Mary C. Murphy:
So I think that college students come to college with at least three questions in mind. Can I do it? Why should I do it? And is my identity valued here? And how students answer those three questions are really going to help students success and you know, administrators and institutions to think about how, what kind of interventions are important.

Keith Edwards:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today. We’re talking about student success in higher education. I’m joined by the editor and two authors of a new book on student success. I’m so excited to learn from each of you today. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browser archives at studentaffairsnow.com. This episode is brought to you by Stylus. Also the publisher of this book, visit styluspub.com and use their promo code SANow for 30% off. And reshipping on all of their books, including the one we’re thinking about today. This episode is also sponsored by Vector Solutions, formerly EverFi, the trusted partner of more than 2000 colleges and universities. Vector Solutions is the standard of care for student safety, wellbeing and inclusion. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he him, his. I’m a speaker, consultant and coach, and you can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m broadcasting from Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to the conversation. I’m so excited to talk through this. Let’s begin with hearing a little bit about each of you and then we’ll, we’ll dig in a little bit further. Jodi, do you want to kick us off?

Jodi Linley:
Sure. Yeah. Thanks Keith. I’m so glad to be here. My name is Jodi Linley. My pronouns of reference are she her and hers. And I’m coming to you from Iowa City, Iowa, where I’m an associate professor of higher education in student affairs at the University of Iowa. In terms of background I got a master’s degree in student affairs and worked in the field for 12 years before going on to get a PhD and, and learn to think more like a scholar in addition to a practitioner. And so I really come at issues of student success from a practitioner lens. And specifically I worked in first year experience, transition programs and initiatives that were designed to assist students in finding ways to succeed in environments that weren’t built for them.

Keith Edwards:
Great. That’ll be so important to our conversation today. Thank you for being here. Mary, tell us a little bit more about you.

Mary C. Murphy:
Thanks, Keith. I’m really excited to be here with this amazing group. My name is Mary Murphy. I am trained as a social psychologist. I’m a professor at Indiana University. I’ve also worn some other hats related to student success. So I’ve been a vice provost for diversity and inclusion at the university. And I also have founded an organization, a research practice organization called the College Transition Collaborative that helps students to apply it helps universities apply research and practice to support student success in the transition to and through college. And most recently I founded a new organization that is actually acquiring the CTC called the Equity Accelerator. That’s really focus on interventions that institutions can use to advance equity for students across their time in college.

Keith Edwards:
Awesome. Well thank you for being here and for joining us, and you’re kind of the ringleader of these two and many others on this book. Tell us a little bit more about you.

Nicholas A. Bowman:
Hi everyone. My name’s Nick Bowman. I use hehe his pronouns. I’m a faculty member at the University of Iowa in broadcasting, not very far from Jodi Linley at this exact moment in time. So I’ve worked before I became a faculty member. I worked in helping promote college access and also worked on service learn and community engagement and understanding that to promote learning and success of students. My interest in college student success are very, very broad. If it helps or hinders or has no effect unexpectedly on student success, then I’m interested in it. And particularly interested in the equity in which those an initiatives might create or might prevent. And so I also work here fair bit on campus with a number of partners in multiple colleges and in central administration to try to prove efforts to both understand and make progress toward improving success outcomes. Thank you so much, Keith, for having us here today.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. I’m really excited to talk about this. We’ve been wanting to do an episode on this topic for a long time and then the book comes out and we just think, well, this is it, let’s do it. In the book you talk about the challenges to student success. Only 60% of degree seeking students graduated from any institution within six years, that really seems troubling. And then when you look at the intersections of racism and classism and other, and gender, these things kind of factor in, and you see greater rates of attrition around Hispanic males, black males students attending two-year colleges and, and for-profit college, even lower rates of success. And you acknowledge the, the challenges around identity, pre-college academic preparation, family, and workplace responsibility, and so much more I’d love it, Nick, if you could kind of frame a little bit about how you think about success and some of the different approaches taken in the book that can really help us particularly for those of us thinking and working about this on a day to day basis helping us inform what we’re doing and helping more college students succeed.

Nicholas A. Bowman:
So I also want to emphasize too, that 60% statistic that you threw out at the beginning is specific to four year student who students who start at a four year college who intend to get a bachelor’s degree. So, I mean, these are the people who you would think are actually most likely to end up with a degree, because they’re in theory at the institution where they could go and just progress through, you know, requirements and go straight to graduation from there. So lots of room for improvement in that. So one of the reasons, I guess I started thinking about this in a previous book where we tried to make sense of basically how college affects students and a variety of outcomes. And so I worked on the chapter and educational attainment and persistence, and you know, so trying to find within a, I think it was 11, 12 year period, like what does all the research say on this topic?

