UG Graduation and Student Retention Summit 2024
Theme: "Building on Promising Practices"
Join us to share, learn and contribute to a campus-wide conversation on ways to enhance retention and graduation rates for our undergraduate students. This event is being held for UM-Dearborn’s faculty, staff, and students under the leadership of the Vice Provost for Enrollment Management Melissa Stone, the Deans, and Associate Provosts. Our focus revolves around continuing to improve our retention and graduation efforts. View our SEM Plan Governance Structure for more information about our Strategic Enrollment Management Executive (SEMX) Committee.
Our first summit, themed “Promising Practices” will focus and highlight current activities or initiatives practiced by our faculty and staff that are showing a positive impact on our ability to retain students and ensure their timely graduation. Part of the program will also include the opportunity to explore ways to leverage and expand on those promising practices to help guide future efforts in this critical area.
We invite and encourage all faculty and staff to consider submitting a Promising Practice that they exercise to be featured. We have prepared a series of FAQs below to offer additional details as you consider sharing your work at this event.
Agenda:
Friday, April 5
Morning 9:00 am - 12:00 pm:
Promising Practices Browsing Fair
Explore how our students experience UM-Dearborn, review current retention data with a focus on the kind of students who persist and who stop out, review promising practices from across campus.
Two Optional Presentation Discussions held from 9:00 - 9:45 am & 11:00 - 11:45 am
Understanding Retention and Graduation Data Trends
Ensuring we're aligning strategies to support those students at highest risk for retention, attend this session to better understand UM-Dearborn's retention and graduation data trends by populations and student characteristics.
Student Centric Scheduling
Undergraduate-class scheduling is one of the building blocks of student success. A panel representing advising and the Registrar will highlight this practice grounded in data from the future educational plans of students and historical data from the previous term’s schedules that helps minimize the time to degree and the cost of the degree. Attend this session to ask questions and learn context to future conversation.
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm: Lunch
During lunch we will hear from our students who will share their own experiences on what has impacted them staying on their path to graduation
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Putting Ideas Into Action
Participants will have the opportunity to share their perspectives on ideas they believe should have the largest impact on student retention and timely graduation in the future and thus ought to be given serious consideration for further development and prioritization on our campus and discuss the potential of implementing locally-proven practices at a larger scale on the UM-Dearborn campus.
Everyone will have an opportunity to provide feedback on each topic as we will rotate tables focusing on the following themes:
Topic 1: Best Practices in the Classroom
Topic 2: ‘High Impact’ Practices
Topic 3: Academic Advising & Student Scheduling
Topic 4: Student Engagement and Holistic Support
Topic 5: Non-Academic Administrative Support (One-Stop, Financial Aid, My UM-Dearborn)
FAQ:
Recognizing improvement in retention and graduation rates is the result of many small efforts, we want to hear from faculty, staff and from teams that have executed some impactful practices to retain our students. We will prioritize featured initiatives based on:
- Is the initiative or practice evidence based, innovative or scalable?
- How does the initiative or practice align with the university mission?
We are looking for you to share highlights and additional details. We would like some visuals (e.g. poster, video) to help tell the story about why this is a promising practice to help support retention and graduation efforts. If possible, we are also interested in understanding how your practice can be implemented more widely on campus. This information will help support additional conversations on Friday afternoon. If you are aware of a student or students who have benefited from your practice in a positive way, we would love to meet them. You are welcome to invite them to the event.
Yes, if a department wants to feature an initiative that reflects cross-collaboration, even better. Only one team member will then submit the request for participation.
The committee will do its best to feature as many practices as time will allow. We will let you know by 3/25 if your initiative has been selected this year. We thank you in advance for your willingness to participate and share your ideas.
March 18th