Voices Blogs from the Knowledge Center

By CSU Student Success Network Staff
July 2021

San Diego State University has made headway over the past several years in creating a supportive environment for transfer students on campus, including innovative programming, a new centralized office, and improved graduation rates for transfer students. How did these changes come about? A case study by Informing Change, a firm specializing in evaluation, suggests that the innovations and new programming can be traced to leadership and relationship building among middle leaders at San Diego State. Middle leaders are defined by the CSU Student Success Network as faculty, staff, and administrators in the CSU who have leadership roles on campus regardless of whether their position title acknowledges these roles.

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By CSU Student Success Network Staff
March 2021

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), approximately 22% of students in U.S. community colleges and public four-year universities are parenting at least one dependent under 18 years old. This is a significant number of students whose lives have been extraordinarily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered schools and daycares across the country, making student parents responsible for the full-time caretaking and education of their children–on top of their own educational pursuits. How, then, are faculty to respond to these new realities in ways that are equitable within this new virtual learning environment?

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By Thad Nodine
October 2019

When a team from Chico State arrived at the CSU Network’s Middle Leadership Academy in 2018-19, the team members had ambitious plans but no specific project to address equity issues on campus. At the Academy, they examined student data and began to focus on correlations between equity gaps in graduation rates and DFW rates during students’ first two years. They found that historically underserved students, compared with other students, were more likely to get a DFW, even accounting for incoming high-school grade point averages. Back on campus, they decided that their first step was to lay a broad foundation to support equity work.

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By Andrea Venezia; Rose Asera; and Bob Gabriner
July 2019

A new report by the Research and Planning Group (RP Group) of the California Community Colleges, struck a chord for several reasons. Not only was RP one of the inspirations for creating the CSU Student Success Network, the CSU Network’s Middle Leadership Academy is modeled after Leading from the Middle in the community colleges, and many community college colleagues generously helped get the CSU Network off the ground.

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By Adam Petersen, and Cameron Gage Stevenson
February 20118

In May 2017, the CSU Student Success Network convened, and Fresno State hosted, a one-day meeting focused on data use. The convening drew participation from teams of faculty and staff from ten CSU campuses. Afterwards, the team from CSU San Marcos (CSUSM) decided to create a data fellows program to improve their campus’ capacity to use data in decision-making. This is their story of why—and how—they created their program.

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By Ioakim Boutakidis
October 2017

Inspired by the CSU Student Success Network’s May convening on data use in the CSU, Ioakim Boutakidis, Associate Professor of Child & Adolescent Studies and Faculty Fellow of Student Success at CSU Fullerton, writes about the “small data” strategies his campus has developed to improve student learning.

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