Nicholas A. Bowman:
You know, and all the things we can do on this topic. And so that was really challenging because I would basically go and at first I would do these like keyword searches that you type in, you know about and all the different words or retention and persisted graduation and stuff like that. And so we go and search it. And at first, like ended up with things that are at the journal that a lot of higher education and student affairs you know, administrators, practitioners, faculty members are most familiar with. And so, and it was just a far smaller number, you know, than I expected to find. And so then I’m like, well, well there’s gotta be other ways to do this. So we kind of worked in different directions saying, well, what are the people that those articles cited, you know, then working forward, you know, what are the ones that cited the articles that we found and just opening up into all these different other fields of literature that were just not represented.

Nicholas A. Bowman:
And so some of them, you know, say in various fields of social psychology, there’s a whole lot of work, sociology has done a whole lot of work economics and behavioral economics and so forth. They’re also, you know, I mean, some of these are in, I mean, what I would call discipline, but you know, others are in sort of specific fields. So you know, the work and stem education tends to be very integrated in itself, you know, so a lot of people, people who are writing about students in general, aren’t citing stem education and vice versa. And so trying to think like, what are all these silos of understanding that we have? Cause often many of us are trained in one of those silos. We know that silo, it’s what we live in every day. And so how do we actually, you know, expand what are the possibilities of different ways that we can think about retention and success?

Nicholas A. Bowman:
Both conceptually and in terms of, you know, what do we do in the real world in trying to improve success outcomes. It’s also really worth noting you know, and it’s kind of illustrating in the book that the way that these different silos think about things is very different, you know, in some cases there, you know, it’s all about theory, you know, so they’re designing theory, they’re testing theory and that’s the focus of what they’re doing. In other cases, you know, it’s starting from practice, you know, what are the specific things that we can do, or they might use theory to inform, you know, what, what those might look like and how those might be effective or ineffective. But there’s just lots of different approaches, you know, and unless there’s, you know, you know, what you don’t know, you know, like it inherently limits the possibilities that you have. So this is something, I mean that we’ll talk a bit about here today, you know, that we’re trying through this book to broaden the endings of, you know, so that we could also, in some ways question some of the things that we’re doing, you know, and just been, Hey, this is the way that syllabi look and that academic probation happens and, you know, and on and on and on.

Keith Edwards:
Right.

Nicholas A. Bowman:
We do things differently and better.

Keith Edwards:
I really appreciate that. I think you’re, you’re pointing to one of the things, one of the challenges of being a scholar who really studies something is the more you study it, the more you realize what you don’t know. And then it just feels like this never ending thing there’s oh, there’s more that I don’t know, more that I don’t know. You’ve really framed the, the book around theories and models and concepts, but then also critiques and gaps and then implications for practice, either love to hear Jodi and Mary chime in, what else would you like to do to kind of lay the foundation for our listeners and viewers around student success?

Mary C. Murphy:
I can share a little bit you know, I kind of see the landscape as kind of fitting into a few different buckets. One is sort of a person-centric bucket maybe this is my psychological training speaking, but, you know, I see a lot of research that really that success is dependent on certain qualities of the students that might be intelligence. That might be their motivation. That might be their study habits. That might be the skills they come in with. And so interventions are sort of focused on developing students attributes and characteristics and resiliencies particularly for underrepresented students who you know, are, are entering settings that literally were not made for them. When we started to think about higher education and student success, we were trying, we were thinking about really educating white middle class oftentimes men you know, in these, in these models of higher education.

Mary C. Murphy:
And so I see sort of one bucket being very person centric, and then trying to see what are the characteristics of the individual that helps them succeed in these contexts and interventions to focus on that. Another bucket I see is sort of situation focused or context focused interventions. And these are interventions that focus on practices and policies and, you know admissions policies, probation policies, early alert practices, right? These sorts of things that sort of help think about how do we communicate to students, how well they’re doing, how can those policies and practices actually motivate students and rather than isolate them and make them feel rejected or like they are you know probational in some ways. And so I think of these two and I think that what we really need as we move forward in student success work is thinking about the merger of these two things.

Mary C. Murphy:
So a person by situation kind of approach, and that’s really comes, I think, directly from my social psychological background. But thinking about heterogeneity, it seems to be a big issue in student success that we haven’t thought enough about under what circumstances for whom, in what context is a particular student success intervention likely to work for some students compared to others. And maybe that’s because the data sometimes are difficult to get and to sort of bring across institutions to look. There’s many reasons why we haven’t quite gotten, but I think the next level work and questions really need to be focusing on heterogeneity student success, initiatives and interventions.

Jodi Linley:
I love what you’re saying, Mary. And I think that that connects also to what Nick was offering about. We gotta break down the silos, right? That we have to embrace both and thinking and supporting students as whole people in systems and changing the systems alongside. Yeah, ditto. My comment.

