Becoming a Student-Ready College

Reimagining the Culture of Leadership for Student Success

A revision to the practical and popular guide, this book asks the crucial question within today's environment, "What's a student-ready college?" Higher education leaders are responsible for preparing their institutions to serve the students they admit in the best way possible. By asking ourselves how we can transform our institutions into student-ready colleges to create a new culture of leadership that is responsive to current challenges and focuses on understanding and utilizing student assets and social capital to achieve shared goals for student success. Becoming a Student-Ready College shows you how.

Conversations in higher education tend to focus on defining college readiness for students. Too often, we forget to ask the question from the other side, and we miss important opportunities to develop institutions in ways that can help students thrive. Higher education leaders and educators can better serve today's college students through responsive and redesigned practices and policies. This updated edition features revisions and new material that speak to the social realities of today's incoming students and cover the latest strategies and techniques for connecting with learners to foster equity and success.

• Leverage existing resources to the benefit of students and deliver the right support at the right time to achieve equity in student outcomes and build on students' assets
• Design eco-systemic partnerships and support programs that nurture the relationship between the student and the institution
• Strengthen institutional capacity-building for achieving defined student-ready goals
• Build shared governance to promote agency and to foster change and collaboration

Becoming a Student-Ready College explores leaders' shared responsibilities in advancing student success and provides practical recommendations for educators at all levels.

Preface xiii

About the Authors xvii

Acknowledgements xxi

Chapter One: The Time Is Now: A Call for Student-Ready Colleges 3

The Quest for College-Ready Students and Redefining Readiness 10

A Profile of Twenty-First-Century Students 16

The Science of Student Readiness 22

The Value of Student-Ready Colleges and the Emerging School-to-Work Economy 25

The Path Forward: Taking Steps to Transformation 29

Chapter Two: Leadership Values and Organizational Culture 33

New Perspectives on Leadership 37

Values and the Student-Ready College 39

Does Collaboration Serve a Greater Good or Is It an End in Itself? 41

Leadership for Grassroots Empowerment 43

Changing Perspective on Educators 47

Exemplary Practice: The University of Wisconsin–Whitewater 47

Positive Vision of Educators 54

Inclusive Professional Development for Everyone Who Teaches 57

Student-Ready Practice of Governance 62

Building Out the Change Effort 64

Exemplary Practice: Alverno College 65

A Pragmatic Approach to Shared Governance 69

A Vision of a Place Ready for Students 72

Conclusion: A Vision to Guide Collaboration 76

Chapter Three: Intentionality by Design to Support Student Success 79

Intentionality by Design: Centering Equity, Diversity, and Belonging 83

Removing Systemic Barriers and Challenges for Students 85

A Caring Educator 87

Embracing a Paradigm Shift 90

A Culture of Belonging 95

Defining Student Success as Learning 97

Promoting Excellence in Student Engagement 99

Charting Your Course of Action 102

Conclusion 103

Chapter Four: Leveraging Ecosystem Partnerships in Support of Student Readiness 107

Engaging the Ecosystem 111

A Critical Survival Instinct: The Opportunistic Self-Awareness of Student-Ready Colleges 115

Three Levers for Establishing and Aligning Impactful Ecosystem Partnerships 120

Student-Centered Symbiosis in Support of Today’s College Students 130

Questions to Consider in Establishing and Aligning Ecosystem Partnerships 133

Conclusion 139

Chapter Five: Educating the Whole Student 143

Whole-Person Leadership and Learning 146

Belief in Student Capacity to Learn as a Genuine and Public Commitment 150

Challenges to Belief in Student Capacity to Learn 154

Addressing Deficit-Mindedness 157

Sites for Action 165

The Wealth That Students Bring 167

Institutional Long Views 168

Leadership Responsive to the Ecosystem 172

Conclusion 178

Conclusion 179

References 187

Index 209

TIA BROWN McNAIR is the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and the Executive Director of TRHT campus centers at AAC&U. She is co-author of From Equity Talk to Equity Walk.

SUSAN ALBERTINE is the retired Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success at AAC&U.

NICOLE McDONALD works as Assistant Vice Provost for Student Success Strategies at the University of Houston.

THOMAS MAJOR, JR. is Associate General Counsel at Lumina Foundation.

MICHELLE ASHA COOPER is the Acting Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Office of Post-secondary Education.

While resources abound for students seeking to get themselves “college-ready,” far fewer answer an equally important question: “Is your college student-ready?”

In the newly revised second edition of Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success, a team of distinguished education professionals delivers a practical blueprint to prepare your institution of higher learning to better serve the students it will admit. You’ll learn to create a new culture of leadership that responds to modern educational challenges and strategies for valuing student assets and building organizational capacity for change.

This book puts your institution in a position to help students learn and thrive, even as they encounter the obstacles and roadblocks faced by contemporary college students. Responsive and redesigned practices and policies that speak to today’s social realities are included, as is new material, strategies, and techniques to help your school connect with learners and foster equity.

Becoming a Student-Ready College draws on five guiding principles to help your institution become a student-ready college. It prepares your school to leverage resources it already has to deliver to students the right benefits in the right way at the right time. It also explains how to design eco-systemic partnerships and support programs that grow the relationship between your students and your institution. You’ll strengthen institutional capacity-building and build a shared governance model that promotes agency, fosters change, and improves collaboration.

A must-read handbook for student administrators at colleges and educational institutions around the world, Becoming a Student-Ready College belongs in the hands of higher education leaders, faculty members, academic professionals, and student affairs experts as they seek to guide students from admission to graduation.

TRANSFORM THE CULTURE OF YOUR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION TO BETTER SERVE STUDENTS

“Campuses need this book more than ever as they recover from the pandemic and try to address longstanding racial inequities on campus where stakeholders no longer have patience to wait for us to redesign higher education so that it is ‘student ready.’ Using students as the foundation for campus design—policies, practices, structures and ultimately our culture is the essential challenge of the next decade. This book continues to provide the steps campus leaders can take to make all students successful and to fulfill their mission and be accountable to policymakers, parents and students themselves.”

—Adrianna Kezar, Wilbur Kieffer Endowed Professor and Dean’s Professor of Leadership, USC, Director of the Pullias Center

“In this Second Edition of Becoming a Student-Ready College, the authors are to be commended for making an already outstanding resource even better for college presidents, provosts, deans, department chairs, faculty, student services personnel, board members, and others interested in and committed to promoting student success and closing equity gaps. The book serves as an exceptional ‘how-to’ guide for colleges laser-focused on promoting success as a student-centered institution.”

—Sonny Ramaswamy, President, Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities