Episode 103: Mark Milliron and Angela Baldasare on Student Success for "ANDers"
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How can you support and develop students who lead complicated lives because they are students AND parents, students AND employees, or students AND deployed? What changes do you need to make to your programs, processes, practices, and partnerships to make this happen? We talk through student success for ANDers with Mark Milliron (President) and Angela Baldasare (SVP Research, Strategy, and Planning) at National University.
In the landscape of modern higher education, the image of a "traditional" student—a nineteen-year-old living on a quad with a backpack—represents only about 19% of the population. The vast majority of today’s learners are what National University President Mark Milliron and SVP Angela Baldasare call the "Anders." These are students and parents, students and employees, students and veterans.
To serve this majority, institutions must move beyond asking students to bend their lives to fit the college and instead design the college to meet students where they are. This shift requires a fundamental redesign of policies, practices, and physical spaces to ensure every learner can finish strong and launch confidently into their next adventure.
Understanding the "Anders" Demographic
The term "Anders" serves as a design challenge. It recognizes that students come to the table with complicated, multi-faceted lives. National University was founded on this principle in 1971, specifically to support Vietnam veterans whose needs weren't being met by traditional academic structures.
Today, that mission has expanded. Meeting the "Anders" means acknowledging that education is a means to an end: changing the trajectory of a life. Students aren't just looking for a degree; they are looking for a pathway to possibilities. If an institution fails to see the person behind the transcript—the elder care provider or the full-time worker—it creates barriers that lead to the "some college, no credential" trap.
Moving Beyond Completion: A New Definition of Student Success
While "completion" is a common metric in higher education, it can be dangerously reductive. Student success should be viewed as a three-part journey:
Learning Well: Gaining the actual skills and knowledge required.
Finishing Strong: Completing the credential without losing momentum.
Launching Confidently: Transitioning effectively into a career or higher level of study.
To track this, National University utilizes five core metrics: one-year persistence, graduation rates, total credentials awarded, student engagement, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). By democratizing this data and making it available to deans and advisors in real-time, the institution can pivot quickly to support students who may be losing their way.
Policy, Practice, and Partnership: The Triad of Support
Designing for the "Anders" requires action in three specific areas:
1. Policies that Respect Prior Experience
Transfer policies are often the first hurdle. Many students lose significant credits when moving between institutions. A "student-ready" college creates seamless articulation agreements and utilizes assessments of prior learning. For example, mapping police academy training directly to criminal justice degree credits ensures that "Anders" aren't repeating work they’ve already mastered in the field.
2. Practices that Reduce Cognitive Load
Traditional 16-week semesters are often incompatible with a working parent’s life. If a crisis happens in week ten, a student might have to drop five classes at once. By moving to four-week or eight-week courses—taking one subject at a time—the cognitive load is managed, and the risk of total academic failure is reduced.
3. Partnerships and "Third Spaces"
Success often depends on "wraparound" services. National University’s partnership with the YMCA to provide childcare (The Nest) is a prime example. By creating a "third space"—a "WeWork for learners"—colleges provide the quiet study areas, high-speed technology, and food pantries that "Anders" need to bridge the gap between their work and home lives.
The Future: Normalizing the Non-Traditional Journey
The goal of the "Anders" campaign is to make this conversation ubiquitous. We must stop treating non-traditional journeys as something for which students need to apologize. As we look to the future, the focus must remain on "making things better"—from fixing a dropdown menu on a website to advocating for federal policy changes, such as increasing employer tuition assistance limits.
When institutions embrace the reality of their students’ lives, they don't just improve graduation rates; they fulfill the true promise of higher education: opening doors to a different future.
Episode 103 Transcript
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Mark Milliron: We're thinking about this with these students in mind. We're not asking them to bend their life to us. We're actually figuring out what can we do to make sure we're meeting them where they are and taking them where they need to go. For us it's just this constant design challenge of figuring out how we create the family of experiences that will help our students learn. Finish strong and launch confidently.
