This is Reimagining The Future of Higher Education from Studiosity. Your go-to podcast with remarkable education leaders, sharing personal stories from their experience in and around the sector, including reflection and evidence for progress in the sector. With your host, Professor Sally Kift, Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, President of the Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows, former Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at James Cook University, and Professor of Law and Founding First Year Experience Director at QUT, and now Studiosity Academic Advisory Board Member.
Prof Sally Kift:
Dr Tim Renick, Executive Director of the National Institute for Student Success. Previously Senior Vice Chancellor for Student Success at Georgia State University, is synonymous with innovation in student success. His university, Georgia State, is internationally regarded for its evidence-based, students first, and data driven approaches to student achievement. In his time at Georgia State, Dr Renick has overseen a phenomenal improvement in graduation rates, a 70% improvement overall, with huge improvements for low-income Black and Hispanic students, leading to the elimination of all achievement gaps based on student's race, ethnicity, or income level. In fact, Black, Hispanic, and low-income students at Georgia State and now graduating at or above the rate of the overall student body. Dr Renick has testified before U.S. Congress and Senate, has been invited to speak at the White House, and regularly features in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and on CNN. In this Universities Accord year, as we focus on the need for a huge increase in the number of equity-bearing students to access, participate in success at university, growing higher education for skills through equity - as the Accord panel has put it - I'm very lucky to have Dr Renick joining us today. Welcome, Dr Renick. Tim.
Dr Tim Renick:
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Prof Sally Kift:
I think we have much to learn from all the great work you've been doing over there. But just taking you back to your own experience of university at an Ivy League institution, Dartmouth, I understand. Can you describe what that experience was like? What did it look like? How did it lead you to here and what enabled you to be successful?
Dr Tim Renick:
Yeah, the experiences I had as a student going through university were very instrumental in the work I'm doing today. I was a low-income, working student when I was admitted to Dartmouth. For my first semester I was working in the dining hall, even though most of my colleagues were quite wealthy. Many of them had come from prep private schools. I didn't even know what a prep school was. That was not part of my experience at all. I had gone to public schools and I really didn't know what I was getting into at Dartmouth. I ultimately had a very successful experience, which is a testimony to the campus, it's supports, and the fact that it was a small, nurturing environment. But I realise in retrospect how easily things could have gone wrong, how I didn't come prepared with the right academic background, I didn't come prepared with the right financial support. And the fact that I was able to get through that college was in part based on luck as much as it was any abilities I have or the system was providing for me. So when I arrived at Georgia State University, which is a very different type of university, Georgia State, where I currently am a professor and direct an institute, is largely non-white. About 80% of our student population is non-white. About 60% is low-income. Unlike Dartmouth College, which was quite small, we're very, very large. We've got about 50,000 students enrolled. I began to see from my classroom perspective firsthand how damaging some of these problems of institutional lack of support and students coming in underprepared, can be for ultimate success rate. So the contrast between being at an elite small Ivy League institution and now a big, diverse public university is very much formative in my, in my work and my thinking.
Prof Sally Kift:
So I've seen your website for your, for your National Institute of Student Success - and emblazoned large on the website is the question 'Are we the problem?' And you just hinted at that. So I'm suspecting that you think that we might have something to do with how students might be supported. What, what are your comments on that?
Dr Tim Renick:
Yeah, I think one of the headlines about the work we've done at Georgia State over the last ten or 12 years is the students have not gotten objectively stronger. And I'm a faculty member, I'm a tenured professor, for a long time that was my group that I identified with. And so often when things go wrong with students, we immediately blame the students, think that if only we had better students to teach, if only they paid more attention, if only they wrote better or did math better and so forth, all our problems will be solved. Well, Georgia State over the last decade plus has raised its graduation rates by 70%. At the same time, we have broadened our admissions criteria, in effect admitting a more challenging group of students who, by objective measures, come in less well prepared. Their average test scores coming in have actually gone down over the last decade. So how have we managed to raise graduation rates by 70% while the students in effect have not changed in academic preparation or wealth? Because we've also doubled the number of low-income students we enrol over this time period. It's by changing ourselves, by recognising that at heart we have been a much larger part of the problem than we were ever willing to admit or recognise in the past. And when you talk about the data that Georgia State has used and the methods that I've promoted at Georgia State, a lot of that data has been used to put a mirror on ourselves, to look at what we are doing and trying to identify areas where we're complicit in the dropout rates of our students, complicit in the fact that they're not succeeding. We don't do that to be self-flagellating, you know, to punish ourselves. But it's a practical strategy because if what we do is spend our times at Georgia State lamenting the fact that our students are not better prepared or not wealthier, we will still be doing that 20 years from now, and our graduation rates would have been just as low as they were a decade ago. By concentrating instead on the things we have control over, the things we're not doing well in effect, but could do better, that's a much more optimistic and practical approach to making changes.
