Jacksonville University

Jacksonville University is committed to prioritizing the student experience. As faculty and staff looked for ways to innovate that would be good for students, they uncovered an opportunity after looking at their student completion data.

Challenge

Dr. Will Miller serves as JU’s Executive Director of Institutional Analytics, Effectiveness, and Strategic Planning – and describes what they found in the data: “When we looked at our completers, we saw our graduation rates were moving in the right direction. However, we noticed that we have this dichotomy in our graduation data.

For any student that has graduated in the last four years, their average time to completion is 3.4 years. So if you graduate, on average, you graduate early. But then we noticed that among those who did not graduate, there was a significant percentage of stopouts with an enrollment duration upwards of 6-7 years, yet they still didn’t finish.”

The more they thought about these students, the more they realized that this was a segment of their population with great potential for impact by extending President Cost’s vision to their unique needs. Miller explains:

“When we were talking about opportunities for enhancing the student experience, looking for students that had experienced perhaps a different JU, we recognized there was a lot we could probably do with this population of students that had left and not ever finished.”

So for us, the challenge was, how do we approach this? What’s the technology? How do you have these conversations? What are the types of things students are going to ask?”

Solution

A partnership between ReUp Education. But given JU’s focus on maintaining the highest standard of student experience, there was concern about whether a third-party organization would be able to deliver the same level of high-quality student interaction that JU demands of itself.

So the JU team asked ReUp to provide evidence in the form of sample audio from real ReUp coaching conversations. As they listened, they got their answer. “We could tell from the recording, the ReUp coaches really care about these students. That’s what we needed to hear.” Miller said.

After moving forward in partnership with ReUp, the experience of personally working with JU’s actual ReUp coaches has aligned with JU’s expectations. “I trust our ReUp coaches to know the answers,” Miller added, “and I don’t worry about them bringing back somebody who can’t be successful, because of the way the coaches make sure they are truly ready to come back.”

For JU, it has not only been the quality of interaction that makes a difference, but also the model for how the coaching is integrated into the student’s journey. ReUp’s coaching model is not just designed to help students re-enroll, but also continues to support them all the way until they complete their degree. Miller explained: “For a lot of these students, continuity is the problem. They need a consistent person. The ReUp coach fills that role for them. The coach sticks with them.”

Results

200 %

increase in readmission applications after two terms

Knowing that ReUp works with other schools is helpful, because they are better able to anticipate some of these hurdles and roadblocks in a way that we would have learned as we went, which would have impacted our timing to see results.

— Dr. Will Miller

Executive Director of Institutional Analytics at Jacksonville University

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