By Jordan Erb, The Arbiter
As registration for spring 2019 crept up in early November, Gabriel Rosenvall, the associate athletic director/student-athlete development for Boise State athletics, sat with a binder full of academic advising reports on his desk. The binder, filled to capacity with papers and little notes, detailed each of Boise State’s 110 football players’ academic courses to date.
Rosenvall’s job is to ensure that each of these players stay on track for the coming semester. He makes sure they finish 20 percent of their degree each year, which equates to about 13 credits per semester. He analyzes their courses and electives, and sorts out scheduling conflicts with college advisors. And when minor bureaucratic barriers appear, such as holds popping up in Student Center, Rosenvall is there to direct students toward fixing the problem.
Rosenvall is the advisor for the football team, and each team at Boise State has a designated advisor like him who keeps players on track to maintaining a GPA and graduating on time. This academic support structure exists in addition to the other players on the team, the coaches, the players’ designated college academic advisor and athletic trainers, each of whom offers a level of support far different than what is provided to the average student.
These concentric circles of support are largely what separate student-athletes from most of the student body, a trend that is reflected in the average graduation rates of different types of students.
For the cohort of freshman entering Boise State in 2010, student-athletes had an average graduation rate of 79 percent. Participants in the College Assistant Migrant Program (CAMP), a program that provides support for students who are migratory or seasonal farmworkers, or children of such workers, on average graduate at a rate of 75 percent. Students who didn’t require loans or grants to pay for college, graduated at a rate of 47 percent. Finally, Pell Grant-receiving students graduated at an average rate of 32 percent.
While the university’s administration has acknowledged this gap and is working to raise graduation rates across the board, there was little success between the 2010 and 2011 cohorts. In fact, the gap between those who did and did not receive Pell Grants–a federal subsidy that helps students pay for college–widened from 15 to 23 percent.
Groups like CAMP and Boise State athletics have demonstrated that student success is based on a multitude of different approaches. The success of students in these groups comes from a mix of financial aid, first-year student outreach, concentric circles of academic and social support, and help maneuvering the university’s bureaucratic processes, such as holds, permission numbers, transfer credits, academic adjustments, or any of the other small things that serve as barriers between students and their academic success.
What support looks like
By the time registration is through, both Rosenvall and his students have a firm grasp on what the upcoming semester will look like. Holds have been removed, advisors and professors have been contacted and players are well on their way to a successful semester.
“I have gone through working with the folks in the Registrar’s Office and different folks on campus, so I know exactly what class (they’re) taking and why (they’re) taking it,” Rosenvall said.
In much the same way, CAMP assists students who are enrolled in their first year of undergraduate studies at Boise State. On average, participants of CAMP have a 75 percent graduation rate, according to Michelle Kelley, the program’s director.
Although the program does offer financial help for students, it is only available for their freshman year. Despite this, their graduation rate remains high–higher than most on Boise State’s campus–leading Kelley to believe it’s less about money, and more about retention tactics.
“There’s something about being connected and having people who can answer the routine, run-of-the-mill questions,” Kelley said. “…You can throw money at people, but without the support, it’s not helpful.”
With CAMP, students receive counseling and tutoring services, skills workshops that help with job or internship placement, and a bilingual orientation that helps students and their parents maneuver different hurdles, such as student center issues, accessing financial aid information and buying books.
Similarly to Boise State athletics, CAMP puts an emphasis on first-year outreach to involve students and keep them at the university. While about two-thirds of student-athletes receive scholarships–whether in full or in part–according to Rosenvall, a lot of success comes down to support and connections over money, especially early on.
“I don’t think we’re necessarily geniuses,” Rosenvall said. “I think we work really hard and we’ve created, over time, a culture here of expectations. Our athletic training staff does an excellent job of engaging with students and helping them feel connected to Boise State and supporting them. We have tremendous coaches who bring in good students who care about doing things the right way, and then we have systems of support in place that can help do that.”
For first-year student-athletes, regular–if not weekly–meetings with academic advisors are mandatory. They look at the weeks ahead and plan around game trips. They make sure they know what homework to bring on the plane, and advisors like Rosenvall help set them up with tutors or learning assistants if need be. They are coached on what their resources are, and also benefit from the study hours designated to each sport.
This, according to Rosenvall, is the obvious advantage student-athletes have over the rest of Boise State’s student groups. The same goes for Kelley, who thinks there is a model set by CAMP that could be learned from.