Keith Edwards:
Well we’re off to a great start. We should say that as we talk about this term student success, that means lots of things. And I think depending on where your place is in an organization or institution, you might, be focused on one or others, but you’re defining it. In the first chapter in the book is college adjustment, grades, retention, persistence, and then ultimately graduation. Jodi you have been thinking as we just, Mary started sort of got us moving about how models and theories of student success are changing and evolving and shifting both in the scholarship and the thinking about it, but then also in the practice, could you tell us a little bit more about how you see the shifting for folks who think of student success and retention as being one in the same and how can we evolve of that thinking and move forward from there?

Jodi Linley:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m excited to talk about that. And I want to note that I think it’s tricky. I think that, you know, we’re in a system where things like graduation rates translate to dollars from state legislatures, right? So we can’t ignore some of the original ways of thinking about student success. They still matter and we need to move, we need to think more expansively about success. So something that I think is really important that I just want to offer to the conversation is that some of those original models, like the Tinto model, for example, you mentioned Keith they they typically come from the perspective of how Mary was describing. You have to prepare students to succeed in a particular container or a particular environment or, or college experience. It’s about changing the individual to fit a particular mold. I study socialization and frequently think about how, no matter how hard you try, you can’t fit a square in a round hole, right?

Jodi Linley:
So the hole has to change what we think of as the, you know, the container of college has to be adaptive and nimble in ways that can match the students that we purport to want to serve. So I think that that’s been a big shift in, in what I’ve seen in a lot of the literature. There’s this really great phrase. Most people know Kimberly Crenshaw for coining the term intersectionality, another term of hers that I really love and, and want to see us talk more about in higher education is perspectivelessness and the idea of particular initiatives or interventions. Basically saying, you know, this is a neutral thing. If we to offer this and build it, it’s gonna be good for everybody, but it continues to center folks who are privileged by the system itself. So when we have perspective lists, notions of success we just continue to reify that, you know, it’s almost like the, the rich get richer idea that folks who are already privileged in the system will continue to be successful. And the gaps that we like to talk about in our field will continue to grow. So

Keith Edwards:
I love this. I want to, I just want to interrupt you. I, I’ve never heard about perspectivelessness, so thank you for, for helping me learn today. It kind of reminds me of folks talking about race. You say, I, you know, I see color. And then of course, like, look at all the stuff that you’re missing. Look at all the experiences, look at all the challenges, look at all the culture, look at all the things. Is that what we’re talking about here with perspectivelessness?

Jodi Linley:
Yeah. Yes, it is. So when she, when she first wrote about perspectivelessness, it was in the context of legal education right. because she’s a legal scholar and it was a critique of law school rules and, and particularly curricula that were basically saying, you know, law doesn’t see color that our legal system is just simply by, you know, there there’s inherent justice built in and her critique is okay, but if the policies and if the laws that get people into a court system are already unjust, then this experience certainly can’t be either that basically we can’t ignore the macro level forces that are at play. When we say racism, isn’t part of the conversation, right. Or heteronormativity, isn’t part of the conversation, right. If we ignore the systemic forces then we’ll never actually be able to achieve these things that we say we want when it comes to diversity and inclusion,

Keith Edwards:
Well, I interrupted you there about perspective ness. So is there more, you wanted to say about how things are shifting and involving before we invite Nick and Mary to chime in?

Jodi Linley:
Yeah, I guess the other thing I want to say is that from a practitioner standpoint. I feel like a lot of institutions have, have shifted their thinking and are of course still paying attention to some of the, the markers, right? GPA, are we students first to second year, who’s graduating and at what rates? And I definitely feel like a lot of institutions have moved to support students in more holistic and integrative ways. Really. There’s been a lot more attention in the last decade on transition programs, on academic support programs, supplemental instruction programs, those sorts of things that are, are meant to really support students, holistic experiences. Great. So yeah, I just wanted to bring the practitioner piece in.

Keith Edwards:
Great. I think Nick, you want to, you want to chime in here and talk about waves? Is that right,

Nicholas A. Bowman:
So in the higher education chapter of the book you know, we tried to summarize all the theories. And so, you know, we thought it was best to try to paint an overview rather than to be like, you know, focus on one or a handful or something like that. And so we talk, we actually borrowed from Jones and Stewart’s idea as they used waves to describe so student development theories and how those changed over time. And we did because we actually thought there’s a similar idea that we could use to describe student retention and success. Attrition was often an earlier framing of some of these theories as well. And so in a lot of ways they moved in the direction of many of the things that Jodi talked about. And so wave one, being some of the older, the Tinto, Astin things of that sort where it’s, you know, looking at these broad environments and context, looking at ’em for all students and you know, not looking, you know, with some attention to institutional context, but not as much as there has been recently where there’s been also more of a recent movement to that are equity in context to consider some theories focused specifically on students who hold one or more minoritized identities.

