Growing Smartly

We are compelled to grow our enrollment at NSC. It’s an expectation of a college founded to address unmet need in Nevada, and it’s a necessity for keeping up with our budget projections. However, as much as possible we want to grow smartly.

Part of that intelligent – and encouraging – growth is through healthy academic programs and the good persistence rates of our continuing students. You can likely see this in the growth numbers that Sandip noted below, which do not yet include incoming first-year students. (The first-year cohort is expected to be smaller than last year’s colossal class, but still quite large, and we recently unveiled an enrollment projection dashboard to help key stakeholders get a better handle on probable fall enrollment numbers much further in advance than ever before.)  

Another part of growing smartly is via transfer students. First, it’s an integral part of our mission and helps students realize opportunities that otherwise might not be availed to them. Second, our transfer students are very successful, comparatively, and it serves us well to serve them well. The 4-year graduation rate for all transfer students is about 28%, which is significantly higher than the 6-year rate of first-time students, and among full-time transfer students the number jumps to over 40%!

Improving the CSN transfer pipeline was one of the five major goals that our team identified at the start of the semester. This work includes efforts to strengthen relationships with the advising and counseling team at CSN, the development of new materials (e.g., a dedicated Transfer Guide), new transfer events, and refined articulation agreements for all of our academic programs. I’ll continue to provide information about the outcomes of these efforts, but in the meantime I want to thank Lee Christopher for stepping strongly into an interim role as a transfer coordinator, and to Erin Hall for her work on a constellation of articulation agreements. 

Common Read Mini-Grants

Interested in using The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in your class this fall? The Office of the Provost is offering mini-grants for faculty who would like to have the book purchased for all of students in their class.

To apply, send an email to me with a brief explanation of how you would use the text in your class. Include the name of the class and some examples of activities you have planned. Funds are limited, so we may not be able to support all applicants. If you are interested, please submit your application email to me by Tuesday, May 1st.

NSC Is Now a NASPA Member!

NSC is now an institutional member of NASPA - Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (formerly the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators). This means we receive individual NASPA membership for the entire campus community. We also get a complimentary individual membership for our Voting Delegate and the ability to host a BACCHUS Chapter.

Long Night Against Procrastination

Student Communication Plan

NSC has done an exemplary job of developing academic support programs, and data shows that the Academic Success Center, Academic Advising, Writing Center, Course Assistants, Supplemental Instruction, Nepantla, and the First-Year Experience are contributing to improved student success markers such as academic standing and 1-year retention. 

 

As the next stage in improving students' experience at NSC, we are now examining the communications that are sent to students from different departments across campus. Anecdotally, students have reported receiving conflicting and/or confusing correspondence from different departments, leading to frustration and confusion. To improve this situation, we are attempting to identify all correspondence sent to students from the time they are a prospective student through graduation. 

To start this process, we have focused on communications coming from Admissions & Recruitment, the Registrar’s Office, and Academic Advising. Andrea Martin, Adelfa Sullivan, and Alex Kunkle have worked to identify the communications that are sent to students at each specific point in their experiences here at NSC. I was amazed at how much correspondence students receive from NSC and how this could be overwhelming and stressful for them. We have identified a few times where different departments may send confusing and/or conflicting information. This has helped to improve and clarify our processes. In addition, we identified a few points where additional correspondence may be helpful. For example, we noticed that after students attend new student orientation, the only correspondence they receive from NSC until the start of the semester involves financial and billing information. We are developing additional correspondence that can be sent during this period focusing on student life and other exciting aspects of NSC. We hope to connect with academic faculty to provide discipline-specific information for our students during this time. Our ultimate goal is to develop a flowchart where anyone can click on a specific point in time and view the actual correspondence that is being sent out to students. This will help ensure consistent, accurate, helpful, and engaging correspondence to our students throughout their time at NSC.

 

Thank you to Andrea, Adelfa, and Alex for their continued work on this project. Once these areas are completed, we will invite other campus departments to participate.

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