Elliot Felix: That was Mark Mill iron President of National University. Mark was joined on the podcast by his colleague, Angela Baldisari, who is their SVP for research strategy and planning, and the three of us had a terrific conversation about understanding adult learners who lead complicated lives, and then redesigning programs, policies, practices, and partnerships to help them succeed. We go from their big picture goal to champion a national movement down into the details about the day-to-day collect and the metrics they use and much more. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers. Welcome, mark and Angela, I'm so excited about our conversation on designing for the Anders, right? Students that are students and parents, students and veterans, students and employees. And hearing about all the great stuff you're doing at National University.
Mark Milliron: Glad to be here. Glad to be in the mix, and I'm glad to be joined by Angela Bald, one of our chief troublemakers here at National University.
Angela Baldasare: Happy to be here. Thanks for having us, Elliot.
Elliot Felix: A great place to get started is hearing how you both did. So maybe Angela, tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today.
Angela Baldasare: Sure. I began my journey in higher education with an academic career as an assistant professor of sociology. And I left that because I actually wanted more tangible impact on social problems. I loved teaching but I also wanted to be able to move the needle and think macro. And so I left that. I went into 10 years of work in the government and nonprofit sector and things like program evaluation, grant writing and technical assistance to communities. Helping to implement change via funding from HHS Justice Highway Safety in all kinds of government agencies and funding streams. Made that move back into higher ed after 10 years of that government and nonprofit sector back into this time on the administrative side, but still really squarely focused on using data. Primarily to implement change and to get to good outcomes which has really been the central thread of my career, no matter the domain. And so I like to live in that nexus between data and practice and higher ed. My whole jam has been about student success. It's really been about how do we connect the dots between institutional strategy. How we finance the institution, how we run the institution, what we offer, how it's structured and all of how all of those things come together to create the right environment for student success.
Elliot Felix: That's great. Do you think this data thing is really gonna take off, or are people just gonna keep going with their gut?
Mark Milliron: Might be a thing. Might be a thing.
Elliot Felix: It might be. Mark, what's your story?
Mark Milliron: I came from a large diverse family of nine kids. Have an African American brother, native American brother, Korean sister, and we had 25 foster kids who rotated through my house during the time I was growing up. And when I graduated high school at 17. There really wasn't any knowing about higher education and so I broke the mold and and actually defied my parents and went to a community college that was nearby and started busing tables and waiting tables and paying my way through school. And so that was really instructive. I learned a lot about the power of access institutions, about the importance of like having flexible models that allow you to work and succeed on the world in education. But really fell in love with teaching while I was at Arizona State University, especially during my master's program. And then went on to get my doctorate at UT Austin. And really just decided to dedicate my life to education in particular as something that could open up pathways to possibilities. What was funny, Elliot, is once I got my bachelor's degree, my mom was like if Mark can do it, everybody can do it. So all my brothers and sisters after got some kinds of degrees, which is great. If you look at the variety of different roles I've been able to play over the last 35 years I've been blessed to work with some amazing people and some really dynamic organizations. All of them focused on trying to help more and more diverse students be more successful in higher education pathways. And that has been the red thread of my work. I have been totally dedicated. Whether it was working with, advanced analytics organizations or with the State Department or with universities or with community colleges, whatever seat I was in, or with the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation. I was always trying to figure out how we can bring the tools, the technologies, the policies, and the practices together to help more of our striving students be more successful than ever before. So I've been really blessed to work with a lot of people deeply dedicated to student success. So that has as Angela said, has been my jam for for decades.
Elliot Felix: I like the, I like that. It's a jam. It's a red thread. It's so many things. Student success. And I would love to hear your your definitions. Of course, there's no one but how do you both define student success?
Mark Milliron: Well, Angela, we could go into our measures of student success, but I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get real basic on this one to me. Understanding the kind of aspirations of students and helping them get on that pathway really matters. Lemme just say two things. One, I think it's very clear that institutions that care deeply about their students want to be dedicated to helping them learn well. Finish strong on that higher education pathway and then launch confidently into whatever the next adventure is going to be. And those three elements all matter and are all a piece and a part of what we're talking about when you talk about student success in the kind of larger journey. But secondly, when I'm thinking about higher education, I get really upset. Or frustrated by folks who get pretty reductive around, just completion. We want students just to complete. And, when we launched the completion agenda, we were at the Gates Foundation. We actually fought some of that because of that, the kind of reduction, reductive notice of that we say out loud at National University because we know who our students are. They don't come to us to get a degree. Full stop. They come to us to change their lives. They have made a choice to enter an education pathway because they want to change the trajectory of their lives. They want to go on a different journey, and often that degree is a means to that end, right? And in these days, it could actually be badges, certifications, degrees. Not to mention it's human connections, it's experiences, it's, so our job is to curate the family of experiences that include classes and completion and connections that will help them get on that pathway to changing their lives. And so in our work, we are pretty expansive by trying to make sure we find the measures that help tell us whether or not we're on or off track towards helping those students get on those pathways to possibilities. So that's my story and I'm sticking with it. Angela, you can go.