Nicholas A. Bowman:
In some cases they’re looking, you know, at all students, but with a greater focus on students who hold minoritized identities as well. I also think consistent with what Jodi was saying, you know, that there’s more of a focus around like belonging and growth and some of these wellbeing and some of these elements in it as well. I mean, if you think back, you know, Tinto, drew upon Dirks Durkheim’s theory of suicide, literally, you know, do you choose to stay in this life or not with the choice of suicide and then, you know, lay that into you know, choosing to stay in college, you know, a particular college or in college in general or not. And so you can imagine, you know, this thinking about belonging, some of these broader, you know, things that might reflect wellbeing or flourishing, you know, or gonna take a backseat, you know, depending on what that sort of initial framing has. I think there’s also a lot more attention to heterogeneity among institutions, whether by type of institution, you know, something that’s like formal or versus some institutions that are designed in certain ways versus others, even that’s not a particular type or selectivity or private public or something like that.

Keith Edwards:
Right. I would just want to go back to the wellbeing and flourishing. I’m really fascinated by this idea that in my experience as a practitioner on campus, a lot of student success programs are about preventing students from leaving whatever it is, the challenge they’re facing and how do we address it. And usually it’s when a student is on probation or as a mental health crisis, or is deeply in debt. And how do we now fix that? I’m particularly interested in how we get proactive and what would it be to be successful here and what are study skills and how can you navigate these things and how can you get the things? So where does this notion of being proactive and helping students be successful? All students be successful from the very beginning fit into this? Mary, I think we’ve talked about waves Mary, you were talking about, is it buckets, Tell us where this all fits in here?

Mary C. Murphy:
Yeah, I mean, I, well, I was gonna speak to your question that you posed just a moment ago of how do we get practical about some of these issues, particularly with thinking about how to help students not leave college. Right. It reminds me of an intervention, a student success intervention conducted and led by Shannon Brady and Greg Walton on probation messages. And this is a project that came out of the college transition collaborative. But basically what they showed was that actually analyzing the probation letters that colleges and universities were sending to the students on probation and asking students, how did you experience, like, what was your motivation after you received this? It was in the toilet. Why? Because they were so filled with legalese because it’s a contract. If you don’t do these things, you will be kicked out of college.

Mary C. Murphy:
Right. And so it has to be sort of spelled out in a very significant way. What student success and academic administrators, like point of sending those letters was to let students know, Hey, we’re noticing that you are struggling here. They said they really wanted it to be more sort of bringing them into the fold of the university, perhaps connecting them with resources, but this is not how it was perceived by students. Right. Students felt less motivation. They thought they were about to be kicked out. They felt threatened. Right. and so what Shannon and Greg did was they actually rewrote the probation letters and they stories from students about what students did in students’ own voices to actually come back from probation successfully. You know, they acknowledge that when they got the letter, they were shamed, they felt really like low motivation.

Mary C. Murphy:
They didn’t know if they could do it, but then they reached out to their advisor or they sought out a faculty member, or they talked to a peer in class of the classes that they were really struggling with. And they figured out ways of doing it. And what they found was that that significantly increased the number of students coming off of probation. When institutions did an AB test of their normal letter compared to the psychologically attuned letter. It had a huge impact on students, motivation, persistence, and actually staying at the university. So I think that, you know, when we think about this, that taking students perspective in this way, very seriously, and actually showing other students directions in other students’ voices, not from administration, not from some kind of academic, you know administrator.

Keith Edwards:
Or general counsel.

Mary C. Murphy:
Actually from other students that’s right. Or general counsel. Exactly. Right, exactly. Right.

Keith Edwards:
I, I love this part of the reason why I love it is it’s essentially free, right? To change the language on a letter that goes out to dozens hundred thousands of students to be more student centered, to be more proactive, to be more supportive, to sharing voices of other students. I work with a lot of campuses to, to make these kinds of changes with conduct letters when they schedule a hearing. And when you get a decision letter, how do you align the language of these letters not changing the of them, but how do you align the language with things like self-awareness and community and equity and engagement that you’ve said are so important, but then these letters which really do land with students and, and, you know, academic probation what else do we want to add here about different approaches to student success? Before we, we move to our next question.

Jodi Linley:
Something that came up for me when you first posed the question that Mary, just so beautifully answered. Thank you. I was just taking some notes while you were talking Mary. Something that popped up for me, Keith was how do we get proactive in supporting students to be, and then I want to add without feeling as though they’re at risk for, I think it was Bill Tierney who called it cultural suicide, and how do we, how do we on the organizational end shift in ways that can support, again, all the students that we say that we want to be successful in our organizations.

