Brooklyn College’s Campaign for Student Success is in Full Swing

12/2/2007

How do you define success?

Brooklyn College defines it as helping students achieve their goals - academic, personal, and professional. Through a two-year old effort called the Campaign for Student Success, everyone at the College -- from academic deans and student services personnel, to departmental secretaries and students themselves -- are responsible for creating an environment that cultivates success.

"We picked some areas where our data shows we can do better," explains Donna Wilson, dean of undergraduate studies. Wilson and her partners in the campaign came up with four goals:

developing a coordinated, college-wide, approach to advising;
continuously upgrading the quality of instruction;
conducting a study of success rates for first and second year students;
and improving services to transfer students.

Wilson says the College is reviewing several student support programs, such as pre-freshman programs in the sciences and some of the learning communities in which students are grouped their first year.

The college has already reorganized some of the duties of academic advisors so that they can be more responsive to students, launched a freshman success course that helps students transition to college life and develop study skills, and expanded on services to transfer students, among many initiatives.

"Right now, we are evaluating some of the changes we made while we continue to make more changes," says Wilson.

All of CUNY's colleges are part of a larger Campaign for Student Success devised in the wake of university-wide developments such as raised academic standards and a slew of new faculty hires. As part of the campaign, the CUNY central office has asked all of the colleges to reexamine their practices, institutional culture, and student support programs in an effort to improve student achievement and raise graduation rates.

"We're trying to use the Campaign for Student Success to encourage all of our faculty and staff - whether they greet students when they come into an office, or they are in a back office running data, or they are a tutor - to share in the College's mission of keeping students at the center," Wilson says.

The Brooklyn College community can learn more about the Campaign for Student Success by logging into the Brooklyn College Web portal and clicking on the tab for academic info.