Angela Baldasare: It echoes many of the same hallmarks, for me. Student success is ensuring that every student, no matter what their age and stage as Mark would say has that opportunity to transform their life through education. And that's meeting them where they are. Understanding what they're here for and supporting them in their challenge to learn and connect and achieve. And so that's it. It's pretty, it's pretty simple. Meeting them where they are is I think, the part that institutions really struggle with. And that's, a big part of that is, I think what we're here to talk about today is seeing them for who they are there.
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Elliot Felix: That's such a great way of thinking about student success so that you're not confusing the means in the end and you're not focusing on the degree so much as what the degree or the credential and the experiences that come with it enable like changing your life. I'd love to hear hear a bit about how you're doing that at national. Tell us a little bit about your focus on your longtime focus. On Anders what is that and how do you do it?
Mark Milliron: Yeah, first and foremost, just to explain what an ander is we refer to our students as Xanders because they're with, without exception, they are students and parents. They're students and employed. They're students and deployed students and elder care, like there's, they're just, there's family of s that they bring with them to our organization. And part of National University's design challenge from day one has been meeting students where they are on these complicated journeys and taking them where they're gonna go. Our root story basically was Navy Captain PhD, Dr. David Chios, who was back in 1971, heartbroken watching service members coming out of Vietnam trying to use their GI bill with traditional education institutions and. And it, they were not succeeding at the level they should have been succeeding. And he knew that in his heart of hearts. And it wasn't because they were bad students, it was because they had, they were Anders, they had complicated lives. They were trying to raise families. They were trying to work full-time. They had deployment challenges and higher education. It's not beating up those traditional institutions. They weren't designed for that. They were designed for a very different kind of student. So he actually worked with a group of former officers and academics and went to WASC and said, we wanna design something. Completely focused on non-traditional working in military students. And that's where National University was founded. And you fast forward 54 years later, we 250,000 alumni in all 50 states in 20 countries. We serve about 50,000 students a year, another 80,000 in workforce training, contract training. About a third of our degree students are doctoral, about a third of master's, third, or bachelor's number one, college of Education in the state of California, big law school. It, but a hundred percent of our students are still non-traditional working military. They're Anders. And what's been great for us is we know who we are. We know who we serve. If you're gonna be a faculty member at nu, if you're gonna be an advisor. If you're gonna be an administrator, guess who we're serving. And we literally have training programs around the students that we care about, including training in military backgrounds. We use something called psych armor training. And then even the Andrews, we have an Andrews training course for our employees that are coming in, but we're designing what we do around the Anders population. What's great about the work that Angela gets to do is Angela, at traditional research arms that work in universities are very focused on IEDs and traditional definitions. Like she gets to play with a very expansive definition of our students and make sure we are capturing those journeys and understanding what's working and what's not.
Angela Baldasare: And I think that's really important because the data is actually very hard to get in the United States about Anders. But the NCES data in, in as much as it can offer, even that has shown us that. These Anders, these non-traditional working students with all of these different roles and identities in their lives have been the majority of US college goers since the mid 1990s. But our policy environment, our practices the infrastructure of higher education has not kept up with the changing demographic of higher education. It is still aimed at traditional. First time in college, freshmen by measure, right? By funding mechanism, all of it. And so there's so much that institutions are left to do for themselves to even discover and see this population
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Mark Milliron: We actually have launched something called Neers Campaign. Elliot and Anders campaign. If you go to nu.edu/anders, you're gonna learn more about the campaign. And part of the campaign is one, let's see these students and help people realize. Like whenever I say the word college student to a large audience, I'll tell 'em to picture a college student and I'll have 'em close their eyes and then they open their eyes and I say, how many of you thought of a 36-year-old woman with three kids. How many of you thought of a deployed service member? How many of you thought a construction worker working on their, on the telephone lines? No. What they all thought of was a 19-year-old with a backpack on the quad and that full-time, first time, full-time freshmen living on campus. Now working is 19% of higher ed. The vast majority of higher ed, far more complicated. So job one in the Anders campaign is, let's see 'em. Job two is let's look at the policy environment and figure out where are the policies holding these students back. They're literally institutions that won't serve these students 'cause they don't wanna hit these iPad traps in terms of their grad rates and things that'll happen out of it. What are the practice changes you have to make? And then what are the partnerships you can develop, whether it's with the military or with employers or with others that'll make it easier for these students to be more effective. Angela and I have been leading these things called Anders Summits.
