Creating a Student-Centered and Student-Ready Campus that Meets Students Where They Are

Facing the changing higher ed landscape requires institutions to focus on becoming student-centered and student-ready schools. Such a shift involves providing better access, increasing flexibility, developing staff and faculty, offering students support and much more.  

There is no doubt that the pandemic had many lasting impacts on higher education, not the least of which is exposing how many institutions’ processes, practices and strategies focused on the institution itself instead of students. Put more directly, many universities have been organized around their own needs and not necessarily students’ needs. The postpandemic period, which has seen a slow recovery in enrollment for some campuses coupled with the inevitability of the looming demographic cliff, will further expose the reality that universities’ student bodies will be made up of fewer and fewer traditional students (those 18-year-olds who have just graduated high school). 

For those practitioners who have long focused on closing equity gaps for racially minoritized students, the fact that many higher education institutions are focused on themselves and not always on students is nothing new. But increasing enrollment pressures, the focus from university and system boards, as well as pressure from legislators to both close gaps and graduate more students have forced universities to take a hard look at themselves and their practices. This is true of San José State University as well as the entire California State University system, which has been pushing for closing equity gaps since the system initiated its Graduation Initiative 2025 effort. The gains, however, have been marginal over time. Though campuses such as SJSU have seen increases in graduation rates for all its students, the equity gaps persist. This reality is compounded by the fact that male students continue to trail female students in retention and graduation across all communities as well.  

To close this gap and build a more robust institution, SJSU has taken a number of steps that show promise. These efforts are designed to build a campus that is, in the words of McNair et al. (2022), “student ready.”1 A student-ready campus is one that is built to support all students and their diverse needs, interrogates its administrative processes to reduce barriers to an education, creates a culture of adaptation to student needs, examines how its classes are structured and pedagogies are evaluated to improve student learning, and organizes itself with the student in mind. Put simply, a student-ready campus is one that looks at what the institution can do for students without focusing on whether a student is prepared or has deficiencies for success. A student-ready campus assumes that, once a student is admitted, they can be successful when given the right support and resources to meet their educational goals.  

Most importantly, we believe a student-ready campus needs clear executive sponsorship with a commitment to invest in the changes necessary to reimagine campus culture and strategy and support the middle leaders who move the work forward. Middle leaders often have some authority but not enough to make grand institutional change. Senior leaders have authority but not enough time to be steeped in the literature on high-impact practices. Working together, they can be a powerful force for change, and we’ve been able to do that to advance the efforts below. Taking the values of being a student-ready campus to heart and with the support of the provost’s office, leaders in academic affairs at SJSU were empowered to make change. They included not only the AVP for Undergraduate Advising and Success but the Office of Undergraduate Education and Enrollment Management, both of which also report to the provost, as well as college-based leaders, particularly associate deans, who have also invested a lot of time in building new support structures for our students in collaboration with department chairs, directors, faculty and staff. As a result, SJSU has made several adjustments to its policies, practices and organization. We outline some of the immediate interventions here to provide a sense of what it takes to meet students where they are and imbue the campus with real culture change.  

1. Perhaps the most important first component is structuring the university with the student in the center. For us this meant, for example, shifting academic advising from a decentralized model to a more centralized one with new expectations and standards for that advising, including a standardized set of learning outcomes that advisors must achieve with students. Through this process, SJSU has maintained college success centers for first- and second-year students but made consistent advising strategies for all students regardless of major, reduced the advisor-to-student ratio to under 300:1 and built a much more robust and predictable advising model that helps students navigate the campus and get them to campus partners quicker, be that career services, health and wellness or identity-based centers. 
2. The second component is interrogating processes that stand in the way of student success to include not just academic practices but financial and other administrative practices as well. One such immediate change that SJSU implemented coming out of the pandemic was to its drop policy for students with outstanding balances. SJSU found that students with some balance who were dropped right before a semester started often found their way back to campus but lost access to their courses and had to re-enroll. By changing practice and providing support for students to meet their financial responsibility over the beginning of a semester, SJSU went from dropping over 800 students just before classes began to less than 60 just before the census date, helping hundreds of students stay enrolled and on track.
3. The third component is investing back into students through strategies to help them find their home on campus and their path to graduation, which means engaging with students on campus as well as students who have left and need to find their way back. SJSU has taken a few steps to improve re-enrollment and retention, including one-time investments in completion grants, improved support for returning students through outreach, increase in flexible degree options through fully online degree completion programs to help students find the best way to finish their degree, and an active re-enrollment campaign. The latter includes piloting a new CSU-wide strategy called Second Start, which allows students to restart their GPA after returning and successfully completing twelve units with a 2.5 GPA or better.
4. The fourth component is a robust investment in faculty development that includes conversations about D/F/W rates, new pedagogical strategies tied to universal design principles and informed by inclusive pedagogies, faculty learning communities centered on rethinking how classroom strategies can strengthen student success and sense of belonging, and investments in new practices to integrate 21st-century technologies and practices in AI, machine learning and digital and creative literacy into the learning experience. Each of these strategies is designed to help students see themselves in their educational experience and build skills that will offer them a clear path to a postgraduate experience
5. The fifth component is the infusion of inclusive excellence strategies and responsibilities in every job on campus, which includes hiring faculty from diverse backgrounds and allies who are committed to doing the work of closing equity gaps. Staff professional development is also necessary for amazing colleagues to find a career at SJSU that they value because, without our staff’s work, our students cannot navigate what remains a complex environment of services. Of course, this work also includes a direct investment in student services, from centers to housing to financial aid. Recent efforts to increase on-campus housing at SJSU, for example, have been coupled with our ability to provide a percentage of our beds at a reduced cost to increase access and allow students to focus on their degree goals.