"Because we've also doubled the number of low-income students we enrol over this time period. It's by changing ourselves, by recognising that at heart we have been a much larger part of the problem than we were ever willing to admit or recognise in the past."
Prof Sally Kift:
That's, that's great to hear. And I think we're trying to go down that path in Australia and New Zealand in particular, I think we've recognised that we need to adapt and not require students to fit into our boxes so much. So, so what are some of the strategies that you've led or seen that improve success, perhaps particularly for first year in the first instance and in our discussion because the consequences in first year of the successful transitioning in are so large, what-what is it that you think we need to do to adapt, to better accommodate students and perhaps get them over that what some here have called that social incongruity of, of the bridge.
Dr Tim Renick:
Yeah, what-what-what we've done as an overarching strategy, to put it simply, and then I'll give some practical examples, is to work to deliver personalised supports to students in a timely fashion and at scale. Personalised supports to students in a timely fashion and at scale. It seems simple. And sometimes when I address audiences outside of higher education, their view is, Aren't you already doing that? You know, aren't you already responsive to the needs of your students on a personal level and providing them some attention? And the frank response is, at least for Georgia State, the answer was often no. And so what we've done in gaining kind of a reputation for being an innovative institution is really just try to practically deliver on that promise. One-one example is we were one of the first schools in the US to begin using AI, Artificial Intelligence, to communicate to students back in 2016. So we're talking about seven years ago now. We launched at scale, an AI-enhanced chat bot for our incoming students. The chat bot was designed to be able to answer their questions, 24/7. It's complicated in the US. I'm sure it's complicated in Australia to transition from, you know, life in secondary schools to becoming a university student. In the US this entails all kinds of bureaucratic processes, completing financial aid applications, sending in transcripts, putting deposits down, taking entrance exams or placement exams, and so forth. When we looked at our data of all of those sorts of processes, we found that inevitably there was a subset of students who qualified for admissions to our university who never completed those steps. And so as a result, they were not getting to university, in part not because of a lack of ability. They had been admitted, they had shown they were admissible to the university. But because of our bureaucracy. More disturbingly, when we looked at that data carefully, what we found is the students who were being winnowed out by these bureaucratic processes were disproportionately our underserved populations, our low-income students, our students from minority backgrounds. So in the US, this is predominantly our Black and Hispanic students, our first generation students, so the students who were the first in their family to go to university. Those were the students who were being upended. For instance, we looked at, we have a immunisation requirement at Georgia State where students have to be immunised for certain diseases before they're admissible. When we looked at five years of data, we couldn't find a single instance of a student from a middle or upper income background who was being excluded from admission from Georgia State because they couldn't meet the immunisation requirement. These were only our low-income students who are having problems in these areas. So we began to think about what could we do to help students in that transition period before they even arrive on campus to help them navigate the bureaucracy. Many of these students we were already trying to invite to campus to get coaching and support sessions. We had phone lines set up, but not many students called to get help, and what we decided we would do is create a texting platform that would be available for them 24/7. And any question they have about financial aid or immunisations or housing on campus or how to, you know, cover a deposit when they don't have the money available and so forth. We would put into that chat bot. In the first three months we had it available just for our first year students who were incoming, we had over 180,000, 180,000 exchanges with students in the first three months. And what we found is the use of that tool was heavier at 12 midnight, than it was at nine in the morning. So you talk about these kind of subtle ways in which our bureaucracies and our administrative structures disadvantage certain student populations, that's one of them. We say we're available 9 to 5, but that's great for the students who are fully financed and full-time students and so forth. But if you're working a job or if you have children or siblings that you're responsible for caring for that tutoring session or that financial aid help session available at 3:00 on a Tuesday afternoon may not be accessible to you. And what we immediately found with the chat bot is the students who benefited the most were the students from these underserved backgrounds. So within three years we had reduced the rate of students who were getting tripped up by these administrative obstacles by over 30%, and disproportionately these students who then began to make their way in greater numbers to Georgia State to actually matriculate at Georgia State, where our Black students, our low-income students, our Hispanic students, and our first generation students. So this is one of the things, you know one example of saying how do we deliver personalised supports to students at scale? It's by leveraging data and technology at times to be able to do things that our understaffed support system at Georgia State is unable to supply.