Angela Baldasare: We're pulling together a broad cross section of community members and students and alumni, but that community member section, other educators, policy makers. Philanthropists, business partners all of those community members that make up that nexus of partnerships with an institution and stakeholders in an institution. We pull them together. And then we do basically community-based research. We do affinity mapping sessions with those community members to focus on what are the policies that need to be addressed. Changed or implemented in order for higher education to better serve Anders? What are the practices? That we need to implement or change, and then what are the partnerships that are needed? And so we break them up into three rooms. Everybody rotates through the three rooms. We have this wonderful idea affinity map then of what needs to be what do we need to do and think about and propose for this new roadmap for higher education. And it's not about national university. This is about higher ed writ large. This is about affecting that larger, that macro policy environment and the practices that we all use and the partnerships that we form. And that help fuel higher education for our students. This is a year long research project that we're undergoing in different locations across the United States, and we're super excited for what we can learn and share.
Elliot Felix: This approach and the language and everything about it really resonates with me and is sorely surely needed. And if, if step one is seeing all students quantitatively, qualitatively, to serve all students, and then step two is changing and practices and partnerships to make it happen. can you give us some examples of. When you design for Anders what are the policies you have to change or create, now that you've seen them and understand them, what are the practices? What are the partnerships?
Mark Milliron: I'll just give some concrete examples. On the policy side, it's things like your transfer policies and your articulation work. 85% of our students in our undergrad population come from community colleges. And so having really strong, effective transfer agreements so that students don't lose credit in transfer is a big deal.
Elliot Felix: The is like you lose 40% of your
Mark Milliron: Yeah, and we don't want them to learn to lose a single one. It's assessment of prior learning. So for example, we've got partnerships going to the partnership side with the local police departments. And if you're finishing your your post program, which was your police academy, you're literally using the same textbooks as that, like our first seven courses in our criminal justice program. So can we actually credit map that into like your criminal justice degree? So we've done that. So those are the kinds of policies that we're talking about. And then practices are, a combination of online learning, hybrid learning, thinking about what you're doing with facilities, thinking about your student support strategies, your scholarshipping, like all those kinds of things. And then on the partnerships is are you working with their military partners. Are you working with your employers to really focus on employer tuitions and support strategies for those folks and figuring out how those can pull in? Are you partnering, for example, with K 12 to build really strong clinical arrangements? If you're training rising teachers, you have to have clinical sites. We have 2,600 clinical sites around California. And that's where we're building these big structural partnerships with these school districts so that we can get better together at getting those teachers ready to be able to move forward. But all that means we're thinking about this with these students in mind. We're not asking them to bend their life to us. We're actually figuring out what can we do to make sure we're meeting them where they are and taking them where they need to go.
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Elliot Felix: It sounds like a very much a very specific instantiation of, instead of the lack of college ready students, you're becoming a student ready college in a very specific, way. Most people hear, they think about ERs or non-traditional or post-traditional students and they think online asynchronous. And so facilities might not, or clinical sites might not be top of mind. Let's on that thread a little bit. Like what role does, do campus facilities or other kinds of spaces play in student success for Andrews.
