Building toward student success at SUNY Fredonia
Like many campuses, SUNY Fredonia’s student body is changing — the campus is now 30% first-generation students and 33% students of color. As a key part of Fredonia’s Strategic Enrollment Plan to reach, welcome, support, and retain students, the University is undertaking an initiative that will centralize students support services in three adjacent buildings. These buildings will form a student success corridor in the heart of the campus. Prior to making the physical changes to renovate these spaces, Fredonia partnered with brightspot strategy in identifying the needs of their changing student body, creating a unified vision and philosophy of student success and an integrated plan for services, staffing, and spaces.
“In our efforts to centralize student support services, we turned to brightspot to help us achieve a new vision for student success and a more engaging and effective service experience. Through their participatory approach, they developed consensus around innovative ideas and built the foundation for collaborative implementation among the providers.”
– Dr. Terry Brown, Former Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, SUNY Fredonia
Through an inclusive process that engaged students, faculty, staff, and leadership through interviews, workshops, town hall meetings, and a campus-wide survey, brightspot assessed the current state and future potential for the student experience and created a shared university vision for student success. Our participatory design process brought together multiple service providers across academic affairs, student affairs, and information technology to develop a new portfolio of student support services, determined the space needs to better deliver the services, and created a staffing and assessment plan.
The services were redesigned to make the services more accessible and useful to students, better connected across providers, and more efficient to deliver. The space strategy integrated the provider service points and created welcoming spaces throughout the corridor that fostered a sense of belonging and connection among a diverse and rapidly changing student body. Our process enabled a clear consensus to emerge from the activities and discussion in a way the University can take real ownership of the strategy and are well positioned to implement it. Many of the service strategies were adopted at the end of our engagement and will enable Fredonia to improve upon key outcomes such as enrollment, retention, graduation rate, and cost of delivery.
