The UNC System released a Strategic Plan with goals for this year, as well as the next 12. It hopes to graduate more students from its various universities.
The plan calls for increasing the number of degree holders in the state to 32.2 percent from its current 29.5 percent. Specifically, the plan targets North Carolina adults, and the plan outlines a goal for 36.2 percent of them to have a four-year degree by 2025.
While increasing the number of graduates is a system-wide goal, it’s one Vice Chancellor and Dean of Academic and Student Affairs Michael Mullen had on his short list for N.C. State.
“One of the things that we’d like to see is that more students actually finish their degrees,” Mullen said.
Currently, about 71 percent of N.C. State’s undergraduate students complete their degrees. Mullen said he’d like to see this number increase to 77 or 78 percent by 2020. How does Mullen plan to do this? By focusing on the students.
“What we have to do at N.C. State, in my view, is to focus on the reasons why a student would leave after their second year or their third year and not finish a degree,” Mullen said. “What’s the barrier that results in us only graduating a 71 percent? That’s the route we would like to go so that the same number of students are starting, but in your senior classes you’d have a few more classmates in every class so, from our perspective, that would be a success for us right now.”
Mullen referred to the increase in students who are seniors, reflecting the UNC System’s goal of reaching out to students who have not completed their degrees and getting them to come back to school.
This approach, according to Mullen, isn’t as complicated as it seems, and it’s been done before.
“Finding these students can be relatively easy because we have records,” Mullen said. “If a student comes here and completes three years with us and then doesn’t come back, if they’re still in good standing we could, theoretically contact the student assuming the personal address we have is still valid.”
Mullen has some experience with this kind of outreach at his previous institution, the University of Kentucky, where administrators implemented Project Graduation to get students to complete their degrees, whether they were current students or not.
“We didn’t get a lot of students, but in my college, the College of Agriculture, we’d have three, four, five an academic year come back,” Mullen said. “People leave college for one reason or another, financial issues, personal issues — whatever, and don’t see a path back, and when you open a door for them sometimes they say, ‘Oh yeah, I could do that.’”
Another part of the Strategic Plan involves accountability, specifically of the system’s universities and the education they provide. Mullen said one idea that’s been discussed by the UNC System is implementing the Collegiate Learning Assessment -— a case study based test that measures critical thinking skills and the ability to solve problems.
According to Mullen, the system members are thinking of starting the program on about five campuses, thought he didn’t have information on which ones.
“For years, employers have been telling us that what we really need is for students to have the ability to work in teams, students who can communicate well orally, write clearly, solve problems, basically students who can think critically, so that’s a very important goal for us,” Mullen said.
Some feel the Collegiate Learning Assessment would help universities measure whether that goal has been achieved by testing a group of incoming freshman, and testing another sample of outgoing seniors to see if their problem solving skills have developed.
“We’re interested in making sure our students come out with those skills from their general education programs,” Mullen said. “It’s not a multiple choice test, it’s one form of assessment that’s used to address the critical thinking part of what we do at universities.”
Mullen said the Collegiate Learning Assessment is used by several universities, but has not been used at N.C. State in recent years—though other forms of assessment are currently in place.
Information about the Strategic Plan can be found at http://faccoun.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/OurTimeOurFuture_StrategicDirectionsFor2013-2015_DRAFT4_2013Jan07.pdf
