Episode 108: Amanda Figueroa and Bonnie Becker on Community–Based Assessment
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Beyond the Spreadsheet: Building a Community-Based Culture of Student Success
In higher education, "student success" is often reduced to a set of lagging indicators: retention rates, graduation numbers, and six-figure salaries. While these metrics are necessary for accountability, they rarely tell the full story of why a student thrives or where they fall through the cracks. At the University of Washington Tacoma, Bonnie Becker, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Success, and Amanda Figueroa, Associate Vice Chancellor for Social Mobility, are pioneering a different path.
By moving away from compliance-driven assessment and toward a "community-based interpretive style," they have transformed data from a source of anxiety into a "data superpower" for faculty and staff. Their approach proves that when you blend technical data with human empathy, you create a culture where student success is everyone’s business.
Defining Success Through a Community Lens
The foundation of UW Tacoma’s strategy begins with a "working definition" of success. Rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae of wording, the team focuses on how the definition helps practitioners make better decisions. Their definition is three-fold:
Academic Excellence: Students graduating at higher rates with meaningful experiences.
Equitable Support: Programming that ensures career readiness for all students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds.
Joyful Collaboration: A culture where staff and faculty thrive alongside their students.
Crucially, this isn't just an internal goal. As an urban-serving university, UW Tacoma aligns its metrics with the local community's "cradle-to-career" goals, aiming for 70% of local students to earn a degree or high-wage employment by 2030.
The Power of the "Data Party"
One of the most innovative aspects of the UW Tacoma model is the "Data Party." Held once a quarter, these events bring together people from across campus to explore outcomes in a non-judgmental environment. The premise is simple: Everyone is a "data person."
Instead of asking practitioners to become analysts, the university provides tools like the Student Success Outcomes Framework (SSOF). This framework focuses on immediate, actionable indicators. For example, by identifying a correlation between late registration and high fail/withdrawal (DFW) rates, the team launched a targeted outreach program. By intervening just 30 days before the quarter began, they helped 45 out of 50 high-risk students register successfully—a win that was celebrated campus-wide.
Breaking Down Silos: Structural Change for Sustainability
To make these successes permanent, UW Tacoma has shifted from temporary task forces to permanent structural changes. A prime example is the co-location of career development and pre-major advising. By bringing these two functions together, the university acknowledges that a student’s choice of major is inextricably linked to their lifelong career path.
This "continuous improvement" culture encourages calculated risk-taking. As Bonnie Becker notes, the goal is to move from "we tried that and it didn't work" to "we tried that, here is what we learned, and here is what comes next."
Conclusion: A Future-Ready Framework
As the landscape of higher education shifts, the "Terrific Trio"—Student Success, Social Mobility, and Enrollment Services—at UW Tacoma continues to adapt. By centering student voice through empathy interviews and psychosocial metrics like belonging and "campus cultural fit," they are building a university that is not just a place of instruction, but a hub of community mobility.
Episode 108 Transcript
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Bonnie: we have what are called data parties about once a quarter we bring together people from all across campus. We always start with the premise that you are a data person and you have a data superpower. And then we explore these different outcomes together and use a more community based interpretive style to go through the data and ask questions of it in terms of what does it mean, who's not being represented here, and what are some actions that can come out of this work.
Elliot Felix: That was Bonnie Becker, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Success at the University of Washington Tacoma, with her colleague Amanda Figueroa, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Social Mobility. We had a great conversation about taking a community-based approach to assessment that enables student success. There are so many great lessons from our discussion, focusing on tackling student success challenges with a bias toward action and practical solutions. Doing this collaboratively as a community of practice, building a continuous improvement culture. Knowing when the work of a task force should just become the new way that people do their work and how the structure should reflect that, I think you're really gonna enjoy this one. 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 the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Bonnie and Amanda, welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm so excited for our conversation about the role that assessment can play in enabling student success.
Bonnie: Thanks so much for having us.