Angela Baldasare: Some of the things that we've learned in looking at our students and trying to understand these Anders, is what are the unmet needs that create barriers for them? In Academic success and in having a great experience at an institution and, they're not surprising, right? For many of these, it's coordinated easy to access services in responsiveness by an institution to them on their time. Which is limited. It's access to childcare. For so many, it's access to a quiet space where they can do their work. If they're, a busy person, they go to work during the day, they come home, there's the kids at home at night or elder care situation. But when is the, where is the time and the space? For them to focus and they're carving that out around the edges. And so we came up with this concept of really it's third space, right? It's the same concept that Starbucks had back in the day for the coffee shop. And it's third space is something that, religious institutions and community centers have provided. So we needed third space for our students where they could come. Have a quiet space to study access technology, access childcare, have food and drink go to class. And so the concept of the Nest was born. And we started working with our community partners to see how we could bring this together. And so we have a great partnership with the YMCA of San Diego to offer childcare for our students, right? We have technology labs innovation lab. Maker's lab kind of thing, where students can go in and use 3D printers and the best of technology, they can check out a laptop. There's food and drink, there's classroom spaces, there's private learning spaces. There's a Veteran center with a food pantry. So much so much. Great, opportunity to create that third space that's specifically dedicated to our students that helps meet them where they are.
Mark Milliron: The nest has been really dynamic. 'cause it's almost like a, we work for learners, right? It's a space where they can come in and they can connect. But the no or low cost childcare partnership with the YMCA is amazing. The, we also partnered with our own harmony program. National University runs a program called Harmony. Which is one of the largest kind of trainers of social emotional learning relationship skills for kiddos. But that program is a amazing, by the way, there's actually a Harmony at home app, which works directly with parents, but we have our Sanford Harmony Clubhouse in the Nest. So we actually run programming for kids and for families within there. And we've ended just putting some of our best of our stuff together to figure out what would help our students. And it's not for every student, but for the students who want to touch down there and connect. It's really neat. But our job is to learn to figure out how effective that is and understand what kind of impact that has on learning and persistence and completion. And we're all in the process of doing that right now. But that is combined with design strategies. That's a design strategy by the way. We can partner with community colleges and open up nests on community college campuses all around the country on YMCA campuses, wherever it makes sense. But we also do things like, you know what? What is really frustrating is for us, people think, oh, serving non-traditional working. Or military students means just do what you already do, but do it at night, which is like the worst, most hackneyed version of it. Yeah. Night courses are important for some students, but. It is Or just now it's just do it online. It's No, it's actually what? The design is different. So for example, probably our most unique design feature, our four week classes, what we have found is cognitive load is the big issue with our students. It's not that they can't take a full load. It says taking five courses over 16 weeks while you're raising kids and working full-time doesn't work. 'cause if life happens at any point along the way, you gotta drop five classes, right? So one course at a time, four weeks works really well for our students, and we've learned this over básicamente 50 years of doing this work. That design feature we have now, we have four week classes, eight week classes. We've got one-on-one models, very much like the WGU model, which we've been doing for 50 years. That's our heavy graduate program. It's an Oxford model of graduate education. Combined with, again, the synchronous learning opportunities. We've got an amazing library resource. It's available synchronously and asynchronously. And we have a great online commons that's available for our folks, but we also have live community events and like I said, 5,000 clinical sites on ground with partners all across the country. For us it's just this constant design challenge of figuring out how we create the family of experiences that will help our students learn. Finish strong and launch confidently. The, one of our real challenges. I know Ellie you've helped people think about pathways like work in, in larger student success. You get really frustrated when people almost talk about college. Like it's really a collection of classes. And if we can get that collection of classes right and check the box where we're successful, like that's beyond frustrating for me. College is not a collection of classes. It is a family of experiences that happens to include classes, but it also includes your co-curricular relationships, your larger kind of experiences at the institution from first contact. To the time you're an alumni, our job is to take somebody from enrollment to endowment, right? We want them fully connected with the institution, so that's our design challenge.
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Elliot Felix: This approach really resonates with me. Like using space to enable student success and wraparound services just makes so much sense. And my not so hidden agenda has been to reimagine libraries as student success hubs for of decades now. 'Cause it's a great way to meet students where they are and provide the kind of support services that you. You're talking about and normalize getting that help and support making it more visible, making it you're doing that in a, I think, in a really interesting way and looking at it holistically, like during the early days of the pandemic, when students were asking for a discount because all their classes were online. If you can remember that far. Looking back through the COVID fog did our national student experience survey. We put in a question, 'cause I thought this is a, this is an interesting question. I wonder what students really do value. So we did a nationally representative survey and we asked how would you allocate your tuition by percentage, classes, support services, technology, the campus, so forth. And classes were only 50%. I think students recognize that as you're saying, you need this whole family, this whole constellation of experiences that each other and and create this positive feedback loop. So I really admire this approach. And I know you've been at this for a while. I also. Would love to see you shine up your crystal ball and look into the future hear from you about what's changing about this. How will practices, partnerships, how are they gonna keep evolving so that you can keep supporting into the future?