"We launched at scale, an AI-enhanced chat bot for our incoming students. The chat bot was designed to be able to answer their questions, 24/7. It's complicated in the US. I'm sure it's complicated in Australia to transition from, you know, life in secondary schools to becoming a university student. In the US this entails all kinds of bureaucratic processes, completing financial aid applications, sending in transcripts, putting deposits down, taking entrance exams or placement exams, and so forth."
Prof Sally Kift:
No thank you for that. So that would be music to our Minister, Commonwealth Minister, Education, for Education's, ears. He has introduced a piece of legislation into our national Parliament, a support for students policy that requires students, that requires all institutions to develop initiatives such as the ones that you've been speaking of with a bit of a stick at the end of it. A potential civil penalty of $19,000 per failing student in the event that that's not that, that won't, that that doesn't sound in the success that you've just been speaking of. So that's an amazing turnaround. And those numbers that you were mentioning, 180,000 student interactions with the chat bot as they are transitioning in, do the nature of the interactions change as students come into the university and over their first few months and then transitioning into the second semester?
Dr Tim Renick:
They do indeed. So sticking to the example of the chat bot, I'll say we started the first year with just a tool to help our incoming students, but it was so successful we decided to build out the chat bot to support our students from the time they matriculate to the time they graduate. And so we developed a tool to help students navigate all of the issues they faced once they were enrolled in classes. How do I find tutoring support for my chemistry class? What do I do if I can't find parking on campus or I have a library fine, and so forth. All those answers were put in the chat bot and more recently we've begun to focus on specific first year courses that have non-high pass rates and saying, Could the chatbot help in those instances as well? So we rolled out a study and we ran randomised controlled trials in our largest enrolment course at Georgia State, which is a course in government. It's a required course in political science at Georgia State. And what we found is we work with the instructor to say, okay, if the chat bot can answer questions about completing financial aid forms, the chat bot can answer basic questions about the course and when assignments are due and what-what the answer is to this problem and this tricky aspect of chapter three in the textbook and so forth. We work with the instructor to build out that, those resources and what we saw overall is for the students on the chat bot in that political science course, their final grades were seven points higher if they were first in their family student, a first generation student as we term them in Georgia, excuse me, in the US, their final grade was 11 points higher. So again, the disproportionate benefit from this systematic, personalised support to students from underserved backgrounds. A second example, which I'll mention is we began to see that one of the reasons why some populations were not doing as well as others at Georgia State was the fact that some populations were having a lot more difficulty finding the right academic field to pursue. So at Georgia State, we've got over 80 different academic majors. And if you come from a middle or upper income family and you've been around professionals all your lives and have parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles who have all pursued professional degrees, you don't always know what you want to do in college, but you have a much better head start. You know what a lawyer is and you know what accountants do and all this sort of thing. If you're a first generation student and you have a choice of 80 majors, you often don't know where to begin. How do you begin to winnow down the list and choose what you want to study in? So we developed a program which we call meta majors, where all the students in their first semester are not asked to pick among the 80 different academic fields we offer, but rather are placed in larger buckets of academic fields such as STEM, business, the arts, the humanities. And what we do in those learning communities based on meta majors is expose students to what the choices actually are. If you're interested in business, let's spend a semester talking about the difference between marketing and finance and risk management and so forth, so that the students can make an informed choice. This is particularly critical for low-income students because low-income students, at least in the US, have a limited amount of eligibility for their aid. So if it takes them two years to find the right fit academic field, they often don't have enough aid remaining to get them to the point of graduating. So now with this program, which is scaled across our whole student body, students have much more quickly found the major, the academic field that they want to pursue. They're changing majors less often later in their academic careers. And as a result, we trimmed over a full semester off the average time it takes students to complete a degree at Georgia State.