Elliot Felix: Let's get started by understanding how you did it. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today.
Amanda: Yeah. Elliot, thanks for letting us join you today. This is Amanda really nice to spend some time with you. I am a first gen professional. My training is actually in the sciences. I have a master's in Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, but as a graduate student, I was introduced to leadership and student success through a buy and for organization for Latina and Native American students in the sciences. And through that experience, I had the chance to develop university community partnerships. And to engage in advocacy for programs and structures that cultivate pathways for marginalized students to attain lifelong and life wide success in higher education. And then was really fortunate that my career took me to the University of Washington Tacoma. Which is a small urban serving campus of the University of Washington, 35 miles south of Tacoma, where I now help to lead programs that support attainment of economic security and meaningful careers for economically marginalized students.
Elliot Felix: That's so cool. I love the life long and life wide, and I also love, having economic mobility and opportunity right in your job title and purpose I think is so terrific. Bonnie, how about you?
Bonnie: So I'm Bonnie Becker. Somewhat coincidentally. I also started in marine biology.
Elliot Felix: Amazing.
Bonnie: So coming a marine biologist was my childhood dream.
Elliot Felix: It's also my favorite Seinfeld episode, so yeah.
Bonnie: Oh, I get that a lot. So I started my career with the National Park Service. I had no intention of going into higher education, but I loved working with volunteers and volunteers of all ages and different backgrounds. So when I saw the job description for UW Tacoma, it really described me. So I've been here 20 years. I got here the first year we started admitting first year students. So we were only founded in 1990. In 2006 we started admitting first year students. Prior to that, it was a transfer only school. So I was excited to work with older students and students from lots of different backgrounds. And I started a lab. I had over a hundred alumni in my lab and just really saw that transformative power of working with students in undergraduate research and wanted to broaden that opportunity for others. I got a tap on the shoulder from admin to go into more of a leadership role. It felt like a return to my roots in the park service working together in a team as part of a shared mission. And over the years I've gone through a few different roles, but I'm now associate Vice Chancellor for Student Success, so I oversee academic affairs, student support services.
Elliot Felix: That's so great. And you have student success in your title. So what a dynamic duo. And what caught my eye was the report you all published not too long ago with your lessons learned on your student success strategy and successes and metrics. And it was really interesting to see like how you all are using data, things like how you use data to uncover and address curricular barriers and be, and A CRM to better understand students and support them and advise them better and, identifying outcomes. I hope folks check out that report and I hope we learn about it in this conversation, and I would love to hear from all that work, how do you define student success?
Amanda: Thanks for that question. So I think what's foundational to that report and why it's posted online is that we are an urban serving university who only exists in Tacoma because the community advocated for us to be there. So I like to say that I grew up as a higher ed professional in the context of a cradle to career community collective impact work. So the first thing to understand about how I think the genesis of this work started is a community definition of success. For the last 14 years, we've had a really active community who's really interested in students' academic success as well, and what higher education means for the community. Our community has a goal that by 2030, 70% of our local students will earn a degree, a technical certificate, or earn a good earning wage employment opportunity within six years of high school graduation. And they specifically call out targeting efforts to focus on students of color and those impacted by poverty. So as a urban serving campus in this community, that is a foundation for us. Our working definition of student success is that students graduate at higher rates with engaged, meaningful experiences in and out of the classroom that prepare them for next steps, that they're supported by programming and campus structures that encourage academic excellence, degree completion, and career readiness equitably for all students. Importantly, a third definition is our working group definition. That we think it's very important that we all experience a joyful culture of working collaboratively to help students thrive while they're at UW Tacoma and after graduation.
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Elliot Felix: I really like that definition. I, and this is maybe my own bias 'cause it aligns so well to. It's all the big ideas in the connected college, right? You're talking about how folks are working together, to make that happen. And you want that work to be joyful and you want students to be engaged and prepared and supported. That really resonates with me. How did you come to that definition?
