NEWS
The Path to Student Success 2.0: Supporting and Expanding Undergraduate Student Success
This article is the first in a three-part series by the Provost’s Office looking at recent successes in undergraduate enrollment, graduate enrollment, and how lessons learned and collaboration between levels is yielding results as Georgia State pursues its strategic vision of Student Success 2.0. Here, we examine the undergraduate level.
By Jeremy Craig, Communications Manager for the Office of the Provost
This fall, Georgia State University experienced something positive that many colleges and universities have struggled with: increased undergraduate enrollment.
In fact, the university outpaced the national average in enrollment growth, measuring 3.8 percent to 2.9 percent.
And as a result, this fall, the university’s student body grew by more than 1,900, bringing overall enrollment across all levels of study to 52,400 from 50,500 the year before.
Even during this spring semester, which typically has a lower enrollment count than the fall, GSU still maintained an overall year-over-year increase of more than 3 percent – more than an additional 1,500 students compared to spring 2024. It’s the highest spring enrollment in the last four years.
Perimeter College, a major point of access to higher education in the region, now has more than 16,000 students enrolled – for the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and up 10 percent from the previous year.
But the 2024-25 enrollment increases are only part of the story of academic advances and educational opportunity for undergraduates.
It represents another example of the strength and resilience of an institution that has made student success for all its calling card and a fundamental pillar – no matter the challenges.
And it’s another example of how the university has its sights for the second phase of student success – going further to redefine and lead amid the challenges of a changing landscape in higher education.
“Enrollment challenges alone are enough,” said Dr. Allison Calhoun-Brown, Georgia State’s Senior Vice President for Student Success. “But we’re doing more than just solving these challenges. We’re also very interested in the retention, progression and ultimately in the timely graduation of our entire student body.”
Building From a Foundation: Student Success 1.0
To understand the significance of what Georgia State has achieved – and its ambitions to go even further over the next decade – it’s important to know how far the university has come.
Prior to the university’s previous strategic plan, the six-year graduation rates among bachelor’s degree-seeking students were as low as 25 percent. Achievement gaps between students of diverging backgrounds were common.
When it came time for the university to envision its future during a strategic planning process in 2010, it was clear that something had to be done.
“Georgia State was under delivering on the promise of education to its students,” said Allison Calhoun-Brown, Senior Vice President for Student Success. “We took a hard look at ourselves, and came to the conclusion that we can do better by our students – and in order to do better by our students, we have changed systems, structures, policies and approaches to realize that vision.”
Creating the Structure: Systems for Support
Admission, enrollment, retention, progression and graduation don’t stand on their own. Together, they are aspects of a system that can be the difference between educational opportunity – or that opportunity becoming out of reach.
Georgia State’s successes are a result of two key initiatives: creating systems and interventions to support student success – and gathering the data to inform them.
The interventions developed are proactive and wide-ranging. Examples include – but are not limited to:
- Graduation Progression System & Expanded Advising: using data and predictive analytics to trigger outreach by advisors to students who may be likely to fail
- Panther Retention Grants: examining and meeting financial gaps, some as small as a few hundred dollars, that keep students from degree completion
- Meta Majors: grouping of related academic disciplines that allows first-year students to explore broad fields of interest before selecting a specific major, ensuring that their initial coursework aligns with their eventual degree path
- Chatbots: using AI powered chatbots to nudge students towards completing the next steps after admission to reduce “summer melt” – where admitted students do not enroll in the university.
Ultimately, the root of the work is to eliminate administrative barriers which create obstacles to student success.
“When we engage and work to remove these barriers, there are things we can do to remove, minimize or lessen these obstacles. In doing that, you create a context where students can succeed a lot more effectively,” Dr. Calhoun-Brown said.
The interventions must be intentional – not only at the individual level of faculty or staff, but across the institution.
“Even though everyone has the best intentions, we must be intentional as a system – meaning the entire university and all of its components must really focus on how we drive better outcomes,” she shared.
This intentionality has allowed Georgia State to eliminate achievement gaps regardless of background, graduate more Black students than any public higher education institution, and increase graduation rates, with degree conferrals numbering greater than 10,000 each year.
Advancing Academics and Stabilizing Undergraduate Enrollment: DFW Rates
Aiding in keeping enrollment numbers up is the university’s watch over student persistence and retention.
On the individual level, this is done through the Graduation Progression System, which triggers outreach by an individual student’s advisor as a form of early warning that they are on the wrong track.
But having a group-level alarm is important too.
There’s always room to grow and addressing DFW rates – the rate of students earning a D, an F, or withdrawing from a course – is one of the important ways Georgia State keeps tab on student success and retention among the student body at large.
GSU has taken various routes to help reduce DFW rates. Many have involved curriculum changes, others have involved innovative teaching methods (also called high-impact practices, or HIPs, such as GSU’s EPIC initiative).
Exploring DFW rates can sometimes bring about findings that challenge previously held beliefs. For example, the university examined teaching effectiveness among different categories of instructor.
“We made sure that everyone involved in decision-making had access to reports that dug deep into these questions, whether the faculty member is a part-time instructor or full-time faculty, or a graduate teaching assistant-taught course,” said Dr. Nicolle Parsons-Pollard, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs. “We wanted people to think about their assumptions.”
One of the presumptions was that full-time faculty members would do better with DFW rates than part-time instructors and graduate teaching assistants. By and large, this is the case, Dr. Parsons-Pollard said, but there were instances where some full-time instructors needed some assistance. University research also showed that graduate teaching assistants often did better with DFW rates than part-time instructors.