Mark Milliron: We will know we have made our mark when the Anders conversation is one that is ubiquitous with people designing better programs for Anders. And here's the other thing, Elliot, it's really important to us is, I can't tell you how many people run up to us now, want to tell us their Andrew story. Yeah, I was an ander. I did this, I did that. And they're really proud of being an Ander. Once we talk about it and showcase it, boy, they want to come up and talk about, Hey, I had to do this. I worked my wife really supported me, my husband supported me, or this, my kids were cheering at the graduation whatever it's gonna be, and it's just so inspiring. But so many of them talk about this idea that they're almost, in some ways apologetic about having to go on a non-traditional journey through education. Sometimes so much to the point where they don't even talk about it, like with other people because they didn't just go to a very standard, traditional kind of institution. We're gonna know we're winning in this when we completely, deeply normalize and actually celebrate the Ander journey. And we have more people like doing the policy work, the practice work, the partnership work to make it more likely that these students can be successful. Because right now, if you look at the data around 43 million people of some college and no credential, the vast majority of them left in good academic standing. And a big chunk of them leave because the institutions are not designed for them. They have complicated lives. So part of it's, can we make a big dent in that? And by the way, I think. That number is eclipsed by the millions more who never put their toe in the water because they didn't think they could do it. They didn't think it was possible for somebody like them. So our job is to one. Celebrate, normalize, and help the educational infrastructure embrace this population, including with things like, can we get much better at employer tuition assistance? We haven't changed the 52 50 policy since 1984. We're still only allowing companies to write off $5,250 for employer tuition assistance. That number should be at 15,000. So we're on the case for that. We're trying to raise military tuition assistance. We think tuition assistance is to the working student, what the Pell Grant is to the traditional student. So that's the policy work we've gotta do. And these are the kind of things where if we can make this change, really good things can happen now. For us to get on that journey and to, again, make sure we're more effective with these students. Our partners are more effective with our policy makers. We've gotta make sure we do the work internally of asking hard questions about what's working and what's not, and understanding how to, so Angela began her work with us doing loss and momentum studies to understand where were we losing students, what was gaining momentum, and helping us think about how we design it. And now we're really looking in deep way at everything from NPS scores to our own version of engagement scores together with, are we increasing the total number of credentials given persistence and graduation? We're getting better and smarter at this, including rolling out predictive models and trying to help make sure we're democratizing the data.
Angela Baldasare: You mentioned that we're democratizing the data, and I think that's the tape. Stakes here is making sure that we are, as an institution, being good stewards of our data. It comes in through multiple systems, right? It's messy, it's disconnected. We've got a great team on our data engineering and architecture side that's building, our data warehouse for us. It's such a complicated institution with a merger a few years ago. We've really had to, work hard to integrate systems, unify systems and get all the data together in one place. Serious work there around data governance around getting all of our definitions in place and agreed upon, governed and approved. And then really now a hardcore focus on democratizing that data, getting it into useful tools and formats for the variety of users that we have around campus. And so that's on demand reports, it's dashboards it's clear visibility into our top five metrics for the institution. Those are the primary metrics by which we will judge our success. And as Mark our five top metrics are our students will persist, right? So it's our overall one year persistence rate and then tracking that persistence through to completion. Completion for sure. The overall graduation rate, it is total credentials awarded. and that includes all of our certificates and credentials. So those microcredentials as well. But then what happens in between there is very important to us, right? Students have to persist in order to complete and they have to be engaged, right? They have to have a good experience. And so our student engagement metric is based on, it's based on the model of the National Survey for Student Engagement Nessie. But Nessie like many other things in higher education, has that very explicit focus on traditional freshmen rightness. Not built for Anders, right? It's the first time freshmen IPEDS cohort, and then that same cohort at graduation that gets into the NESSI data. And so we took the concepts and many of the constructs of nessi, but we expanded and adapted those for national university into a custom metric. The measure students engagement. Peer engagement, faculty engagement, engagement with their core academics and engagement with support and services. And so we track overall student engagement. And then we track our