Bonnie: Both Amanda and I have been involved in this kind of work for over a decade, and we have both been part of committees that have spent an entire year essentially trying to define student success. So we tend to believe that it's less about the definition and more about the connection for why it's important and how we use it. So the definition is necessary. You have to have a definition, and that's why we call it our working definition. We've got something to ground us. But to us, what matters is how it helps people make better decisions and to prioritize. Some element of a definition needs to be measurable and accessible. And so we as a community have agreed upon as a higher ed community agree upon numbers we can benchmark, right? Like retention and graduation. And they're super helpful 'cause you can compare them and honestly we need students to persist in graduate. So they make a lot of sense. But when you're on the ground and working with your staff. Those numbers are very backward looking, right? They tell us what happened, but not really what will happen or even why, what happened. So we think that assessment needs to be useful, compassionate connected to action and not just a compliance driven kind of a thing.
Bonnie: That's great. So as part of our multi-year, you refer to our reports. We have a multi-year cross campus student success strategy. What we're trying to develop is a framework that gives practitioners, it gives our staff who are the folks who are doing the heavy work of making change on campus to have tools to help them connect those numbers to their real life actions.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. 'cause then you're making it real for folks and they know how to apply or how to use that working definition instead of getting caught up in the minutiae. One of the one of, one of the ways I end the book is there's this famous or infamous report from the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. That they made this simple sabotage field manual. Have you all heard about this? So it was written 80 years ago and it's like tips and tricks for disrupting the progress of any organization. And it's amazing. Very prescient and still applicable. And one of the things is argue over the minutiae of wording. And another thing is make all your groups big, never less than five. And and it sounds like you all are avoiding all those pitfalls and you're just like rolling up your sleeves and making it happen.
Bonnie: I love that. I feel like, yeah, that, that gets to the heart of what we're trying to say.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Yeah. That's really great. I feel like you have this working definition and you're saying some of it needs to be accessible. So it needs to be accessible and accessible. Talk a little bit about the role that assessment played in these efforts. Figuring out what to do, figuring out how well it's working.
Bonnie: So while we're trying to think through how we use data to actually shape action, when you really get into it, and really, it's really an easy thing to say, but when you get into it and try and figure it out. We hire our faculty and staff to work with students not to study our students, right? They're there to have incredible skill in the day-to-day. But a lot of assessment models are actually unintentionally asking practitioners to become data analysts, which isn't really aligned with training roles, time, capacity. So we start with the premise. That it's from a book called you are a Data Person. That all of our staff and faculty are data people. And that they use data in their own way to shape the good jobs that they're doing. What we're trying to do is create some tools to make it easier for folks to do that. So what's called the Student Success Outcomes Framework or the SSOF and it's a community centered, community built set of shared tools. And what I mean by that is we are honing in on some indicators that are a little bit more immediate and that we know how to work with. For example, this year we're really focused in on time to registration. A lot of our students do tend to register quite late and for really good reasons. But we have seen a correlation between late registration and higher DFW rates, so higher fail and withdrawal rates in classes. Starting with that data point, we then work together as the Student Success Council to ideate what are some things that we can do together to try and help students to register earlier? And then we have something we can look at over time and say how did we then move that shared metric forward? So time to registration is part of our student success outcomes framework, as is time to major. Some more benchmark metrics like credit accumulation ratios, which come from the post-secondary data partnership through the National Student Clearinghouse. So having a series of metrics that we can use to drive action. But I think part of it, the part of it that I'm really excited about is that we have community-based events to help both develop these metrics, but also to help folks develop their data superpower, right? And to feel like this is something that they have access to. And that we have a shared understanding of.
Bonnie: So we have what are called data parties about once a quarter we bring together people from all across campus. We always start with the premise that you are a data person and you have a data superpower. And then we explore these different outcomes together and use a more community based interpretive style to go through the data and ask questions of it in terms of what does it mean, who's not being represented here, and what are some actions that can come out of this work.
