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This Week In Student Success
Some wins and some recurring issues
Glenda Morgan
October 19, 2025
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It has been a busy week. Among other things I cut down a Siberian elm tree using only a small hand saw - Ive been working out. But what happened in student success?
The Wall Street Journal published an article today on the course shut-out phenomenon I first wrote about in August and followed up on in September. As a reminder, this refers to the situation where students attempt to register for a specific course, often a required one, but are unable to do so because it fills up too quickly. The topic was the focus of a compelling research paper from Purdue, which leveraged an unusual event to create a fascinating quasi-experiment.
The study focused on enrollment at Purdue in 2018, when an unexpected surge brought in 2,000 more freshmen than usual. To assign classes fairly, the administration asked incoming freshmen to rank their course preferences, and then used an algorith to randomly assign students their preferred courses. The result: 49% of students got all of their requested classes, while 51% had one course shutout.
The article emphasized the disproportionate impact of course shut-outs on women students. Compared to their peers who were not shut out of courses, these students:
Were 7.5% less likely to graduate on time
Had a cumulative GPA 0.05 points lower
Were 5% less likely to major in STEM
Earned about $2,098 less when they entered the workforce
What’s frustrating to me, though, is that.
The authors didn’t specifically examine what caused these gaps.
We should cut them some slack, it was a great study. But we also need to do the hard work of understanding why these adverse impacts persist.
You can’t spell student success without CSU
This week, the Cal State System marked the conclusion of a decade-long initiative to improve student outcomes. The goals were ambitious: boost graduation rates overall, including for transfer students, underrepresented minorities, and Pell-eligible students.
While the system missed its 2016 benchmarks in all but one category, I still find the results impressive, especially given the considerable headwinds Cal State has faced in recent years. (Full disclosure: I worked there briefly in the early 2000s.)
Results vary quite a bit by campus, as you might expect. I couldn’t always find campus-level data—which, to me, suggests something about the level of individual campus engagement with the initiative. One area where campuses consistently fell short of their goals, despite making notable progress, is graduation rates for underrepresented minority and Pell students, as these examples from CSU Bakersfield illustrates.
How did they do it? By means of a focus on six areas.
Much of the work, of course, took place on individual campuses, and there’s wide variation in how each approached the challenge. One example comes from Cal Poly, linked from the CSU Chancellor’s Office Graduation Initiative page.
I’m eager to learn more and to follow CSU’s continued progress on student success. As no one has ever said, but probably should "You can’t spell student success without CSU."
A series of tensions
If the internet is a series of tubes, then designing or managing student success in higher education is a series of tensions, constantly balancing one urgent need against another pulling in the opposite direction. Whenever I think about that, I’m reminded of this scene from Seinfeld.
Even though Kramer was trying to get to the hospital in a hurry and fighting off the mugger he kept stopping at all the regular bus stops
Jerry: You kept making all the stops?
Kramer: Well people kept ringing the bell
Similarly in higher education we need to keep things running as we reinvent and innovate.
Online drives success, despite everything
Phil Hill shared this on Friday as part of his Friday Follow-Up, but I wanted to highlight it here from a student success angle, and because I wanted an excuse to read it again. Earlier this year, the RP Group delivered a report on online learning to the California legislature, which included an astounding study on the impact of taking courses online on student graduation rates.
Figure 4 reflects the relative impact on degree completion rates based on the percentage of online courses students take within four years. Importantly, there is no evidence that taking online courses negatively impacts students’ ability to transfer to four-year institutions. While the study found that Black/African American students earned fewer units overall on average compared to their peers, this difference did not significantly affect their degree completion rates. Moreover, the impact of online course-taking intensity on student outcomes appears to be consistent across various student subgroups, including race/ethnicity, income status, gender, and disability status
I’d summarize the chart in even stronger terms: taking online courses has a significant positive impact on student credit accumulation and supports timely graduation. This effect holds true across a variety of student subgroups.
That’s great news overall—and especially for the California Community Colleges. But it’s also somewhat surprising, given what the RP Group found regarding the limitations of student support.
● Most colleges have yet to create centralized, user-friendly hubs for online support.
● Colleges offer a wide array of online support services, but there is considerable variation in the depth and accessibility of these services.
● The availability of online services during evenings and weekends is limited.
● Marketing efforts of online supports primarily focus on websites, while channels like social media and online applications remain underutilized.
● Colleges face barriers like staffing shortages, outdated technology, and American Disability Act (ADA) compliance issues that hinder the implementation of online services.
In particular, there appears to be a significant gap in staffing student support services outside of regular business hours, even when those services are offered online. This creates real challenges for online and working students.
You hear a lot these days about meeting students where they are. This chart is an argument for the urgency of doing so.
The over-achievers
I was all prepared to be a bit snarky about this report from the Community College Research Center (of who’s research I am a fan), which explores how combining college readiness programs, specifically Dual Enrollment (DE), Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and Career and Technical Education (CTE), can improve student outcomes.
My initial reaction was something along the lines of: Breaking News! Highly motivated, high-achieving students from well-resourced schools tend to do better in college!
I’m still hovering on the edge of snark (maybe the title for a new newsletter), but it’s actually a compelling report. It makes the case that while each of these programs offers benefits individually, students may see even greater advantages when they participate in combinations of them. As the authors explain.
Research suggests that each of these accelerated coursework types improves student outcomes through a variety of mechanisms: AP increases four-year institutional enrollment and bachelor’s degree completion, although the benefits are larger for students from less disadvantaged backgrounds [snip]. DE increases credential attainment, including bachelor’s completion, while shortening the time to degree completion [snip]. High school CTE increases employment and earnings outcomes, although there is large variation by field of study. There is also evidence associating high school CTE with completion of an associate degree and, less so, a bachelor’s degrees.
Although most research examines each type of accelerated coursework in isolation, that’s not how students typically engage with these opportunities. In practice, many students mix and match Dual Enrollment (DE), Career and Technical Education (CTE), and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate (AP/IB). This study set out to understand the effects of different combinations of these programs.
The researchers used data from Texas students expected to complete high school in 2015–16 and 2016–17, supplemented with cohorts from 2019–20 and 2022–23. They analyzed how students combined various forms of accelerated coursework in high school and the impact on their college success and post-graduation earnings.
They identified six core pathways:
DE-only takers
DE takers with a CTE focus (10 or more CTE courses)
DE and AP/IB takers
AP/IB takers with no DE
CTE-focus-only takers
Students with no accelerated coursework (no DE or AP/IB, and fewer than 10 CTE courses)
The results show that participating in accelerated coursework contributes to stronger college outcomes, especially for students who combine DE with AP/IB.
While all groups of students who engaged in accelerated pre-college coursework performed better in college, the benefits were significantly more pronounced for non–low-income students. You can probably see where some of my snark comes from. As the report dryly notes:
In short, while low-income students consistently benefited from accelerated coursework, there still remained sizable gaps in postsecondary outcomes with non-low-income students.
Interestingly though, women benefited more from Overachievement Combo’s than did male students.
Musical coda
At the concert I attended last week, one of the artists talked about the ukulele, which reminded me of this piece, one of my favorites from the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.
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