Keith Edwards:
And avoiding that cultural suicide is helping students be successful as who they are rather than feeling like they have to give that up in order to be successful. Right.

Jodi Linley:
Right, right. Yeah.

Keith Edwards:
Great. Well, I think that’s a great way to move into where we wanted to go next, Mary we’re going to let you lead on this. How can institutions advance practices and policies that advance student success and equity, and, and that’s been sort of a through line through this whole conversation.

Mary C. Murphy:
That’s a great question. So I would say that this follows in the context focus bucket, right? Not the person focus bucket, but the context focus bucket, what can institutions do right to advance equity and success. So I would say that what I see oftentimes happen when institutions try to put practices in place that are gonna support students, they, they take things from what I would call an observer perspective, sort of taking a look of the land from their position in the hierarchy of the institution and sort of saying what might be the problem here. And oftentimes they look at the evidence and so they do things like decrease college class sizes, or they introduce new technology in the classroom to help students learn or to stay engaged in class. These are many context focused interventions for student success. Right. What I would argue that we need to do is actually not take the observer’s perspective, but instead take what I call the actor perspective.

Mary C. Murphy:
So take on the student perspective themselves, this goes back to the probation letter intervention, for example, where we actually ask students, what are the psychological concerns that you have in the moment what’s holding you up or holding you back? Some of those things might be structural. Like I actually don’t have money to make tuition or to eat. Right. And so then there are practices and policies that can be put in place to solve those problems. Many of them are psychological. So I think that college students come to college with at least three questions in mind. Can I do it? Why should I do it? And is my identity valued here? And how students answer those three questions are really going to help students success and you know, administrators and institutions to think about how, what kind of interventions are important.

Mary C. Murphy:
So can I do it, it’s a question of efficacy rather than thinking about it as student problem of efficacy, think about the culture creators at the institution. What are the faculty saying in doing to students? Are they saying, look to your left, look to your right. Only two of you are going to be here of the three at the end of this term, of course, I’d wonder can I do it in that kind of context where faculty are, you know, really suggesting this growth MI or this fixed mindset, culture, you know kind of situation in class you know, what about the messages that they get in advising? What about messages they get when they, when an advisor says, Ugh, you know, given your background, I’m not sure this is the right class for you. I think we need to start, you know, somewhere else, you know, how do we actually deliver the kind of feedback that really students need to be receiving to navigate college successfully, that aren’t gonna trigger some of these concerns and help them answer those questions maladaptively really when thinking about, can I do it? Why should I do it? And is my identity valued here?

Keith Edwards:
You’re raising an important question for me. Of course, there’s, there’s the many things you just pointed to in terms of equity at the institution, but these institutions don’t exist in equitable environments, right? They are in systems of oppression and structural inequity around them. And I think we, we know that institutions aren’t these walled off places. These, I think we often fancy them to be these utopias within problems, but, I think now, not only aren’t there walls, but the barriers are even more porous with students engaging on social media, constantly like walking across campus, getting texts from high school friends who are working and didn’t go to college and parents and seeing all of these messages that you shouldn’t even go to college. You know, here’s all these billionaires who never went to college. So there just seems so much coming at that’s beyond the institution’s control, but influencing the student. How do we think about navigating all of this without just throwing up our hands and saying, I don’t know what we do.

Mary C. Murphy:
It’s a great question. And I think that’s why student constru and taking the actors’ perspective of students, const controls, how, how they’re actually thinking about their context, whether the messages they’re receiving is so important. So another example I’ll give is, you know, most universities at this point have some kind of first year experience program or project, right. And I would say that the large majority of first year experiences are really kind of rah, rah, get you motivated. Here’s how to have the college spirit. Here’s how to become, you know a Hoosier let’s say and what Hoosiers are like. And and also to connect you with some resources up front, here are the offices that can sort of help you as you navigate that first year college experience. But oftentimes these first year programs do not actually target effectively students’ controls of the transition into college.

Mary C. Murphy:
What we know about that transition is that there’s a lot of belonging, uncertainty, as you say, they get messages from family, they get messages from friends, they get messages from the media about whether or not they belong in college. And so what we have seen is, you know, another intervention that we have tested at 22 universities and over 400,000 incoming first year students is this belonging intervention, this social belonging intervention. That intervention actually looks at you know, providing students before they come onto campus you know, in their first year. And as they’re thinking about what college is gonna be like stories from other first year students and, and, oh, actually more junior and senior students as well to show what were the concerns to actually target those concerns and control about belonging. When I first got to college, I wasn’t sure I, I belonged.