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Elliot Felix: I like that collaborative process. I would imagine. Identifying the metrics together and going through the results really helps people to be more bought into them and more likely to apply them. And I take your point about like graduation and retention are, kind of backward looking. And we talk about we talk about boards need to balance, oversight, insight, and foresight. But then when you think about the, the metrics that institutions are governed with or run on, it's almost entirely the oversight metrics, the backward looking. And the foresight metrics you're talking about that are predictive of, gosh, we have late registration equals, increased DFWs, equals increased time to degree or decreased grad rates, I think is it is so great. Those examples you mentioned are mostly course related. I wonder if you can, broaden the circle, Amanda, maybe there are other things. It seems like you all are joined at the hip and it's very integrated. But I would love to hear some other, as other metrics, other assessment tools you're looking at. For that holistic view.
Amanda: We are joined at the hip. I like to call Bonnie, my partner in crime but also partner in culture building because a lot of that's what we're talking about when I think about how I was introduced to student success at the leadership level, it's all about the outcomes and it's all about these backward looking metrics. But when I am supporting the practitioners who are face-to-face with students every day who are thinking about how do I help make sure that this student has the housing and the stability in housing that they need so they can attend their courses, then we have to think a lot more broadly about the kinds of data that we're collecting. Other things that we do in the Student Success Council include really leaning into student voice. And so we've had. Empathy interview protocols that we have asked our student success council to go out and find students and just talk to them and really center empathy in their conversations. The other kinds of psychosocial constructs that we're thinking about in the Student Success outcomes framework include being able to understand how students are developing their own sense of purpose and particularly purpose that's pro-social because there's interesting emerging literature that demonstrate or that indicates that is aligned with student success outcomes, of course, belonging. But we're also really interested in how we own institutional responsibility for student outcomes. And so we've also been working with Pat Garriott's cultural community wealth model of academic and career development, and he and his colleagues have put out a really interesting tool called the College Social Emotional Crossroads Index. So for example, in the Office of First Gen, which I oversee, we've been using that with our cohorts to understand how are students developing academic capital, how are they developing campus cultural fit, and how are they navigating school and family integration?
Elliot Felix: It sounds like a great approach and really great tools and you've done such a great job defining student success in a way that's actionable and then doing this kind of assessment, understanding , late registration equals increased DFW let's like shine a spotlight on some of the successes you've found from having done the done this work. What are you particularly proud of in terms of where you've moved the needle?
Bonnie: I can speak to the registration example which again, this is what we're working on this year, so we're gonna be doing a report out next week that's like a mid-project report out. But as part of this design work that we did with our Student Success Council we brought together different groups. People are doing outreach around registration all the time. But what we were able to do through the council is to be more integrated and more collaborative in how we were doing it. So working with, especially the registrar's office. We have an office of student advocacy and support. So we have a caseworker on campus as well as my office, which includes academic advising. And so we did an outreach to about 250 students who hadn't, it was 30 days before the quarter started, and they hadn't registered yet. Of those we got about 80, 90 responses from people, from students who told us either that they were planning to register or not planning to register. And so then we were able to do some like exit work with them, or I'm planning to register, but I need help. And so we were able to then triage very quickly. What kind of help do you need? Have you talked to anybody else about this? And of those 50 students who needed help. By the beginning of the quarter, 45 had registered. And so we thought that was Pretty great. What I really liked about that is it was super immediate. We all got to work together on something and track it, and then 30 days later we had something to celebrate that felt really meaningful. It felt like we had helped 45 students who were looking for help to register. So that is a success that I'm still basking in a bit. We've also been doing some work around belonging in the classroom through the student experience project. Which is a faculty development program developed by the APLU. And using their instrument, we've been using a instrument called Ascend. Which is a really cool formative assessment tool to look at blogging in the classroom. We now have 50 faculty who have gone through that training and something that's really rising for me and that ascend data, something really wonderful is our students tend to report that they have quite a bit of trust and connection with our faculty, which is wonderful, and we can always work more on that. But the thing that we're seeing in those data are that there's less of a connection student to student. We are a commuter campus, right? Mostly commuter campus. And so there's another example of a space we haven't tackled yet. This is all like happening as we're talking about it, right? That's an example of how we can then use data to say, gosh, if we wanna drive belonging, we need to be really mindful about opportunities for students to connect with each other, providing those opportunities for that to happen. It's of course up to students to connect with each other, but we can provide venues and opportunities and be thoughtful about what that looks like on our campus with our specific student body.
