Episode 67: Terry Brown on Redesigning Policies and Processes for Student Success
Listen On
Who are their students, what are their needs, and how are they changing? How can you redesign your policies and processes to increase students success at scale? We dive into these questions with Terry Brown, VP of Academic Innovation at AASCU, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
In the world of higher education, we often focus on the "big" things: building beautiful campuses, hiring world-class faculty, and designing prestigious academic programs. But what happens when a student has the right mindset, the best advisors, and a great classroom environment, yet they still can't graduate because they can’t get the one course they need?
According to Terry Brown, Vice President of Academic Innovation at the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), student success isn't just about high-level theory—it’s about the "plumbing" of the institution. It’s about policies, course schedules, and the removal of artificial barriers that we often create inadvertently.
Redefining Student Success Through Data and Metrics
The definition of student success is shifting from a vague ideal to a structured set of outcomes. While every institution has its own flavor, common threads include preparing globally engaged citizens who hold a credential that leads to a sustainable career and personal fulfillment.
To achieve this at scale, leaders are moving toward a "data-centered institutional transformation." It is no longer enough to simply have the data. The real work begins when leaders ask: "So what? and Now what?" By looking at disaggregated data—examining how different demographics like first-generation students, veterans, and Latinx students are performing—colleges can identify exactly where the leaks in the pipeline are occurring.
Breaking Silos with Student-Centered Course Scheduling
One of the most significant, yet overlooked, barriers to graduation is the course schedule. Often, schedules are built around faculty preference or departmental tradition rather than student need. When departments operate like the "Wild West," scheduling off-grid classes that overlap, they inadvertently wipe out multiple time slots for students.
If a student cannot find a seat in a required course, their "second choice" is often to take no course at all. This creates a massive drag on graduation rates. Re-engineering the course schedule to be student-centered is a fundamental requirement for any campus serious about student success at scale.
Empowering Middle Management and Elevating Student Voices
Systemic change doesn't happen solely in the President's office. It requires empowering middle managers—the associate provosts and directors of student success—who are often the "unsung heroes" of this work. These leaders sit at the intersection of faculty, students, and administration, yet they are frequently overlooked in change management strategies.
Furthermore, we must move from listening to a singular "student voice" to understanding "student voices." This means moving beyond standard surveys to active intercept interviews and formal structures that capture the experiences of those who don't typically participate in student government.
The Power of Simplification
In an era of declining enrollments and demographic shifts, the future of higher education is not additive—it is simple. Many institutions suffer from "complex curriculum," where an overwhelming number of tracks and choices causes students to freeze.
The most effective leaders are those who perform landscape audits to see what is already working before adding new programs. A good strategic plan isn't a big tent that includes everything; it’s a tool that tells you what to say "no" to so you can focus on the initiatives that actually drive impact.
Episode 67 Transcript
-
Terry Brown: You can have a campus that has a great climate where all students feel like they belong. You can have a campus where they have top notch advising, caring. Effective advisors where the teaching is excellent and pedagogy suits students learning styles, but if they can't get the course, there's no progress.
Elliot Felix: That was Terry Brown, the VP of Academic Innovation at ASCU, the Association of State Colleges and Universities. We had a great conversation about student success at scale and how her team is working across institutions on initiatives like redesigning policies and processes, optimizing the course schedule, and more. Working with Terry when she was a provost was as enlightening as it was enjoyable. And so I hope you feel the same way about this episode. 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 upcoming 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. I'm really excited to talk to Terry about student success at scale. Welcome, Terry.
Terry Brown: Thank you, Elliot. And I'm excited to talk to you. I remember our first conversation at the Society for College and University Planning, SCUP conference.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, we had office hours.
Terry Brown: We did, side by side. Side by side office hours. I was so taken with what you were presenting and that we then had a partnership that worked on a great project at SUNY Fredonia together.
