As part of its ongoing efforts to increase degree completion, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) has named UNC Charlotte among three finalists for its 2019 Degree Completion Award. This annual honor works to identify, recognize and reward institutions that employ innovative approaches to improve degree completion while ensuring educational quality.
“Public universities are the nation’s great engines of upward mobility, and the finalists are at the leading edge of further expanding college access, equity and completion,” said APLU President Peter McPherson in recognizing the finalists for “their exceptional work advancing degree completion.”
The Degree Completion Award is one part of APLU’s robust work to advance college access, equity, and completion. The award complements the association’s Powered by Publics effort, which convenes 130 APLU member institutions collaborating within 16 transformation clusters working to solve different pieces of the student success puzzle. Collectively, the schools have pledged to aim to increase college access, eliminate the achievement gap and award hundreds of thousands more degrees by 2025.
APLU noted that in 2011, UNC Charlotte launched a three-pronged approach to improving student success through its 49er Graduation Initiative. The effort engages students as active agents in their own success, proactively advises at-risk students and advances policies that optimize students’ path to graduation.
Through the University’s Prospect for Success curriculum, more than 90 percent of incoming first-time-in-college (FTIC) students take a first-semester academic engagement class centered on building their commitment to success, developing critical thinking skills and enhancing their cultural awareness. The University also systematically uses technology to identify emerging indicators of academic risk and then proactively connects students with advisors who have the necessary skills to help them get back on the path to timely graduation.
Finally, UNC Charlotte has created a graduation metrics platform to help departments and colleges identify common curricular barriers to completion and address them on an ongoing basis. This process led to changes to prerequisite sequences that created unnecessary hurdles, changes to semester schedules to offer critical progression courses year-round, changes to course content, and improvements in faculty advising.
The wide-ranging approach to student-centered reform has helped the University increase its six-year graduation rate by 10 percent since 2009 and increase its four-year graduation rate by 17 percent during the same period. Now, the University is focused on using a continuous improvement framework to build on these gains.
The University of Central Florida and the University of Rhode Island are the other two finalists for APLU’s 2019 Degree Completion Award.
The award winner will be announced and all finalists will be recognized at the APLU annual meeting, Nov. 10-12, in San Diego, California.