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Elliot Felix: Yeah, and that echoes national trends. I think there was just a inside Higher ed student voice poll that came out, 5,000 students, less than 50% had any kind of engagement outside of coursework, right? So less than 50% belonged to a student organization went to an event. And and I think, as we're trying to understand and better serve and support post-traditional learners who have other responsibilities that's a challenge for sure. Amanda, another success story before we move on?
Amanda: To me, the biggest success story and the one that we often don't talk about and it's really hard to measure, is the change in culture. One of the goals of this work that we have been stewarding is trying to really uplift and interdependent and collaborative culture around student success, and I think it's really easy. Everyone in higher ed that I have ever met talks about silos that we hold, but what we have been able to do is engage in ever widening circle of practitioners. So at the time that this report was put out, we had 94 different individuals. We had engaged across students, staff, and faculty in this work, and that circle has widened since then. One of the things that is really hard. Especially as enrollment pressures and budget pressures increase and quick solutions continue to be what leaders are held accountable to is really slowing down enough to focus on the human capital and the relationships that are required to really do smart and heart driven work. I think we've been moving in that way. I wouldn't say we've arrived, but I'm really happy about our progress.
Elliot Felix: That's really great to hear about how the culture is progressing and student success. Is community success and your, you're all working together to make that happen. Have you found the need to change the structure? To match the culture. Have you made any changes in reporting or re you know, organizational redesign in order to help you deliver on this, the, these initiatives these efforts?
Amanda: Definitely. So I'll start with a few, and I see Bonnie is smiling and nodding and I'm sure she'll catch me if I miss anything. Really important. So from my perspective, some of the things that I've really appreciated about this work is that we're always thinking about what is sustainable. And it's really important to acknowledge that we can committee and and task force ourselves into burnout. But we've always been trying to keep an eye on what does it mean to do this work in a sustainable way. And so we've explored what does that look like for us to move from a task force? Into someone's job description and into expected practice. And so that's always been the goal. We have seen best friendships evolve through this process, which I'm really excited about. But we've also had several structural changes that have happened. So my department career and social mobility is something that was officially launched two years ago. That is bringing together economically marginalized populations with career development and having me participate in this campus-wide student success effort. One of the units that reports to me career development moved in with one of Bonnie's areas, which is pre-major advising. So now we have career development, which was separated across the campus and now they cohabitate and they are doing their own work and building very successfully a collaborative culture within that suite and really thinking about what does it mean for us to help students to think about what is a major, and how does a major connect to what I want from my life. I know Bonnie has a couple of other things she'd like to highlight.
Elliot Felix: Those are great examples and I just wanna shout out the, advising and career co-location and integration and collaboration. 'cause I just, that's, the idea that we send students to different people to talk about their courses and their career path is just bonkers to me. Bringing those together, physically, if not organizationally or programmatically, if not organizationally is great. Bonnie, over to you for structural changes.