Mary C. Murphy:
However, over time I kind of joined some clubs. I went to the office hours of my faculty member, I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I got involved in the academic and social life of campus in many different ways. And those stories are attributed to ethnically and racially diverse students from different kinds of backgrounds and sort of give the context of belonging as a trajectory and not just an outcome, you either have it, or you, don’t actually something that builds over time. And we show that paired with other kinds of programs can have huge on students persistence four years later, and also their graduation, their performance in terms of their GPA four years later. So thinking about those transition moments, students and how to target those directly in our initiatives seems imperative. If we really want to affect long term persistence and performance.

Keith Edwards:
Well, you reminded me when I, when I talk with college students, particularly college men, their image of what college is gonna be is still animal house and old school and animal house didn’t just come out before they were born. It came out before their parents were born, but it’s still the mental model. Many of them are arriving here and they know intellectually it’s the on sense, but it’s visual and they can see it. And just imagine all of the messages then you’re, you’re working on undoing. Nick and Jodi, what would you add here?

Nicholas A. Bowman:
Well, I definitely want to echo this sort of, how can you intervene effectively with this? And so, so I, I now work with a number of people, you know, who work, you know, and have convinced me that students study skills and habits could be improved. And so, so let’s assume that’s true. So then what do you do about it? So you can imagine a first year seminar, you know, and you’re like, oh, well, we need to tell students how to study and what to do. So you can imagine this thing where students are in a first year seminar and week X, you know, they’re sitting there and now I’m gonna tell you how to study. You know, maybe we bring in someone from the center of teaching and learning, you know, and I tell you a bunch of things, you know? And so that might work, you know, students might interpret that, but maybe not, you know, like, is that more effective than, you know, if they, you know, is in Mary’s example, if they hear some of this from other students, you know, who might be like, oh, this is someone who just did what

Nicholas A. Bowman:
I did, you know, like a year, two, three years ago from this, like, is this more effective than instructors, perhaps designing, think about how do you design assessments in their class, or how do you create perhaps more frequent assessments so that, you know, students don’t have the ability to say, Hey, I have two tests. And so, you know, there are two times in the semester, you know, where I really need to gear up.

Keith Edwards:
Oh, or video testimonials of students that could be shared out at different times of the year, talking about the challenges they faced and overcome and what was helpful. Yeah, exactly.

Nicholas A. Bowman:
Yeah. And I think another theme is sort of like what’s within college’s control. And so we’ve talked about some things around financial difficulty you know, kind of the tension between students pre-college background and their college experience, you know, that we need to work on, but their hard, you know, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work on them, but then there are other things like academic probation, where the policies and practices are almost entirely within the, you know, control of the university. So the letter they send the support they provide, whether or not to even place them on academic probation as a result of whatever level, whether to call it probation, you know, which is often talked about in the context of criminal proceeding, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, like these things are entirely discretionary. And so how do we reconsider things? You know, that again, may have been around for a long time from that student or that, you know, perspective which is the perspective that’s most important if we’re thinking about helping students succeed.

Keith Edwards:
I really love your bringing that in. It’s a great reminder that there are so much beyond our control and there are so many things that we really do have a lot of control over. Jodi, what would you like to add here?

Jodi Linley:
Yeah, yeah. A lot has come up for me. One thing that I want to bring into the conversation is that I’m hearing a lot of us talking about anticipatory socialization. We’re talking about what are the messages that students are receiving before they even think about applying to college and then how do those messages, how are those actualized, how are those affirmed? How are those challenged? And by whom? And I think the role of peers cannot be understated. I’m really, I just want to, you know, reiterate the importance of peers as agents of socialization. And I think that, you know, that’s a, a great way for us to consider, you know, as educators, as policy makers, as administrators and student affairs educators how do we, how do we engage peers in helping in these processes so that they can be the agents and the communicators of the messages to future students through anticipatory socialization. I also I had to laugh, Mary, you mentioned, you know, what is it to be a Hoosier? I don’t know if you know this, I have a research article called We are not all Bulldogs. There we go. Every campus has that t-shirt we are all, yep.

Keith Edwards:
We, I just thought you were Hawkeys were squirming at the Hoosier menu.

Jodi Linley:
Right, right, right. Yes. And that’s not reality, you know, what, what so many of the initiatives currently do this goes back to this idea of perspective lessness is that rah rah, you know, get excited about coming to be member of our institutional community with this very generic sense of what that even means. Right. I go back to in the belonging literature, I think it’s Anne Marie’s body of work around the idea of belonging outcomes are experienced depending on a person’s positionality. Right? Absolutely. But in specifically in historically and predominantly white contexts that students of color define belonging as things like being able to have an authentic relationship with somebody, right. And, and white students call belonging fun, I can go out and have fun characterizing belonging differently in that way is really helpful for me to think about, okay, when I say let’s push against the perspectivelessness, that’s what I want to push against that socializing students to be successful in higher education is more than just fun.