"What do I do if I can't find parking on campus or I have a library fine, and so forth. All those answers were put in the chat bot and more recently we've begun to focus on specific first year courses that have non-high pass rates and saying, Could the chatbot help in those instances as well?"
Prof Sally Kift:
Thank you for that, Tim. There's so many parallels with a number of the I want to say, challenges, but let's talk about the opportunities for students as they, as they transition in and through and out successfully in higher education. In Australia, we have around 50% of students who are still first generation, first in their family to attend university. And I think you, you're speaking to the complex and complicated nature of their lives that they try and manage in addition to their student identity, which is only one of many complex interactions that they have on a day-to-day basis. I'm particularly interested in what you were talking about just then around the students making sure that they had consolidated their course and career choice. For younger students we know a third of their, a third of them are probably uncertain about the course or career choice that they've made. But I think you're speaking there also to changes in curriculum. Am I hearing you correctly on that? What what, what what have you done there?
Dr Tim Renick:
Yeah. So changes in curriculum and required student supports. So we have at, at Georgia State in the US, academic advisors who meet with students on a regular basis. So what we've changed is both the curriculum in significant ways and the ways those interactions occur in a required sense outside the classroom. As far as curriculum is concerned, we're designing the first semester experience to help build the students exposure to the career opportunities in front of them. One of these programs is really simple and low cost. We started about six years ago what we call a seed grant program for faculty who teach any introductory courses at Georgia State. So if they're Introduction to Psychology or Introduction to Chemistry, they get one of these seed grants if they agree to create one day lesson, one required experience in the course where the students are asked to explore the career opportunities for that specific field. So if you want to pursue chemistry or you want to pursue psychology, what are the career opportunities? And so we're hardwiring those sorts of experiences into the curriculum, because when you make them optional, when you say, Yeah, we have a career fair, but it's 3:00 on Tuesday afternoon, you immediately are empowering the students who are best financially situated, who don't have jobs and don't have family obligations and so forth, and disadvantaging the students typically from first generation backgrounds and low-income backgrounds. So how do we do that in a hard-wired fashion. As far as our advising is concerned, and this is a recent tool, but it's low, low cost. We're using a vendor right now to scrape the Internet to find our alumns. So the reality is when we try to see what our students are doing after they graduate, by asking them, we get very low response rates. Last time we did a comprehensive survey of all the alumni from Georgia State, only about 5% reply. So we pivoted, as far as our strategy is concerned, now we're using big data to scrape the Internet on websites like LinkedIn and other professional websites to find the graduates of Georgia State, to find what they're doing, where they're working, what, what, what kind of titles they have and so forth. And then to aggregate that data for our current students. So our first year students who are interested in political science can now get live data about what political science majors from Georgia State are actually doing. What organisations are they most likely to work for? What kind of titles do they have? What are their average salaries and so forth. So when a first generation student is picking between political science and psychology, they're no longer just throwing darts at a board and trying to hope something good lands, they're actually doing it based on better information. None of this is a panacea, so it doesn't work perfectly for every student. But there's a large subset of students who have been able to make much more informed decisions about their academic field and, as you say, consolidate their courses at an earlier rate so that they can build towards a complete degree than was the case in the past.
Prof Sally Kift:
It's, that's a fantastic example, isn't it? The students are able to see other, other students just like them, who have been to your institution, come in through and out, and are successful. And it's very motivating, I think, in a positive frame within which they undertake their studies. And your, your comments about seed grants, they're one of our institutions here, the University of Technology Sydney had a similar program funding quite small grants in the order of, of Australian four or $5,000 for individual academics to improve some, some aspect of curriculum in their, in their first year in particular. That career development learning embedded in curriculum is so important. I just wanted to take you to, to the end of the degree, also, because I see that, that you've had great success in awarding small grants for students to complete university. Students who, who have been on track, but then for financial reasons, have the potential to drop out. Would you speak to us a little bit about that, please?