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Bonnie: Yeah, I feel like y'all are misinterpreting my vigorous nodding. I'm just I was just so excited about the story of moving career over I think as a group as well. We have really adopted this idea of continuous improvement. And so we're always reflecting on these questions of what is best done by a committee across campus committee? What needs to be integrated into somebody's job description? The latter is more sustainable, but also if it's hard to change job descriptions, especially if they're outside of your own unit. So we try and be really iterative about the way that we think about the way that we're structured. So people talk about continuous improvement all the time, but what we mean when we say continuous improvement in this work is a bias towards action, which I think has come out pretty strongly in our conversation today. Testing small changes rather than waiting for everything to be perfect. And in order to do that, you have to do some calculated risk taking building on successes and learning from failures and mixed results without judgment. Judgment of others, judgment of yourself and regularly reflecting on and adapting your process. Also that came out in our conversation today, measuring and testing our assumptions using shared data and also bringing in multiple voices especially student voice alongside those data. So as we're doing that continuous improvement process and reflecting back we take a lot of time to ask our committee members how things are going, and that's part of how we moved from having multiple task forces. So we had five different groups working on different aspects of student success that had been identified by groups prior. Some of those have now spun out to become part of just regular work. One of the groups was working on integrating Slate for Student success as a CRM on our campus. That is very much part of the registrar enrollment services advisors, it's now part of their daily work. So it's part of the student success strategy, but it's beyond that now, right? It's like just the, it's part of what people do on a daily basis. The Student Experience Project was also a good example of that. And so the council is new this year to try and move from that sort of task force approach to more of a cross campus. A space for us to continue to monitor, to continue to work together, to identify spaces that involve collaborative work. And we're assessing that now too. So our next meeting with the Student Success Council, Amanda and I are planning that meeting right now to work with our counsel and ask, how is this work? How is this looking for you? And do you feel like we're making progress in the way that you were hoping this year? So that continuous improvement ones has been a huge game changer for me. I feel like, rather than saying we tried that, it didn't work, throw it out. It's we tried that, here's what we learned, here's what comes next. And that it is really inspiring, at least for me. I find it really inspiring. Amanda mentioned earlier this idea of working together joyfully and celebrating the things that go well, and then again, not being judgmental about the things that didn't go exactly as planned and think about what we learned from them and move on to the next thing.
Elliot Felix: It's really great and in a way you've you have anticipated our final question. 'cause we've been talking about culture change and structural change and continuous improvement and you just mentioned what comes next. And as we wrap up, shine up your crystal ball a little bit and think about how this work changes in the future and your advice on adapting to that change.
Amanda: One approach that we have started to take is we very met, see our work related to our campus strategic enrollment management, and at one point our chancellor referred to us as the dynamic duo, and now we have asked to be reconsidered as the terrific trio. And that is because we are working directly with our Associate Vice Chancellor for enrollment services and we regularly get together with the three of us to say, what, how are we connected and what do we see for the campus in order to be future ready? It is no secret. Everyone is aware that learners are changing, economies are changing, and overall the rapid pace of social change is really putting pressures on higher education in order to adapt to new majority learners and to new ways of global connections and economy and workforce development. So how we think, again about expanding that circle of interdependence and how can leadership create the conditions that facilitate smart risks? I think those are things that we're paying attention to and we're trying to position ourselves to be able to respond to.
Elliot Felix: Bonnie bring us home.
Bonnie: It's really on the ground work and it's always evolving. I think in the future enrollment is always going to be part of the conversation. And how does this work help us to both fulfill our mission, but also to meet our enrollment goals, which are necessary to help us fulfill our mission. And these things are all interconnected. You have to mind them all. But thankfully they build on each other in a sort of positive feedback kind of way.
Amanda: Particularly when it's grounded in understanding your community. So we are biased as a regional urban serving campus to really think about what are the community needs? How do they define success, and integrating in that into what we're doing and when we're authentic partners in that way. Then that's I think the conditions under which we can help. Both our enrollment goals and our student success goals really align in ways that are powerful for our communities and our country.
Elliot Felix: It's really inspiring to hear how you move from like community to collaboration to the council and back out again to help students and to help society and to help the region. Lots of great stuff here and great frameworks and lessons for folks to follow. So thank you. Thank you both very much.
Amanda: Thank you for having us.
Bonnie: Thanks for having us.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliot felix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download information on upcoming events and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.