Higher Ed Leaders: Culture, Data, & Support Drive Student Success

College presidents champion culture, data, and support for student success. Strategies include micro-level data analysis, boosting graduation rates to improve earnings, and offering services like food pantries, especially for low-income & marginalized students.

Jaime Taylor, president of Lamar Universityin Texas, told meeting attendees that, even with his background in mathematics, he believes “culture is drastically more crucial” than having a completely crafted system for trainee services. If people don’t believe in the objective and acquire in, it still will not work, he stated.

Addressing Disparities in Student Success

Low-income trainees see reduced typical early-career revenues compared to their peers, also those that participated in the exact same colleges. Lots of institutions, specifically those that offer trainees from historically marginalized histories, are functioning to link those kinds of voids.

“That enabled us to break down data at the mini degree,” he claimed. “We understood precisely what was the four-year graduation price, six-year graduation price, and two-year transfer pupil rate of, say the background division.”

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Lamar College President Jaime Taylor, right, speaks throughout a panel at the American Association of Colleges and Colleges ′ yearly meeting on Jan. 21, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
Laura Spitalniak/Higher Ed Dive

Cultivating a Student-Centric Culture

Exactly how? Taylor credited a new guiding concept: “If you work and you can’t tie what you do back to just how it’s assisting pupils, you may want to reassess your job and what it’s doing right here,” he said, stating what he told university workers at the time.

Data-Driven Leadership for Improvement

Data was leading of mind for Tomás Morales when he took control of as head of state of Cal State San Bernardino. As one of his very first acts in office, Morales met the management from every management device and every scholastic department. His objective was to all at once obtain the given up the land, identify prospective discomfort points for workers, and protect their buy-in for developing an institution-wide study procedure concentrated on pupil information.

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Information was leading of mind for Tomás Morales when he took over as president of Cal State San Bernardino. As one of his first acts in workplace, Morales met with the leadership from every management system and every academic division. His goal was to concurrently get the lay off the land, identify potential pain points for staff members, and safeguard their buy-in for creating an institution-wide study procedure focused on student data.

Presidents Share Strategies for Student Outcomes

The head of states of 3 of those organizations– Ferris State University, Lamar University and The Golden State College, San Bernardino– spoke to participants at the American Association of Colleges and Universities ′ annual seminar recently about useful means they work to improve pupil results.

Fostering Diversity and Inclusive Campuses

The university’s focus on diversity is installed into its business framework, rather than existing as an appendix, he claimed. Cal State San Bernardino is home to a LGBTQ affinity center, a Women’s Source Facility, and Latinx and Frying pan African.

The Financial Impact of College Completion

Public Program’s financial wheelchair evaluation, released last month, consists of every U.S. university that signed up a minimum of one trainee in the 2022-23academic year and awarded at least one bachelor’s degree between 2020-21 and 2022-23.

A bachelor’s degree-awarding college with a conclusion price of 61%, 5 percent factors higher than the national mean of 56%, might anticipate to have graduates with mean yearly profits that were an average of $1,283 higher.

Researchers found that higher completion prices at an institution were related to more powerful incomes end results for graduates.As an outcome, improving college graduation rates “is crucial” for “fair returns to higher education for all trainees,” the report claimed.

“For Americans from wealthy family members that have actually had access to higher education for generations, the industry of school choices may appear nationwide– or perhaps global– in extent,” it stated. “For the huge bulk of Americans, the real range of choices is extremely regional.”

Essential Campus Support Services

Ferris State opened a campus food pantry last year, and a number of hundred individuals appeared on the very first day alone, Pink said. He additionally informed attendees that his university is working to battle the stigma that is occasionally associated with food kitchens to guarantee no trainees in requirement decrease to use the service.