Maximizing Student Success ROI Through a Focus on “Students at the Heart”

Session Abstract: Student success is often measured in terms of timely graduation, but successful completion begins with retention. As a public institution with over 40,000 students and limited resources, California State University, Fullerton needs to strategically focus our effort to maximize the ROI on our retention efforts. Relying on data, we unpacked student performance through several lenses of increasing specificity to identify possible locations of intervention where student-success support could yield maximum impact. Specifically, our data “deep-dive” highlighted the importance of early retention, revealed classes that are critical to student experiences, and zoomed in on the subset of students––“students at the heart”––who could benefit the most from student-success interventions.

Keywords: student success ROI, data deep-dive, association study

Contributing Authors: Noha Abdou – California State University, Fullerton