Elliot Felix: Thank you so much. And I'm let's keep learning together. I'm excited about the work you're doing at scale and how you're supporting so many different campuses and bringing them together and giving them tools and training. We know each other, but our audience doesn't. Tell me a little bit about how how you got started in higher ed.
Terry Brown: I started as an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. I came from the University of Florida. Where the graduate program there that I graduated from did not think that going to an institution like the University of Wisconsin River Falls was a sign of success for that program, that they wanted me to be someplace else at one of the more elite institutions. And it took some years for me to realize that I was actually exactly where I needed to be, that I loved working with the students that I was working with. They were first in their families to go to college in the case of the University, Wisconsin River Falls. It was a lot of students coming from dairy farms and they were hardworking, earnest not always academically oriented, but eventually really committed to succeeding. I think I learned a lot about student success as a faculty member, working with them in my classes in my English classes, particularly writing classes. But then I became a dean and, and a provost, and I was on 3 different campuses and most recently at SUNY Fredonia and across the arc of my career began, I think, probably not as very student centered in my 1st years as a faculty member, more faculty centered, but over time really became student centered in my work and passionately Devoted to and committed to making sure that we were removing artificial obstacles to student success because there were so many that we had created inadvertently.
Elliot Felix: Give us a before and after, what did faculty centered Terry do versus, student center, Terry?
Terry Brown: I would say I was focused on as a faculty member covering the material and, performing as a lecturer in front of my audience, the students and learned how To become a more empathetic facilitator of learning, as opposed to teacher as performer and to cultivate a real relationship with the students in a way that was less hierarchical, honestly, and ego centered, just talking about my ego. And what I found was I was best as a teacher when I was also challenged by the material. So I really sought texts that were challenging to me as well. So I could sit around the table with them and struggle together. With meaning and understanding and that, and this is easy when you're an English professor because there's a lot of poetry. There's a lot of literature. There's a lot of text. What happens when you're challenged by a great text, particularly one that speaks to what it means to be human which is what literature does and film does, what happens is that you're changed. Your students are changed. And that to me, that alchemy is really brilliant. That's the before and after. I was a much better teacher after.
Elliot Felix: More empathy, less hierarchy, more, seeking challenge, seeking collaboration how does that inform what you're doing today, how you lead today?
Terry Brown: Because I continue to put students at the center of what we do, even though I'm in at an association that works with institutions that serve the students, so I'm removed from the work directly. Students are still at the center of what we do. The team I work with here in academic innovation and transformation seek to understand who we're serving. Who are the students that are AASCU institutions are serving the numbers of students? The percent of students who are Pell eligible. The numbers of students who are black, indigenous Latinx, Asian first generation. How many veterans do we have? How many international students are we teaching? And then you get a picture of the students that we're serving that is not what people think when they think of the university. I think now the public has in mind an idea of college that is really dated. And so we, when we talk about serving our members, it's how do we help them help their students succeed in the way that those institutions define student success.
Elliot Felix: Yeah that was going to be my next question. Actually, how do you define student success? It sounds like you have a little bit of a federated model, leave it up to the states and listen to your institutions about how they're defining it.
Terry Brown: The work that they're doing is to prepare students who are going to be globally engaged citizens, who have a credential that will lead to a job can support them. And a family that's success helps them and gives them a dimension in their life that leads to, I think, happiness and fulfillment. I don't think that's too much to ask for to have a little extra help with on the happiness side of things, and it shows, studies show that is the case for college educated. So that's what we think about. We think about. Are we doing a good job? Are we helping our campuses do a good job and preparing students who are informed and educated?
Elliot Felix: Yeah, you have to do the work by working together. It's interesting. On the one hand, you have to be locally attuned, and how our institutions defining it. On the other hand, you want to create some consistency and share what works across these different institutions and so many, some common threads about global and career and happiness and fulfillment. How do you create that common ground? I'm thinking about National Association of Colleges and Employers, they have their eight competencies, right? Do you have some, something you use to create that common ground or that shared definition of student success across the campuses?