Keith Edwards:
Right. And that belonging isn’t one thing. Yeah. Right. It’s so many different things to so many different students and what they’re bringing, right.

Jodi Linley:
Exactly.

Mary C. Murphy:
I would, I would say too, I want to add here and chime in that, you know, one good example, I think of moving from the person for focus to the context focused is the evolution of mindset research. So everyone’s heard of the fixed and growth mindset, Carol Dwek, fixed and growth mindset ideas. And for so long, it was thought of it’s just a characteristic in our heads. You might have a growth mindset. I might have a fixed mindset that influences our motivation, the way we responded challenges, you know, or failure, these sorts of outcomes. But it was always thought of as kind of like an individual difference. And so we saw it in education that many faculty who know about mindset or particular in the K12 settings that it became a label. Oh, that kid just has a fixed mindset. There’s nothing I can do about it.

Mary C. Murphy:
But in the last step, there’s been work in higher education that myself and many other colleagues have, has been focused on in reconst ensuring mindset, not just as a characteristic of individual psychology, but as a characteristic of environments, it’s a cultural variable. There are fixed mindset cultures, and there are growth mindset cultures. And many times we are guilty in higher education of creating a fixed mindset culture, where there’s only some that can be successful. You either have it, or you don’t, if you don’t get this fast and, and flawlessly, maybe this isn’t the class or the major for you. Right. And so in the messages that we send, I think also of like convocation addresses, are we talking about fame and glory when the, a president and the provost welcome the class, your class now consists of, you know, four people who’ve written books, five people who have patents, like all of this fame, are we talking about the development and growth and progress that these students have shown, and that they’re going to experience over time and sort of laying down the trajectory of, of success as a growth opportunity rather than a, you have it, or you don’t, you’re only as good as your last performance.

Mary C. Murphy:
So I think that we need to be thinking about, you know, the messages we send in the classroom setting. You know, we have an intervention that we did with over 300 faculty at six universities where they really just worked on exactly the same policies and practices they did, but actually communicating to students as they had those policies and practices that they believed that students could grow and develop the growth mindset language. And that increased the number of students getting a or BS. It decreased the number of DFWs in the class. And the benefits were experienced much more for underrepresented students of color than for white advantage continuing gen students. Yeah. So, you know, I think thinking structurally like this, and what are the messages we are, we are doing in all different kinds of practices in the classroom and outside the classroom where Nick said, you know, we have full control over certain aspects of this, like our convocation address. Right.

Keith Edwards:
I love that. I mean, I think that’s maybe a great place to bring us sort of to back to where we began. I started this thinking about you reminding me of a piece from one of Parker Palmer’s books, where he describes sitting around with a group of educational administrators who are complaining about the students who are complaining about admissions, who are complaining about how can I teach these students who aren’t coming to, whatever. Right. steeped in a lot of hiss. And he just says, you all sound like hospital administrators who complain about not having healthy patients. Like that’s not the purpose of this place is to bring in people who are successful it’s to help them learn how to be successful, to learn how to write, to learn, how to study, to learn how to do all of these things. We are running out of time, but we’ll get one more thought from here. Each of you, as you know, this podcast is called Student Affairs NOW, and we want to ask, what are you thinking troubling or pondering now? And if you want to share where folks can connect with you that would be great. So Jodi, no pressure. What are you troubling now?

Jodi Linley:
Yeah. Right now I’m sitting with what does, so I should preface this with I teach the student development curriculum to master students at the University of Iowa preparing to work in the fields that we’re talking about today. Right. So I’m thinking about what does embracing fully embracing that we are in the work of growth and development. What does centering that in a definition of student success look like in practice, in different functional areas? That’s a question that I think I’ll take to class next week and explore with some students. And if folks want to be in touch with me I’m available via email at jodi-linley@uioa.edu.

Keith Edwards:
Awesome. Well, thank you for that question and the question you’re gonna share with your students and thank you for sharing that with all of our listeners and viewers really appreciate that, Nick. What are you troubling now?

Nicholas A. Bowman:
I don’t know where I also like, you know, based on this conversation or just in general. I mean, I think one of my things that this is perhaps I’m troubling or thinking about this, because it’s sort of outside the stuff that I normally do, but like, you know, like sometimes like it’s clear, you know, you could ask students like, what are the barriers to success? And they can all like point at something and that’s something might be a particular individual. It might be a policy, you know, it could be any number of things. And so, but it’s like someone who’s there, you know, they’re probably not, you know, like what do you do about that? Exactly. You know, if it’s someone, you know, who just isn’t doing their job in the way that you would want, you know, and like, and I mean, in theory, you know, there could be something, but how do we like, you know, get at these things that are clear challenges, we can identify them, but you know, for there’s some obstacle like almost a barrier in front of the barrier.

