Learning From Failure in Student-Success Programs

Administrators are almost always happy to lead conference sessions about their institutions’ successes, but sessions centered on their failures are rare. You learn a lot from mistakes, sure, but standing up in a hotel ballroom to talk about how you and your colleagues screwed up — even with the best intentions — may not be a popular move back on campus.

Setbacks are common nonetheless, as is benefiting from them. “Many of the things we do in higher education seem like good ideas at the time with the information we have, but there are certain things you can only see as do-overs,” says Tiffany Mfume, director of Morgan State University’s Office of Student Success and Retention. “What we don’t do usually is admit that.”

But a session on Sunday at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities’ annual meeting, in Austin, Tex., was slated to focus on what Morgan State and two other institutions — the University of Memphis and Western Michigan University — learned when they realized that student-success efforts they had rolled out with great enthusiasm were not, in fact, succeeding. The hope is that other institutions can learn from the mistakes the three universities agreed to publicize.

“We love our best practices,” said Ms. Mfume in an interview before the meeting. “But there also needs to be a moment when we acknowledge that higher education is not one size fits all. What didn’t work at our campus might work someplace else, and vice versa. If we started sharing, as a community, the things that don’t go well, that could help our peer institutions.”

Western Michigan’s experience involves a particularly unusual effort called the Seita Scholars Program, which began in 2008. Its goal is to help students who had been in foster care succeed on the 24,000-student campus. The first semester, says Chris Harris-Wimsatt, the program’s director, “we were expecting 15 students and we got 55 — we weren’t going to say no.”

“We thought we were doing a good thing here, but we hadn’t taken the time to look at the needs of young people transitioning from foster care to academia. In foster care you have to be supervised 24 hours a day. Then you get into this environment, and there’s no supervision. You have to make your own choices.” Many of the students had never handled more than small amounts of money, for instance, and didn’t realize that the amount of scholarship money left over after they paid tuition would have to cover books and living expenses.

During the program’s first semester, the average of its students’ GPAs was half that of all undergraduates, and in the first year, half its students withdrew from classes. “One of the students said, We don’t know what we don’t know,” recalls Mr. Harris-Wimsatt. “Our failure was on the front end, in not providing the support and structure that students would need to be successful.”

“We were managing on the fly,” says Mr. Harris-Wimsatt, himself a longtime foster parent. When he took over as director, in 2012, he put the program on pause.

“What we could have done, what I would suggest if we had to do it all over again, knowing what I know today, was take a student and walk through it from their eyes. Obviously you can’t do it for the entire semester, but you can sort of walk through the process.” He means the whole process, too, including things administrators might not typically think of, such as students arriving at the bus station and having no idea how to get to the campus.

“Now they come on campus for a week in July, meet with academic advisers, and build their academic plan. They meet potential mentors. They take the city bus system so they know how to navigate around town. They get experience of living in the residence hall so they know how to prepare for that.”

The program now has a cap of 150 students, which Mr. Harris-Wimsatt says is what the university can afford with the money it has available.

The University of Memphis had a different experience, though with a program just as well intentioned. Its goal was to bring back students who had dropped out after completing 90 credits’ worth of work. “We went through a couple of iterations of inviting them back that weren’t very successful,” says Richard Irwin, the university’s vice provost for academic innovation and support services. What administrators weren’t focusing on, he says, was that initially the university was “inviting them back to the same situation that forced them to leave.”

After two attempts to get the program to work, he says, “we were smart enough to say, Why was this a flop? There was an aha! moment when a financial-aid officer said, These people have just run out of aid. We went all the way through this campaign and just learned the most important thing at the end. We had let them run out of aid while we sat by and weren’t paying enough attention.”

For its third attempt, he says, Memphis pulled together “a lot of existing resources or policies,” including an academic fresh-start policy. “We could wipe out a bunch of old bad grades” after a student had been away four years, as had many of the people the program was reaching out to. “We could wipe out that freshman year when you thought you were going to be an engineer, or a doctor, or whatever. It’s a way to grant amnesty for bad decisions you made as an 18-year-old. In some cases, that’s enough to get a student above a 2.0 and earn a degree.”

Another change was to centralize the effort. Historically, he says, students who applied for readmission were sent back to the departments they had been in previously. Now they go to a central office where staff members review a variety of options based on how many credits they have already and what their current goals are.

“Many of these folks just want to get a degree,” he says. “Then staff becomes an advocate for them, negotiating on behalf of students to explain that this student is returning.”

Another change, he says, followed the university’s finding that a former student might agree in February or March to return to class, but then not show up in the fall. “Too many other things come up,” says Mr. Irwin. “The nimbleness of many of the for-profits is that you could start class tomorrow. So we thought, could we coach them to assemble a portfolio, or complete some classes pre-enrollment? Find something to get started on right away?”

There has been some resistance from faculty members uncomfortable with nontraditional ways of earning credit. But 300 students have finished the program already, and another 200-plus are working on degree plans. “The trajectory is really upward,” Mr. Irwin says. “We have 70 or 80 ready to graduate next month.”

At Morgan State, Ms. Mfume says, President David Wilson supported her desire to participate in the APLU session, for which participants were chosen after submitting video entries. Morgan State’s refers bluntly to the “hot mess” Ms. Mfume found a decade ago, when she took over the effort to create “intrusive, engaging, effective advisement” for first-year students, and also to her “first, major, epic fail” — arranging to offer faculty members additional money to come in during the summer to advise freshmen. (Because faculty members self-selected, the university had no way of making sure all departments had equal coverage.)

Ms. Mfume’s video offers details about how the university made a variety of changes and then topped them off with commercial advising software, leading to “true success.” But among the lessons she’s learned, she says, is that before she proposes a change, she should get in touch with another institution that has tried something similar. “Who can I pick up the phone and get some insight from, before I pick a vendor, a partner, a tool?”

Mr. Harris-Wimsatt, at Western Michigan, has become a fan of vetting too. He also suggests three other necessities for avoiding setbacks:

• “Individuals or organizations that you’re trying to impact need to be at the table from the very beginning.”
• “You need to put together a strategic plan. Ask where do you want to be in one, three, and five years?”
• “You need to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are.”

Beyond that, he has one other piece of advice: “Being able to say no is just as important as being able to say yes.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.