Resource: Quantifying the Impact of Your Student Success Initiatives

A Toolkit to Measure Student Success on Your Campus


  • To measure student success, most institutions track institutional outcomes like retention and graduation rates. However, these metrics take a whole year to assess, and often fail to illuminate exactly which initiatives are actually achieving results.

  • Given the significant investment required to implement new or expand existing student success initiatives, it is critical that leadership teams consider how they will evaluate the impact of those strategies.

  • An excerpt of a toolkit created for members of the Student Success Collaborative, this resource walks you through the evaluation cycle for assessing the impact of your student success initiatives. You will learn how to:

    • Define your scope for a new student success initiative
    • Select the right process and outcome metrics to track
    • Design an evaluation strategy, including selecting a focus population and comparison group
    • Avoid common data analysis and interpretation pitfalls

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