Nicholas A. Bowman:
That’s preventing us from like making that change, you know? Like how can we go about that? If we know like, Hey, like this could be done more effectively, you know, we know how to do it. You know, let’s go ahead and do it. And I mean, obviously an intermediate step on this. And I think of more of a focus of what we’ve been talking about today is the, you know, the thinking of about how to do these things effectively, you know, whether, you know, from what perspective should that come from and so on and you know, what knowledge can we draw upon to do it more effectively? Great. Oh yeah. I guess in terms of contact me, email is also probably the best way. Nick-Bowman@uiowa.edu. We are not creative here.

Keith Edwards:
I love the simplicity.

Keith Edwards:
I love the simplicity, what a great way to manage it. Yeah, it works. That’s fantastic. Mary, how about you? What’s troubling you now?

Mary C. Murphy:
Well, I’m really focused on, you know, the very easy problem of institutional transformation, institutional transformation. How do we actually transform institutions to, rather than being gatekeepers? How do we transform institutions to be gateways for students and particularly for underserved students? I’m thinking about how do we tailor interventions for various contexts in student bodies and particular kinds of concerns, how do we create sort of a knowledge, maybe an institutional assessment of things like hotspots and bright spots on our college campuses. And then targeted interventions, you know, based on those hotspots that emerge from our analyses these are the kinds of things that I’ve been thinking about a lot. And that goes to the heterogeneity question and matching of various interventions and policies and practices to the actual real, you know, concerns and problems that are on the ground at different colleges and universities currently, and really working on institutions as change agents here. And that would mean their faculty, staff, administrators you know, working on that. I think to me is the thing that I really am focused on where people can reach me. You can reach me by email. My email is mcm@psyiu.edu, or you can also reach me at our website accelerateequity.org.

Keith Edwards:
Awesome. Well, thanks to all three of you for joining us and sharing these ideas. I’m really with right now, these different perspectives and listening, asking students, listening to students and sharing with students. What other students have said has worked for them seems quite simple but also maybe pretty radical all at the same time. This has been terrific, congrats on the book and getting it out and thank you for sharing your wisdom and contributions with us today. I also want to thank our sponsor of today’s episode Stylus and Vector Solutions. Stylus is proud to be a sponsor of the student affairs now podcast, browse, their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at styluspub.com use promo code SANow for 30% off book all off all books and free shipping, you can also find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter @styluspub. Vector Solutions.

Keith Edwards:
How will your institution rise to reach today’s socially conscious generation. These students report commitments to safety, wellbeing and inclusion are as important as academic rigor when selecting a college it’s time to reimagine the work of student affairs as an investment, not an expense. For over 20 years vector solutions, which now includes the campus prevention network. Formally EverFi has been the partner of choice for 2000 more colleges, universities, and national organizations with nine efficacy studies behind their courses. You can trust and have full confidence that you’re using the standard of care for student safety, wellbeing, and inclusion. Transform the future of your institution and the community you serve. Learn more at vectorsolutions.com/studentaffairsnow. As always a huge shout out to Nat Ambrosey, the production assistant for the podcast who does all the behind the scene work to make the four of us look and sound good. And if you’re listening to today and not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at studentaffairsnow.com scroll to the bottom of the homepage and add your email to our mailchimp list. While you’re there, check out the archives. I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks again to all three of our fabulous guests today and everyone who is listening and watching. Please make it a great week. Thank you all. You. Thank you.

https://styluspub.presswarehouse.com/browse/book/9781642671339/How-College-Students-Succeed

https://education.uiowa.edu/research/research-centers-and-initiatives/center-research-undergraduate-education/crue-projects

The IU Equity Accelerator–using research, practice, and policy to create more equitable learning and working environments from college to careers: https://AccelerateEquity.org/

Downloadable resources and tools for faculty, staff, and higher education professionals to create more equity in higher education: https://collegetransitioncollaborative.org/resources/

Faculty mindset effects on equity gaps in their classrooms: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau4734

Customized belonging intervention: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aba4677

Our SXSW Edu talk about creating more equitable growth mindset cultures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_0L15AgtkI

To read the original proposition about perspectivelessness: Crenshaw, K. (1984). https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/natblj11&div=12&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals

Vaccaro, A., & Newman, B. M. (2016). Development of a sense of belonging for privileged and minoritized students: An emergent model. Journal of College Student Development, 57(8), 925-942.

Jodi’s article, “We are (not) all Bulldogs.” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/665674