“We’ve got a pretty big institution, and it’s easy for people to get lost. I know the institution is concerned about first-gen student completion,” Kelley said. “And I think ‘OK, what could they learn from what we do?’ I don’t know if this is something that could be implemented on a larger scale or make things more available to students, but I think there’s value in seeing what we’re accomplishing.”
University action
For Leslie Webb, the associate vice president for student affairs, and Andrew Finstuen, dean of the Honors College, first-generation college students are of particular interest. The two created the Student Success and Retention Committee in 2016, and although it’s intended to impact student success as a whole, they looked carefully at first-time, full-time, commuter students, who tend to be among the most vulnerable.
“X number of years ago we pushed for better retention and graduation,” Finstuen said. “Now, what can we do on those same measures — better retention and graduation — around students that face more challenges? Statistically, if you live off-campus and you’re an Idaho resident, you’re more likely to have financial challenges, whether that’s Pell-eligible or not. You’re more likely to not retain at the university. That’s the group we want to focus on.”
According to both Webb and Finstuen, this group constitutes a broad population that overlaps with both Pell-eligible and underserved populations. That group is likely to cover some of the Pell-eligible students who fall into a group that is now 23 percentage points beneath Boise State’s average graduation rate.
“Whether it’s widening or not,” Finstuen said, “when you look at a 15-point difference, you want to try to respond to that and ask ‘what can we do to help support those students?’”
In November, the committee came back with four areas of development that the university can improve upon to increase student retention and success. The four areas include mitigating bureaucratic barriers to success, pushing for student registration, creating an alert system in the classroom for students who are falling behind, and finally, developing an overall sense of mattering and belonging. They’ll need approval from the provost before they can start implementing the recommendations, but they hope to get started by the end of the month.
According to Finstuen, bureaucratic barriers can be any number of small things that put one more hurdle between students and their academic success, including holds, permission numbers and credit transfers. These barriers are often financial, but they can also simply be time-consuming and inconvenient, and without a support system to help students navigate them, they can be a deterrent to continuing at the university.
“It just becomes one more thing that’s the final straw, like, I’m done with this for a little while,” said Luke Jones, director for Housing and Residence Life and a member of the committee. “I’ll come back when I have more time and resources. I think it disproportionately affects the students who lack the time and resources to figure it out.”
This ties into the next recommendation, which is to figure out ways to reach out to students who are eligible to enroll, but haven’t yet. Finstuen and Webb hope to implement a system that will allow them to call students who haven’t yet enrolled and ask what’s holding them back.
Oftentimes, finances are a factor that keep students from enrolling. While the university doesn’t have the ability to offer money to every student who is kept from enrolling due to financial hardship, it does have certain emergency funds that can be implemented in some cases. Beyond that, though, the committee would just like to see some sort of outreach program that can help mitigate the issues that keep students from enrolling.
Next, they want to ensure they’re catching students when it matters–at the beginning. They are looking into a way to track students’ progress at the beginning of the semester, and make sure their grades are on track to pass their classes. Similar to Boise State athletics and CAMP, this would be a collaborative process amongst professors, advisors and administration.
“The most concrete solution is an early-alert system, where by week four there’s been a substantial enough assignment that a faculty member can gauge where a student is in terms of progress, and that can be automatically reported to advising or other support staff,” Finstuen said.
This would allow students to stay on track with their courses, and perhaps even build some sort of relationship with their professors, which is a key component to the final recommendation. To take a play out of athletics’ book, they hope to boost students’ sense of mattering and belonging–although, they admit, those terms are a bit vague.
“Those are just words,” Jones said. “What does it mean to matter and belong? At the heart of it is that you find people who share your values and your goals. You find like-minded people, students or others. You believe that there are people who are sharing in your success. There are people who are rooting for you, and that there are people who depend you on at the institution.”
Finstuen agreed, saying he’s not sure that he, or anyone, really, has the answers to the question of mattering and belonging. The committee hopes, however, that by helping students create meaningful relationships to the university, along with the other three goals, they’ll help improve retention and graduation rates.
“It’s not just about the rates or the numbers,” Webb said. “There is a large level of humanity behind this, and ignoring that is a problem. We’re not ignoring it. We’re really trying to understand who we are talking about and get to know them in an intentional and meaningful way.”