Dr Tim Renick:
Yeah, absolutely. It's another example of a strategy for delivering personalised attention to students at scale, using data to do so. So we saw, this was ten years ago, a disturbing phenomenon. There was a large group of students who were leaving the university not because they had academic deficiencies, their coursework and their grades were fine, but because they ran out of financing, they didn't, they weren't able to pay their bills. And in the US, I will say most of our scholarship programs are time limited. The student has the scholarship for a limited period of time, and after that time expires, they are no longer eligible for those funds. That's true at the state and institutional level. It's also true at the federal level for some of our US federal higher ed grants and so forth. And what was happening is these students leaving at the tail end of their program for financial reasons were also feeding the equity gaps that we were facing because these students were primarily low-income students. They were the ones who were reliant on these financial aid packages, and they were the ones who, when the financial aid packages expired, were going to drop out with no, no degree because they didn't have the finances from other means to sustain their studies. So what we started to do back in 2011 and 12 was a micro grant program, requires the students to do nothing and that's a critical part of the recipe here. No application required. One of my great frustrations in student success work over the last 15 years has been all of the, the hurdles we make students jump through to give us information we already have about them. So we sat there and thought, what information do we need from these students? We know which students are close to graduating. We know which students are academically progressing and advancing their studies in a positive way. We also know which students have run out of eligibility for their aid packages because we're the ones that calculate that and we know which students don't have other means of supports because they have balances that need to be paid for them to stay enrolled. So we started just awarding these grant monies to the students, proactively, just putting the money in their accounts and calling them up and saying, don't worry, we just covered the last 1500 dollars. Now these grants go up to $2500. That first semester we gave 40 of these grants away. Since then, we've given over 20,000 of them, averaging about between two and 3000 of these grants every year. Now, what we found was two things. One, the right amount of money timed at the right time can make a huge difference in the prospects of a student actually securing the degree, the credential, because, you know, if you have a first year student who has financial deficiencies, the reality is they need multiple years of support to get a degree. But if you target these students who are at the tail end of their degree requirements, they might only need a couple of courses or an additional semester to complete their program. So a smaller amount of money can have a bigger impact. And the other thing we found is that ironically, this program, although it seems much larger than we could have imagined it to be, 20,000 plus grants awarded over a decade, pays for itself, in fact, more than pays for itself. Boston Consulting Group, a large consulting firm in the US, came in and did an ROI study, return on investment study of this particular program. And what they found is that we actually collect more revenue as a university by the program than we lose. Over the last ten years, with 20,000 grants, the average grant amount we've awarded a student is about $900. What Boston Consulting Group found is that the average bill that student was trying to cover for that semester was over $3,000. So by giving the student $900, we help close the gap that keeps them enrolled and enables them to pay greater resources to the university. But the most striking data to cite about this program is in the past, if a student, even well prepared, academically qualified, dropped out for financial reasons, stopped out for even a single semester, only 30% of these students ever came back and completed their degree at Georgia State. With this, on average $900 grant, over 80% of these students are completing their degree. So for our $900, we're turning what were 30% completion rates into 80% completion rates. You couldn't do that with your first year students. But it is an opportunity with students who are close to the finish line to just giving them that nudge they need to get them across that last, last few requirements.
"One of my great frustrations in student success work over the last 15 years has been all of the, the hurdles we make students jump through to give us information we already have about them."
Prof Sally Kift:
What a wonderful ethos, requires students to do nothing. I think that should probably be our mantra and very attractive to our senior managers, I'm sure, to hear about that return on investment study done by Boston Consulting. I suppose we haven't thought about financial aid in that, in that last semester or last year to that extent. We've done a bit around providing students with quite small grants and it's the, it's the small amount of the grant that I always find astounding. You were talking about an average of 900 there, I think Queensland University of Technology, under the guidance of one of our equity gurus here, Mary Kelly, was giving students very small amounts of money on entry into the university, which students use to buy time, but also then the reciprocal relationship that was established. Students felt that someone was confident enough in them and their success to invest in them. That paid enormous dividends as well.
