The fifth UAB Student Success Summit gathered more than 200 faculty and staff at the Hill Student Center on May 14 to discuss preliminary plans developed as part of the university’s SUCCESS Initiative.

SUCCESS — which stands for Strategic and Unifying Campus Collaboration that Empowers Students to Succeed — is building a roadmap to achieve continued enrollment growth at UAB and improve student success.

“The goal is bold — a transformative change that will require us to think differently about how we partner together and work across the institution,” said Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Janet Woodruff-Borden, Ph.D., in opening remarks.

The centerpiece of the daylong meeting was a series of reports from the co-chairs of the initiative’s seven working groups. Each group is charged with one of the SUCCESS strategic priorities:

• Working Group 1: Pathways for Enrollment Growth
• Working Group 2: Transfer Students
• Working Group 3: Student Engagement Across the Undergraduate Experience
• Working Group 4: Data Management
• Working Group 5: Student Marketing and Communications
• Working Group 6: Retention Awareness
• Working Group 7: Student Health and Well-being

Each working group has met at least twice monthly since February to develop annual action plans. These plans were presented to the initiative’s Executive Steering Committee on May 12.

“I was truly inspired by the commitment, the creativity and the passion that these groups brought to their task,” said Woodruff-Borden, who leads the Executive Steering Committee along with Vice President for Student Affairs John Jones III, Ph.D. “Folks who may not have worked together or even known each other came together to think differently about what we can become as a community.”

Common themes among the working group presentations included:

• developing comprehensive guides that would allow students to quickly access supports and other services, give faculty and staff leaders access to critical decisionmaking data, and allow the entire institution to learn from innovative strategies pioneered in schools and departments;
• exploring new scholarship policies to incentivize key student populations to choose UAB;
• investing in new technologies to improve coordination of student communications; and
• investing in new personnel to improve the student experience.

Vigorous discussion followed each of the working group presentations. Following a final presentation of the draft data dashboard for the SUCCESS Initiative, attendees at the 30-plus tables in the packed Hill Center ballroom were encouraged to discuss the plans put forward throughout the day and write comments and questions for each group.

The Executive Steering Committee will be using this feedback as it synthesizes and prioritizes the working group plans, notes Bradley Barnes, Ph.D., senior vice provost for Enrollment and Student Success. The makeup of the working groups will shift at the same time, he adds, with new members onboarded as the focus moves from ideation to implementation. Attendees with an interest in joining a particular working group were encouraged to share that interest on their tables’ feedback forms for those groups.

Faculty and staff can expect a town hall update on the SUCCESS Initiative timed with the beginning of the fall semester, Barnes says.

Follow the progress of the initiative, including celebrations of new SUCCESS champions, on the SUCCESS website.