Reviving Enrollment and Ensuring Stability Through Bold Planning

The North Carolina state legislature almost closed Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) in 2014 as its enrollment was plummeting and its leadership was coming up against a high turnover that inflamed its mounting instability. Shuttering ECSU would harm not only its enrolled students, faculty, and staff members but also the Elizabeth City community at large that depends on the institution for its livelihood as the third-largest employer in Pasquotank County.

With so much weighing in the balance, ECSU had to act decisively to respond to these unprecedented challenges. So, leaders at ECSU, which is a historically Black university, rolled up their sleeves and got to work on developing a plan that would overhaul the university to create a sustainable, educational environment centered on student success.

For ECSU, the importance of the university to the community matters. The students it serves are mostly from a majority low-income area with limited resources; therefore, the university wanted to reinforce its commitment to do everything it could to ensure their success. By 2015, leaders from admissions, financial aid, housing, athletics, academic advising, and curriculum design collaborated to establish the Nurturing Student Success from Admittance to Graduation Plan.

This universitywide strategy leveraged various new technologies and improved internal processes and procedures to not only increase enrollment, retention, and student graduation rates but to also establish institutional stability. ECSU, a constituent of the University of North Carolina System, implemented the plan from 2016 through 2020 and continues to modify it to meet student success goals at the university.

The Methodology

ECSU’s approach to a campus redesign was deliberate and strategic, surpassing the university’s expectations of increased enrollment, retention, and graduation rates. The implementation strategy involved adopting new technologies through the cross-departmental engagement of staff and faculty members, students, and administrators who acknowledged existing system issues and addressed internal concerns within the university.

The strategy was divided into three phases—planning, execution, success—beginning in 2015 through 2020 and was guided by these principles: start slow; eliminate redundancy; get quick wins; improve and create processes; start, stop, and continue; and expand campuswide.

Academic Advising

Academic advising remains one of the most critical components of any student success initiative, yet students and academic advisors at ECSU weren’t collaborating efficiently. They lacked a standard process. As a result, long-term academic planning was hindered because students didn’t have a full knowledge of their degree requirements and their advisors were not fully aware of course availability over multiple semesters.

In recognition of the key role advisors play in students’ academic progression, ECSU made academic advising a central focus of its student success initiative. In March 2016, ECSU initiated a revamp of its academic advising protocols and processes that involved multiple departments including retention, financial aid, athletics, faculty, veteran affairs, registration, and general education.

It launched EAB’s Student Success Collaborative (SSC) platform and branded it under its E4U (Engaging, Enriching, Empowering, Effective) platform. E4U enables advisors and students to seamlessly schedule appointments and share information electronically with various stakeholders across campus. Through the SSC platform, advisors and retention staff can receive alerts about a student’s academic performance so they can develop early intervention strategies to get them back on track.

The Academic Advising Advisory Board, led by faculty members, developed a uniform advising protocol. It outlines how students and advisors should use E4U to schedule appointments, document meetings, and store advising records. It also provides faculty members with technical support, tools, and resources to advise students.

Credit Requirements

ECSU realized that reducing curricular barriers was also essential to improving student success. During the fall 2016 semester, ECSU approved a new 35-credit general education curriculum, a reduction from the current general education requirements of 46 to 48 credits. The university also approved an across-the-board reduction in the number of credits required for graduation from 124 to 128 credits to 120 credits for all majors. In the fall of 2017, 15 to Finish, an initiative that focuses on students enrolling in 15 credit hours each semester in order to graduate in four years, was launched.

Admission Process

Prior to the implementation of the Nurturing Student Success from Admittance to Graduation Plan, applicants applied for admission through a manual process. Part of ECSU’s campuswide technology redesign included the adoption of an electronic application system, AdmissionPros customer relationship management. This system manages all aspects of recruitment, application processing, and communications, allowing ECSU to correspond more effectively with prospective students.

Student Monitoring

In March 2017, ECSU began implementing the degree audit system, DegreeWorks, an improvement from what was a time-consuming manual process. It allows advisors and students to quickly monitor a student’s progress toward degree completion and identify any outstanding requirements. DegreeWorks also provides students and advisors an opportunity to explore how existing credits can be applied to possible alternative majors when considering a change. In addition, ECSU’s acquisition of the AdAstra scheduling software improved ECSU’s ability to schedule classes that students need to graduate in a more efficient manner while reducing course conflicts.

Infrastructure

The key to developing and sustaining new campus initiatives is a strong infrastructure that supports those initiatives. ESCU established its Office of Student Success and Retention that supports the university’s goals through advising, academic support services, and retention efforts. The office was created with the help of ESCU leaders to provide vision, management, accountability, and direction for the university’s academic advising model, curriculum reform, new student success technology systems, and high-impact retention practices.

These efforts are propping up ESCU’s high return on investment for its students and strengthening the meaning behind its slogan, “Come to Discover. Leave to Conquer.”

Key Takeaways

Although ECSU has embraced new technologies and revamped its curriculum and advising model, the real cornerstone of the university’s success lies in the collaborative efforts and effective communication among leadership, staff, and faculty across all departments, driving student success to new heights.

Dr. Farrah Jackson Ward, ECSU’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, shares the following reflections to guide and motivate the leaders at colleges and universities that are facing similar challenges and want to propel their institutions forward in a collaborative and effective way:

• Work together and communicate across all units. Engaging departments such as the bursar, admissions, financial aid, housing, orientation, distance education, athletics, and the registrar was vital to ECSU’s transformational success.
• It’s a marathon not a sprint. It’s hard to rush student success initiatives. Take time to truly understand the problem before determining the solution.
• If you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. New initiatives will only work if you are willing to refine your policies and processes.
• All progress is good progress. While you may not always achieve the outcome you set out to accomplish, any progress toward improving student success is a step in the right direction. 
• We have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listening to constructive criticism with an ear toward improvement will only improve the end product.
• We all need to look in the mirror when it comes to student success. No matter how well things are going, every unit on campus can improve.
• You can’t expect what you don’t inspect. What gets measured gets done.
• You can have success even if there are still challenges.