We don’t provide information they need in a timely fashion.”

Georgia State isn’t hand-holding, he says. “We’re tipping students off earlier on that there might be a problem and giving them a fighting chance to correct it.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about technology’s influence on teaching and the future of learning. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.