Numbers and Sense: Ensuring Student Success One Cohort at a Time

by Alexandra Salas

Overview

This book highlights the exigency of student success and how higher education institutions are addressing this call. On the heels of the COVID-19 global pandemic, institutions have been challenged further to manage student satisfaction issues, enrollment and financial insecurities, equity, inclusion and access. As starting point to these ongoing priorities, this book aims to raise awareness, questions and suggestions based on examples of courageous leadership that support retention and completion agendas but more so visionary and actionable approaches to ensure student success. The book addresses the various tensions among education stakeholders, the impressions of change, the expanded realities of competition, the casualties of silos, the value of examining and understanding data in advancing options, and the merits of collaboration, and opportunity thinking. Cases and interviews with thought leaders who candidly share experiences and realizations about ensuring student success provide insight about what else can be done to move the needle forward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475855388
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	04/01/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	116
File size:	385 KB

About the Author

Alexandra Salas is dean of Innovation, Teaching and Digital Learning Excellence at Delaware County Community College. She is also an education consultant, speaker, facilitator, and has extensive post-secondary teaching experience in traditional and online platforms.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Advising Architects

Chapter 2 Assessing Enrollment Realities

Chapter 3 Financial Mindset for Student Success

Chapter4 Retention 4.0: Disruptors, Adapters, Adopters

Chapter 5 Agency and Change

Chapter 6 Mission Accomplishing

Editorial Reviews

For all of us who yearn to understand student success but find ourselves or our institutions lost and unsuccessful, the work of Dr. Salas provides the advice we’ve been waiting for. Dr. Salas shows us that the one-size fits all approach does not hit the mark regarding student success. Her book provides insights into how we should provide a “stronger advising pathway which leads to enrollment, retention and completion,” for an entire ecosystem focused on student success.

Reggie Smith III

Numbers and Sense includes the insights and perspectives of numerous educators as to why ensuring student success requires a comprehensive and holistic approach. Dr. Salas provides reflective and actionable recommendations for what needs to be done to lead change.

Tia Brown McNair

Dr. Salas builds a compelling case for higher education to move away from a one size fits all approach to student success. She does a magnificent job of showcasing how many higher education institutions are using the power of disruptive retention and support strategies to move the student success needle in the right direction. I highly recommend this book to all higher education scholars and practitioners who want to make a positive impact on the future of their students.

Anthony Cruz

In this book, Alexandra Salas shares many of the challenges facing community colleges today and communicates a sense of urgency for action to increase student success. Throughout this book, she brings the reader numerous stories of how current community college leaders are engaging in bold and much-needed actions to move the needle on student success. Her commitment to and passion for student success is clearly evident!

Christine Harrington

This book provides a synthesis of lessons learned and challenges faced in higher education. There are questions to ponder, technologies to consider and a great deal of resources. The author also brings to life the voices of successful thought leaders in higher education.

Yesenia Madas

Dr. Alexandra Salas’s Numbers and Sense: Ensuring Student Success One Cohort at a Time is one of the first books to uniquely raise awareness, questions and suggestions based on today’s rapidly changing learning demands to ensure student success. This book elucidates Dr. Salas’s assertion, “These are exciting times as a new normal provisions to engage, and support students toward success like never before…one cohort at a time!

Steven J. Bassett

Dr. Salas' book is required reading for community college leaders, faculty and staff. No college can claim it is 'student-centered' without implementing the recommendations in this book. Dr. Salas not only offers crucially important insights about who today's community college students really are, she sets forth a practical guide for achieving student success based on her current front-line experience. Read Numbers and Sense, then take it to your next meeting or retreat.

Mark W. Rocha

The top priority for colleges and universities is student success. Changing student demographics, performance-based funding models, and increased workforce demands make it paramount that educational leaders do all that it takes to demonstrate positive student outcomes. The holistic approach to student success that Dr. Salas outlines makes this a must-read for all those who play a role in higher education.

John J. Rainone

Dr. Salas offers us a very clear and transparent 21 st century hands on approach to advising and student success coaching that takes the fullest advantage of both high tech and high touch methods at a time and a day when both have become essential. Few have the skills and patience to command both aspects of teaching, advising, and student coaching, but Dr. Salas offers a qualitative balance between Them... This book offers a first-hand insight into what the best practices of student success coaching involve in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Joseph Cronin

In Numbers and Sense: Ensuring Student Success One Cohort at a Time, Dr. Alexandra Salas provides an important new resource for those concerned about student success. Understanding the need for higher education institutions to change, develop, and evolve to remain relevant, Dr. Salas outlines relevant pathways for those interested in updating their mindset on advising, teaching, and enrollment strategies. In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous global marketplace now marked by a pandemic creating seismic forces higher education will need to deal with for years to come, Dr. Salas offers a reliable blueprint to consider for those willing to update their institutional missions and create the change necessary to prepare students for their future.

Michael Edmondson

For all of us who yearn to understand student success but find ourselves or our institutions lost and unsuccessful, the work of Dr. Salas provides the advice we’ve been waiting for. Dr. Salas shows us that the one-size fits all approach does not hit the mark regarding student success.  Her book provides insights into how we should provide a “stronger advising pathway which leads to enrollment, retention and completion,” for an entire ecosystem focused on student success.

Reggie Smith