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Proof of Life
10/8/2006
Getting to Graduation
With 23 schools across the Golden State, the California State University (CSU) system has experienced some of the benefits of SLM first-hand. The system—the largest of its kind in the US—deployed Oracle’s SLM solution last year after confronting some sobering statistics about the time it took CSU students to graduate. These stats indicated that only 25 percent of the system’s freshmen were graduating in four years. Clearly, something had to be done.
That’s when Mike McLean, CSU’s senior director of common management systems, got involved. McLean dug around a bit and learned that the system itself was partially responsible for students taking so long to finish school. For starters, the CSU system was not offering the right classes at the right times. To make matters worse, advisors weren’t effectively communicating to students which classes they needed to obtain their degrees.
“We had situations where many students were far into their college program before they understood what were the specific requirements of their major,” says McLean, who notes the CSU system has more than 400,000 students overall. “By the time they understood, it they didn't have much time to catch up, and so it took them even longer.”
CSU turned to Oracle’s SLM solution to turn things around. With the help of regular degree audits, the school has been able to chart which classes are required for each major, enforce policies discouraging course changes, and provide roadmaps for students throughout the year. The system also has made this information available to students 24/7 via a new Web interface, and will get involved when students are in danger of slipping up.
It’s still too early for McLean to glean a specific return on investment (ROI) from the project, but he says students on at least three of the system’s campuses have reported overall satisfaction with the new approach and are moving through the system at a faster pace. Over time, he adds, less schooling will mean lower cost for students and parents alike—a benefit that’s bound to keep CSU “customers” and their families satisfied.
“We are finding out that just addressing the problem seems to help solve some of it,” says McLean. “Even if you don’t have all the software in place, just the awareness that we are trying to do better on graduation rates helps to improve it.”
Improving Retention
Technologists at DePaul University, a 23,000-student Jesuit institution in Chicago, have experienced similarly positive results using the SLM solution toward a different goal. There, the problem was retention of at-risk students. Those struggling students who didn’t just give up and drop out were transferring to other, less-demanding Chicago-area colleges, and receiving their degrees elsewhere. In all, about 275 students fell into this group.
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