Institutional Policies and Practices that Support Student Success in College

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

While high school graduates increasingly attend college, fewer than two-thirds of students who began a bachelor’s degree at a four-year institution in 2014 earned a degree within six years (Irwin et al., 2024). Efforts to promote students’ success in college vary widely in intensity, duration, and target (Meyer et al., 2025). Postsecondary interventions that aim to improve persistence and graduation via success in academic coursework often involve supports that are external to the college classroom, such as financial aid or supplemental advising (Bettinger & Baker, 2014; Weiss et al., 2019).

 

This panel examines how institutional policies and practices impact students’ success in college. In particular, this panel focuses on institutional policies and practices related to classrooms and course-taking, largely in STEM fields and gateway courses. The papers in this session have a shared emphasis on implementation and examining efforts to improve students’ academic success beyond their first-order impacts.

 

The panel will begin with a paper on the impact and implementation of a multiple-measure placement policy change in developmental education placement at the City Colleges of Chicago; the policy change was informed by an advisory committee comprised of faculty and staff. This paper also presents findings from interviews with students about their perceptions of the policy. The second paper presents qualitative findings from an experimental study at a large, diverse public institution. This study examines how faculty and staff collaborated on the implementation of a chatbot intervention to promote students’ academic success in a gateway STEM course. The third paper continues the thread of STEM success and course placement to study the impact of a policy change in calculus placement on students’ outcomes. Like the other courses that other papers focus on, calculus is a key gateway course that shapes the majors available to prospective STEM students. The fourth paper studies the random assignment of students to one-to-one peer partnerships in an important gateway STEM course at a large public university. Drawing on this intervention, the fourth paper proposes a new technique to estimate peer effects.

 

College classrooms and course-taking patterns are promising areas of intervention to strengthen students’ outcomes in higher education. Even when interventions work well, they must be sustained by a diverse range of stakeholders. Taken together, the papers in this session illustrate how partnerships with involved faculty members and communication with students help to build resilient, durable policy solutions in higher education.

Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• Katharine Meyer, Brookings Institution

Discussant

• Taylor K. Odle, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Organizer

• Ellen Bryer, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• Supporting Early Academic Momentum of Community College Students: the Impact of Incorporating GPA into Course Placement - Presenting Author: Kelly Hallberg, University of Chicago

• Behind the Scenes: Faculty-Staff Collaboration in a Student Success Effort - Presenting Author: Ellen Bryer, Brown University

• Understanding the Impacts of First Semester Math Placement on Post Secondary Outcomes - Presenting Author: Brianna Nicole Felegi, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

• Estimating Peer Effects among College Students: Evidence from a Field Experiment of One-to-One Pairings in STEM - Non-Presenting Co-Author: Robert W Fairlie, University of California - Los Angeles; Presenting Author: Daniel Oliver, WA Student Achievement Council