"...the reciprocal relationship that was established. Students felt that someone was confident enough in them and their success to invest in them. That paid enormous dividends as well."
Dr Tim Renick:
I agree with that 100%. I'll just say very quickly on that point, one of the metrics that we're tracking increasingly in the US is so-called mindset. That if students have the right mindset that they think they can succeed and they believe others want them to succeed, they're more likely to succeed. And we've seen exactly that with the micro grant program. The mere fact that the students don't apply, but all of a sudden somebody swoops in and gives them the money has had many students comment, I didn't know anybody was watching and anybody cared. And now I'm more dedicated and inspired to complete my degree because I know I'd be letting people down if I didn't, I didn't do so.
Prof Sally Kift:
It's a wonderful success story. So, so these approaches that Georgia State has successfully implemented, do you see them as being potentially replicated more broadly across the sector? I see that you've just started up a National Institute for Student Success Acceleration Grant program. You've got $12 million that was to be distributed across universities. Interestingly, it comes with an implementation coaching component. So there's, so institutions are coached and helped to be successful themselves. So what, what is the potential for doing what you've done so remarkably well at Georgia being spread more widely across the sector?
Dr Tim Renick:
I am a firm believer that these approaches are transferable to other contexts and we've got good evidence to support that, just as we have good evidence to support the impact of these individual programs at Georgia State. Prior to the pandemic, we were visited by teams from more than 500 campuses globally, so many across the US, but many across across the globe as well. We had particular interest, by the way, from New Zealand, and I made a trip to New Zealand and to talk at, with the Tertiary Commission and at many universities prior to the pandemic. But what we realised is while these systems are evidence-based, they require a technical know-how that isn't largely available right now. So people don't know how to use big data and predictive analytics and AI and chat bots and so forth. So the National Institute for Student Success, which is now two years in operations, works specifically with institutions to help them implement these kind of interventions. I have a full-time staff working for me of 30 individuals. They do nothing all week long other than working with, with other colleges and universities to try to help them figure out where the opportunities are to improve their systems and their administrative approaches. And once those are identified, how to implement some of these initiatives at scale. We're currently working with, or have worked over the last 18 months with more than 50 institutions, specifically institutions that enrol large numbers of underserved students, students from more disadvantaged populations.
Prof Sally Kift:
So, so, so what do you think are the biggest risks for higher education heading into, heading into the next year? You've just started, I think, your new academic year over there in the US, where we're coming to the end, to the end of ours. But there's a, there's a lot going on, I think it would be fair to say. COVID we're, we're still dealing, I think with the, with the fallout from that. This increased emphasis on student success in the context of the need for upskilling and reskilling of, of all citizens, including in particular, our underserved cohorts. So, so if you were speaking directly to senior managers, as you regularly do, and to politicians again, as you seem to regularly do, what's your best advice to them about what to focus on going forward?
Dr Tim Renick:
Yeah, it's a great question. We're very much seeing some parallel problems. There is significant learning loss from the COVID pandemic and in the US, and I'm sure it's true in Australia as well, the impacts of COVID on educational outcomes at the secondary level were disproportionately felt by low-income students from underserved backgrounds. So the very students who you're trying to help and we're trying to help at Georgia State and at the National Institute for Student Success, are the students who now are starting from even further behind as they begin their university studies. The other thing we're seeing in the US I will mention is a strong backlash against equity initiatives that, that has become politically problematic, to talk about specific efforts dedicated to one demographic group rather than another. And what I say in response to both of those challenges is we need to double down on our institutional efforts to do what we do better to solve these administrative and other barriers, because the reality is that most of what Georgia State has done over the last decade in not only increasing graduation rates by 70% overall, but eliminating equity gaps, and we now graduate more Black students from Georgia State than any other college or university in the US, have been efforts to resolve what are universal problems for our students, right? It's not by saying let's do something very unique and different for this demographic group than another demographic group. It's by saying all of our students struggle as they're coming into the institution. Let's create a chat bot and a communication platform to help them more successfully navigate that time period. All of our students are struggling with picking majors, and let's come up with a model for helping students make more informed decisions based upon career outcomes and so forth. And many, many of our students are struggling to complete their finances and graduate. Let's do a micro grant program to help students in their last semester or two. Not one of those examples, and I could cite six others, are only for this one demographic group. They're for all of our students universally but when we've implemented them systematically across all student groups, what we found is that they disproportionately have benefited, our minoritized, our low-income and first generation students.
