All About the Office of Student Success
As Bentley launches the 2024 - 2025 academic year aimed at achieving success for all of our Falcons, Jane De León Griffin, associate provost for the newly renamed Office of Student Success, answered our questions about how faculty and staff can best collaborate. She also gave us the scoop on how a recent $1 million anonymous grant will help drive student success outcomes.
Why is Academic Services being renamed the Office of Student Success?
The name change from Academic Services to Student Success reflects Bentley’s current strategic priority to provide access and opportunity to a more diverse set of learners. For me, the term “services” can also connote a more transactional relationship with students. I think the term “student success” better encompasses the transformative educational experience we commit to provide. We want to help students achieve academic outcomes, realize personal goals and prepare for careers and lifelong learning.
Which offices and programs are included in the Office of Student Success?
The Office of Student Success encompasses: Falcon Discovery Seminar, the Honors program, Undergraduate Academic Advising, Academic Integrity, and Academic Achievement and Access — which includes Student Accessibility Services (formerly Disability Services), Student Success Coaching, Peer Tutoring, Academic Peer Mentoring, and Strategies for Academic Success (a non-credit course offered to students who are struggling academically).
Our office also oversees many important processes that promote student success, including early intervention for students experiencing academic difficulty (also known as “progress reports”) and the assignment of academic standing through the Committee for Academic Standing (CAS, formerly known as Academic Performance Committee or APC). We partner closely with the university registrar on course registration and approving exceptions to academic policies. And finally, we work to improve faculty-student relationships, which we know are critical to student and faculty success.
How will this change affect students?
It’s less important that students know that Bentley has an Office of Student Success and far more important that they know the individual offices, teams and programs within this office and how each can help them achieve their goals.
It is imperative that students know how to make an appointment with an academic advisor and how to find a peer tutor or a peer academic mentor. They need to know how to get academic accommodations for a learning difference through Student Accessibility Services and how a student success coach can connect them with resources on campus to improve their learning.
What should faculty and staff know about this change?
Everyone who works at Bentley University is a student success agent, and we want to collaborate with all of you to make it happen. It is important for faculty and staff to know who the individual offices, teams and programs are within Student Success so they can better refer students and help students achieve their goals.
The Office of Student Success recently received a $1 million grant from an anonymous donor. What will the money be used for?
This grant supports a project called “Building a Data-Driven Student Success Ecosystem,” which we refer to as BaSSE for short. BaSSE is a collaboration between Academic Affairs and the division of Information Technology and is a subset of the enterprise-wide data analytics initiative.
The project is centralizing all student data into a single source of truth and building dashboards to enable faculty and staff in departments across campus to make data-informed decisions to drive student success outcomes. Eventually, it will provide predictive and prescriptive analytics to help us better understand the conditions under which Bentley students most often succeed and how to make those conditions equally accessible to all students.
The BaSSE project will examine and update existing policies on the acceptable use of sensitive student data, student data privacy and ethics, in alignment with the university’s existing Data Governance Framework.
BaSSE is a big, ambitious project that will give us accurate and accessible information about how Bentley students experience our curriculum, our resources and our community.
What are future plans for the Office of Student Success? Any new initiatives or programs in the pipeline?
We are very focused on improving our early alert system (known as progress reports), through which we identify students who need more support and connect them to resources early enough in the semester to make a positive impact. Our goal is to improve the user experience for faculty in submitting progress reports and improve our ability to connect students to appropriate resources and assess the impact of the entire early alert system.
Another top priority for us is to help build a system of “collaborative care” across the university to ensure we are working in synch, that our processes and philosophies are aligned, and that we share information. To that end, I am convening a cross-divisional student success committee to better coordinate efforts and communications across offices. We are also exploring how to expand our use of Navigate 360 to support a university-wide system of collaborative care.