net promoter score, which is a an industry standard, right? Net promoter score. It's that one question on a scale of one to 10, what is your likelihood to, to recommend National University to your friends and colleagues? And then the. Follow up questions are, why did you give us that score and tell us what we can do to improve? So with those five core metrics we have learned so much right about our students' journey and our students' population, especially with engagement. And with that NPS, the qualitative that we get off NPS alone is instructing us in so many ways about how do we improve what's really driving students' experience at National University and. The blockers and the opportunities, what we're doing well and what, where we can improve. We've now dug in, we've revised, I think this one's really important too, our course evaluation survey. So course evaluation surveys across higher education have been really. The same for decades. And they're highly contested spaces as they're often used in faculty promotion and tenure decisions and things like that. We recently worked with our faculty and worked through faculty governance to upend that survey and turn it also into a short pulse. So instead of 17 to 20, some questions about multiple dimensions of the course that the students may or may not really relate to and resonate with. We ask them about their experience with the, their satisfaction with the course, with the faculty member and questions about, tell us why. Our response rate on the course evaluation survey itself has gone up from a, an abysmal like 13% to over half of our students right out of the gate responding to that survey. And so we just finished like full institution-wide implementation of this new survey in the fall and in the winter leading up to the winter break.
Mark Milliron: Our vision is world class student experiences. We want to have world class student experiences, which means you gotta pay attention to 'em. You have to. This is why I love having almost a mini version of EMPS for courses. So that, and because the faculty want that, they want information that they, they can use themselves to understand what's working and what's not. And it's basic questions like, would you recommend this course to somebody else? Tell us, the, how would you rank. The instructional resources and like just very basic stuff and it's only what? Four questions, Angela. That's it.
Angela Baldasare: Four questions and it's available in multiple, through multiple doors of the student portal. It's it's in their email and it's in the course shell and.
Mark Milliron: There's another 20 plus metrics underneath it that go against our strap plan. But the top five are the ones Institutionally, we point our strap plan at. Our board has a dashboard with all five of those with the live data, so they can go in at any time and disaggregate it and literally go deep. We have a few board members who are pretty serious about going in and disaggregating and asking questions, but they've never had anything like this at their fingertips. The engagement score, the net promoter score, that stuff we share with every dean. They go down and work with their program directors. Everybody's sharing this data out. We work with our advising core and people are using this to start the conversations and we have these things called our ways of work we asked the entire institution at our best, what would people say about the way we work? And what came back with these five categories? And they were, boy, those folks champion student success. They build trust internally and externally. They advance inclusion. They see people, right? They embrace accountability. And my favorite, they make things better and making things better is. The, instead of talking about innovation as a value, 'cause innovation's way up here and not everybody can participate in that make things better is every day it's an aggregated job. Hey, it's pick up the trash in the parking lot, fix the dropdown menu every day. You can do something to make the institution better. So all of these things that Angela's talking about start these make things better. Conversations about how can we like do something about this, do something about this that pulls us up into that conversation. But that all begins with knowing who you serve and what you want in terms of the kind of a larger outcome. And that's why it's pretty exciting work. And boy, we just wanna be a part of this movement. There are lots of other institutions that care about the kinds of students we care about. And you know what, everything we're talking about can be stolen by people who are dealing with right from high school, students who want to be good at this. It's just about being focused on that kind of, that student experience in particular.
Elliot Felix: I can't think of a better place to end than talking about how it's everyone's job to make things better the parking lot to the coursework, to the course evaluation. And mark and Angela, I really appreciate your perspective and all the great work you're doing at National.
Angela Baldasare: Thank you, Elliot for having us today.
Mark Milliron: Elliot.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the connected college podcast. Subscribe to my Connected College Newsletter at ElliotFelix. com for insights and excerpts from my book, tools you can download, and special offers. You can also find more information about talks I've given, articles I've written, and upcoming events there, and please support the podcast by rating and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.