Terry Brown: We haven't created our own for our association, but we do facilitate those conversations among cohorts of institutions about how they're defining student success. Now, in the case of work that we've done, that's funded, for example, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, there, we're working with a foundation that has a clear set of metrics.
Elliot Felix: I'm guessing there might be some data and metrics involved.
Terry Brown: There is data and metrics involved. And it's a simple set of metrics related to graduation rates and retention rates, et cetera employment. Yes we find no problem with the metrics that are funder is looking at. It's a good starting point. It absolutely is what I find in an environment where states have backed away from the investment that they once made in public higher education and where funders have stepped in to do work to invest in student success at scale. I think what we have to be mindful of is that it's higher ed, American higher education that has to really define what our priorities are. When you have major investments being made by large funders, you have to make sure that their priorities are in line with our priorities and values, right? That is the case with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. We've been working with them now for years. They've made a major investment. We're working with at this point. We have 60 institutions in 4 cohorts. We started with a kind of a proof of concept that we worked with a small group of about 6 institutions to refine a process of helping them with institutional transformation, data focused, data centered institutional transformation over a couple of years. We refine that process and now we're scaling it and now we're working with 60 institutions and we have the capacity to build these number of institutions that are doing this work. And what they're doing is they're understanding what the data is telling them first. And for many institutions, this is an important 1st step. It used to be campuses would say, we don't have the data. I don't think that there's any campus out there that can say we don't have the data.
-
Elliot Felix: That's really interesting. Yeah. Now they've got the numbers.
Terry Brown: It's okay, now, so what? I knew it. I knew somebody in IR was so good. And she would say, okay, the first question is what? So what are you asking? The 2nd one is so what? And then the 3rd is now what? And so many institutions are now at so what? And what we do is we've got teams of people who work with these campuses to help them get to so what? And then to identify what needs to change at the campus level.
Elliot Felix: And as you run that playbook, what are some of the key things you've learned for student success at scale?
Terry Brown: We do a policy summit every year where we bring in our institutions and we talk about all those policies out there and those procedures on hundreds of campuses.
Elliot Felix: Like having to apply for graduation, even though you have your credits.
Terry Brown: Oh, you didn't apply. So we have a policy summit and we found it's really very helpful because then you can also do comparisons and institutions. You've got multiple institutions there that can say we fix that problem with this. And we just eliminated it and there was no impact, we can talk about the registration holds. Yeah. Registration holds and library fines. And then, what the drop ad policy is and just a lot of things that may be in place that no one at any point said, why are we doing this?
Elliot Felix: Yeah that's the way we've always done it.
Terry Brown: And I actually think that's because whoever is implementing it does not feel like they have the agency to say, this doesn't make sense that's where change management comes in. Change management is so important because you can't just say, we have lots of policies that, need to be changed, but, you really have to have the tools, particularly the communication tools to change the culture. To empower people with the insight to say, here's a change we could make. And it would really help students and then to have a culture where those people are being heard.
-
Elliot Felix: So it sounds like we've got, get everybody together and audit and compare your policies and procedures relative to these artificial barriers and then it sounds like another key tactic is empowering people to identify these things, change these things, giving them some air cover to do that, managing the process.
Terry Brown: We have a whole series of workshops for middle managers in student success, because of how critical they are, and they are overlooked in this work. And so they're the associate provost of student success, or the director of student success. Because they've got this role where they're not in the necessarily a position to make a decision that's institutional. But they're hearing from students, they're hearing from faculty and so how do we help them feel empowered and give them the tools in order to communicate up and horizontally and vertically and down.
Elliot Felix: That's so smart because often middle management is the segment that's most resistant to change. Because they're both not making the decision and they're caught in the middle in terms of executing it. And they have, sometimes the most to lose and territory and turf and so forth.