Prof Sally Kift:
It is, it isn't, it is, excuse me, that's that systematic approach, for all students, whole of institution, all disciplines, all cohorts. What's, what's good for equity bearing students is, is good for all students. And I really, you mentioned your great success rate with, with Black undergraduates. I really need to, to call out to the particular aspect that I saw on your website. According to Forbes, the entire Ivy League, so that's our Group of Eight institutions in Australia, combined enrol a total of around 5,000 Black undergraduates last year. In the past year, Georgia State alone enrolled 18,000. I think we have similar issues in Australia around how we're going to do as the, as the Minister is asking us to do, lift and head towards parity for equity groups. We need to grow the whole pie. And it can't be that the Ivy League, our Group of Eight skims the high-achieving students, equity bearing students off the top, the whole pie needs to be grown. And you're doing this in the context, I probably need to remind our Australian and New Zealand listeners, of the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision overturning affirmative action. And I saw your comment in your, in your letter about that doesn't make our work easier, but it makes it more critical. It's a, it's a good point to finish on. If you were able to change one thing in the first year experience for our students and we might finish up here, if you were able to change one thing that would make the difference between them coming in, getting a sense of belonging, feeling engaged and supported and welcome in the relationship rich education way that we hear Peter Felton and Leo Lambert now talking about, what would that be?
Dr Tim Renick:
Yeah, that's a challenge because there are a number of things that need to be adjusted in that first year experience. But what I would say is the most chronic program problem we're seeing across the 50 schools that the institute that I direct is working with, is really not a lack of staffing. We've got a lot of people trying to help these students. It's not a lack of caring. The people who tend to work with our first year students are quite caring. It's a lack of coordination, that higher education in the US is chronically haunted by silos. Different offices doing different things, not in coordination with others, communicating in an uncoordinated fashion, and so forth. So if there's one thing I could change, it wouldn't be, although I'd love to have more staff to hire more people, it wouldn't be, although I love for our staff to be caring and supportive, to make them more caring and supportive because they already are. It would be to find ways to deliver our services in a more coordinated and systematic fashion. And that may seem like a relatively small ask, but as we all know who work in higher education, this is a very, very heavy lift. And oftentimes when we don't coordinate what we're doing, when we're unclear about our communications, when our systems and our, our platforms are not working well, it's the low-income students, it's the first in their family to go to college students who are the ones who are going to slip between the cracks. So it's again, to kind of close at the point you started with an example of how we are the problem. We're the problem. We create these systems that swallow some students up, but importantly swallow students disproportionately up from our weakest backgrounds, our weakest demographic groups as far as financial resources, academic preparation, and so forth. So we need to take some ownership of the fact if we're dealing with gaps in success rates for students from different populations, it's not all on secondary, it's not all on society. A good part of it is on us.
Prof Sally Kift:
So again, you've echoed what's in very large font on your on your National Institute website when you talk about the challenges it's that institutions hinder their students success through policies, practices, and structures that are the key drivers of equity gaps. And that's music to my ears, I've spent much of my career talking about the need for whole of institution approaches. It looks like we've got our institutional act together so that students can trust us to do the right thing by them and return an investment on their investment in time with us. Tim, thank you so much for your very generous time. It sounds like I'm sorry that New Zealand got you out. I'm just jealous now. We need to get you out here to Australia.
Dr Tim Renick:
I would love, I would love to visit Sally. Thank you so much.
Prof Sally Kift:
I don't have much power, but I'll see what I can do about that. Thank you so much on behalf of Studiosity and from me as well for taking the time to talk with us today. I think you've set a grand challenge for us as we head into the, to the pointy end of our Universities Accord considerations here. And you've given us much food, food for thought. Thank you.
Dr Tim Renick:
Thank you.
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