“All of us having access to the same data allowed us to hone-in on where we needed to focus our energies,” she explained. (More about the power of data sharing and collaboration in enrollment will be shared later in this article series.)
All told, cutting DFW rates helps to keep students in the classroom and lessens the impact of lower incoming student numbers – no small task, considering that the number of credit hours influences budget allocations from the state.
Stabilizing credit hour enrollment from the post-pandemic drop means that the university can help more students thanks to greater financial resources.
“Student persistence has just as big of an impact on our budget as it does for bringing in a new class of students,” Dr. Parsons-Pollard said.
Success at Perimeter College
When Perimeter College – a formerly independent two-year unit of the University System of Georgia – consolidated with Georgia State’s Atlanta campus in 2016, the university applied lessons learned downtown toward associate degree-seeking students to find if the proactive measures could be impactful when practiced more broadly.
“In many ways, Perimeter College was our first test case of whether this data-based strategy works in a different institutional culture and environment,” Dr. Calhoun-Brown said.
And it did, with six-year graduation rates for perimeter students increasing from 6 percent to more than 20 percent.
Today, Perimeter’s 16,000+ student enrollment is a major contributor to the university’s overall enrollment growth this semester.
Transferring downtown after completing an associate’s degree at Perimeter has also allowed students to enroll in upper-division courses without having to apply again.
“They don’t have to submit a full application, because we are one institution,” Dr. Calhoun-Brown said. “If they are in good academic standing, they can choose when they transition to the Atlanta campus.”
Georgia State’s lessons learned from this, and other experiences led to other colleges and universities looking to replicate best practices. From that, the National Institute for Student Success (NISS) at Georgia State was formed by Dr. Calhoun-Brown’s predecessor, Dr. Timothy M. Renick who is now the NISS’ executive director.
The NISS works with more than 100 colleges and universities to share these best practices, evaluate institutional barriers to success, and recommend strategies for change, helping partner institutions increase retention rates above national averages.
“These approaches – data-intensive, proactive, student-centered and comprehensive at scale – work,” she said.
Indeed, as a national model for student success, the U.S. Department of Education awarded its first-ever Trailblazer Award for undergraduate student success outcomes at Georgia State, and Georgia State’s support for other institutions doing the same through the NISS.
The Headwinds: Economics, Demographics and the Pandemic
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Georgia State, like other institutions faced greater challenges from economic and demographic headwinds.
For years, Higher education leaders and experts have predicted a “demographic cliff” around the middle of the 2020s – the consequence of a sharp decline in births during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.
Enrollments were expected to drop, which would affect colleges and universities to varying degrees, including factors such as institutional size and mission and geographic region.
High school students themselves have expressed mixed views on the value of undergraduate college degrees, while still valuing some form of post-secondary training.
Then, then pandemic caused disruptions to nearly all aspects of American life, higher education included. Georgia State was not immune.
Like other institutions across the country, enrollment dipped. Students struggled with changes in course modality – going online or into a hybrid format – and in their academic work in general. A severe pandemic-related recession caused financial and other hardships.
For enrollment, this was especially felt at the associate’s level. Like other two-year colleges across the country, enrollment dropped at Perimeter College – experiencing enrollment decreases of more than 17 percent.
Rising In the Post-Pandemic Recovery
Georgia State, like other large universities, has a myriad of departments that play roles in the academic lives of students across its different colleges, schools and institutes.
At Georgia State, those departments work under the umbrella of student success, which allowed the university to efficiently identify issues, determine solutions, and implement changes necessary to support students in the new post-pandemic environment.
This approach has allowed Georgia State to not only adapt but excel to scale.
“Centralization enables us to scale our support for students and monitor what’s going on with them systematically,” Dr. Calhoun-Brown said. “When we created institutional capacity in areas like advisement, financial aid, and admissions, we could identify challenges more comprehensively and deploy strategies to address them effectively.”
On the admissions front, proactivity and streamlining have helped. The university’s efforts include targeted outreach to potential students, in addition to practical improvements behind the scenes such as a new optical character recognition system to review transcripts from other institutions. That has increased efficiency in transfer admissions and enrollments.
The bridge between the Perimeter campuses and the Atlanta campus is stronger now, too, thanks to a new transfer and transition center created to better support the students who are transitioning from Perimeter to downtown (and vice-versa).
Education’s Importance and Potential
While there are political and policy arguments about exactly which types of post-secondary education and training work best and have the most impact, there is broader agreement that expanding educational opportunity is beneficial for us all.
“Whether you want to realize the benefits of education because of workforce preparation, or someone who is oriented toward social justice arguments, we can come together in agreement around the promise of education,” said Dr. Calhoun-Brown.
Indeed, the stories of Georgia State graduates affirm the transformative power of education. And seeing examples of oneself as a successful student and alum is powerful.
“Even small things like having Perimeter College’s commencement program during the same ceremony so that they can see, ‘this is the next step for you’ – we think this is a powerful thing for students,” Dr. Parsons-Pollard said.
Next: Expanding Approaches and Lessons Learned to the Graduate Level
Part of Student Success 2.0 in the Blueprint to 2033 strategic plan is to take lessons learned and successful approaches proven at the undergraduate level to the graduate space.
And they’ve yielded positive results, with graduate programs contributing to the university’s overall enrollment increases – for example, the record spring 2025 enrollment increase was due in part to an 8 percent increase in graduate enrollment.
In the second part of this series, we’ll look at how student success efforts are applied at the graduate level. Our third part will examine the collaboration between the two levels, and how those collaborations have advanced Georgia State’s work towards its strategic vision.