Terry Brown: And I think they're overlooked in this work. Because what the focus may be on faculty on advisors on the leadership presidents provost, but they're unsung heroes of the student success work.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, absolutely. And they need help and support. And I think, as guilty as anyone in terms of, the way my brain works, since I've been in a leadership role is to fall into this trap of once you make the decision, you move on to the next thing. And then in your head, it's done, but the work still has to happen to make that decision, make that direction come to fruition and the people that are doing that are the ones that need the voice and the support.
-
Terry Brown: Another thing that we're doing is something that I did with my colleague, Lisa Hunter at SUNY Fredonia, and that is to re engineer the course schedule to be student centered. So we talked about policies and procedures and the course schedule is one that's all about policies and procedures. But thinking about the technologies of delivering the degree, the course schedule is the engine of that. Work if the purpose of the institution is to prepare students who have credentials in hand, the course schedule is critical, but it can be overlooked in the student success work.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and it can totally it can create those artificial barriers that you started off by saying, it's our job to remove. I remember working with an institution that identified 1 of their biggest barriers to student success is too many off grid classes where departments were just it was like the Wild West, and they would, they were scheduling courses whenever. And not following the grid so that, your course, starts half an hour later and goes half an hour longer. And then it wipes out three other slots, not one. And then all of a sudden, the student can't get the course they need to graduate because It just, there's, it's impossible to make it fit. Exactly. Because people weren't playing by the rules. Yeah.
Terry Brown: You can have a campus that has a great climate where all students feel like they belong. You can have a campus where they have top notch advising, caring. Effective advisors where the teaching is excellent and pedagogy suits students learning styles, but if they can't get the course, there's no progress. It's fundamental.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And then all of a sudden you got to enroll for another semester and you can't float the tuition.
Terry Brown: Right. And what we're seeing is that if students can't get a course their number their second choice, the course that they choose instead is no course at all. Think about that. That means that they're now three credits short. They're not even taking any credits to make up for the course that they couldn't get. If you think of that at scale, that's a huge drag on our ability to get millions of students to their credential. On time, and so we're working with 11 institutions to help them. Understand what the data is telling them about where the obstacles are, where the bottlenecks are, institutions that are seeing that critical first year courses are just overloaded. So those first year students are not getting them in 1st and 2nd semester. If a student can't get a course that is so discouraging, of course, that they need. It's so discouraging.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. If you don't get the prereq, then you're set back. Yeah.
-
Terry Brown: And the complexities of the curriculum now make it even more difficult.
Elliot Felix: You mentioned earlier the problem used to be, people would say, I don't have the data and now they don't know what to do with it. What are some of the other things that are changing this work? Certainly the, availability, the profundity of data and the expectation of using it in real time is one, but as you look around the corner to what leaders can do to enable student success at scale. What are some of the other big changes you're seeing?
Terry Brown: Another change that I see in this work recently is the importance of elevating student voice and listening to students. You did that with us when we were at SUNY Fredonia. You, when we were looking at how to redesign our student support services. And you canvassed students going into the cafeteria.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Intercept, intercept interviews. Yeah.
Terry Brown: That is one example of that, but we're now seeing more and more institutions being really intentional about how they seek voices. And I don't want to say I shouldn't say student voice. I should say student voices because it's not one voice, but make sure that they are asking students, having a voice. And building in formal and informal ways for students to talk to them about what is working and what isn't working. They have surveys, they have data, not everyone's looking at it in a systematic way and I would say that every cabinet should be reading every student survey that is done at that institution. What are your students telling you through your formal surveys? Then what are the other ways that your students are talking to you? I think most campus leadership is intentional about making sure that they're have relationships with student leaders, but also seeking out ways to have conversations with those who may not feel that they are part of the traditional structures for student governance.
Elliot Felix: What would your advice be, so gather the, what, so what, now what, and listen to students and remove the artificial barriers, what would you say to peers, that are deans, provosts, VPs of technology advancement. Facilities, what's your advice on student success at scale?
Terry Brown: Number 1 is know your students and make sure that everyone knows who your students are because many people on a campus can be working from an idea of who they are serving. I know that when I started as a faculty member, I was teaching the students I wished I had and not the students I had in front of me. There's a difference between the idea I've got of my students and who they really are and really knowing them. Leadership needs to know the data on the students disaggregated data on the students. What is it telling you about who you're serving? And then share that widely and regularly with the campus. Then I would say, make sure that your deans know who they are serving because it's different from college to college. And I did that as a provost, I used to say to them, dean, do you know who your students are? Exactly. Do you know what the retention rate is in your 1st year classes? Do you know who's succeeding and who isn't? Do you know what the number 1 transfer school is for your institution? And then departments do the departments really know their students. What is the data telling them about who they're serving, who's succeeding, who's persisting, who isn't, where they're going instead, so that's one part. And then I would say make sure you have multiple ways to listen to your students. I would also say, do you know what you're already doing? And 1 of the things we do with our institutions is we do landscape audits of the student success activities, that's that are already going on. I think right now on some campuses, they may feel like there's a frantic level of activity by well, intentioned people going in multiple different directions.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I think that's really good advice because there is, sometimes there are well meaning parallel efforts. Sometimes there's lots of things going on. Students aren't aware of, I know we've probably all been in the heartbreaking student workshop when a student's I wish there was a way to do this and you actually can do it. They just didn't know, and doing that, what are we already doing and what's working before we add more stuff. How do we break that? How do we break the cycle of keep, adding more stuff. I think in the desire to serve students, we, add new programs and centers and institutes and offices, then it can become confusing and redundant and we also can't afford it anymore.
Terry Brown: Yeah, so we can't sustain it. I think a lot of leaders are saying this is that's not sustainable. And so we, you have to be able to assess what you're doing to make sure that what you're already doing is having impact before you add I think simplifying is the way of the future. Simplifying the curriculum, because I think a complex curriculum is really overwhelmed students with choices and they freeze and they can't go forward, emphases and within tracks within, all of that complexity is not necessarily good for the student. I think that just being additive is just not sustainable. And I think that many institutions now with the kinds of challenges that they're seeing as a result of the demographic realities we're seeing it already that, institutions are saying we can't take this on, and we know that we ask you, we Try to be supportive wherever we can and we also know that some of our institutions are saying we can't take that on right now. And I think that's a good choice for that institution.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Part of my answer to this question about how you stop the kind of the cycle of everything is additive is you just do a much better job at strategic planning and a much better job at assessment and I think there are too many strategic plans that are just plain vanilla and a dime. Five goals. The fifth one is organizational excellence, and they're just trying to create a big enough tent where they don't have to make any decisions because everything fits under it. And, a good plan tells you what to say no to. And then if your assessment is really telling you, like you said what are you already doing? What's working? I think those things. Combined can help us integrate as opposed to add or consolidate.
Terry Brown: And I think that's a big F with the, if your assessment is telling you, yeah, what's working? Yeah, I think that's a great place to put emphasis is how do you know that all of this activity is working? And you may not know exactly that it was that program that led to that outcome.
Elliot Felix: To your point of what are you already doing? I think what happens a lot is there's. Let's say a retention problem is identified and then you throw six things at it and it goes up, but which worked maybe only one of the six?
Terry Brown: I've been guilty of it. Yeah. You try and do what you can and get quick results. When I was leading at the beginning of a decline, enrollment decline had to keep myself from panicking. And then making decisions under that kind of stress. You really have to keep your cool and take the long view.
Elliot Felix: Terry, thank you so much for your stories and insights and the inspiring work you're doing at AASCU. Some great lessons here for everyone about enabling student success at scale.
Terry Brown: Thanks for the opportunity. I always love talking to you, 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 upcoming 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.