CHAPTER ONE
The Time Is Now: A Call for Student-Ready Colleges

In higher education, there is growing concern and accountability for student success among college leadership, and at state and national levels, out of a growing awareness of the persistent challenges that threaten higher education opportunities for millions of today's students. While many within the higher education community desire to improve student success, they continue to aspire for students who, when they enter college, are ready for the rigors of higher education and come with better standardized test scores, from high schools with better resources, with parents who attended college, with a sense of independence, with few distractions and fully focused on college. Yet issues of college accessibility, affordability, and success remain, and student success still prioritizes college readiness. So what's the harm in defining student success this way? While it is important for students to be as prepared as possible for a college education, defining student success primarily by students' college-readiness limits the possibilities for student success almost exclusively to pre-college factors over which higher education has only limited influence and places the burden of success in college almost entirely on the students. Here we advocate for a different vision of student success: a vision of the student-ready college as the optimal setting for student success and deeply rooted in the transformative power of higher education institutions, and their commitment to ensuring the success of students and students' capacity to participate in twenty-first-century life and work.

What does it mean to be a student-ready college? Being a student-ready college requires more than a mission statement that touts expressed commitments about student-centeredness or espouses philosophical ideals of inclusiveness, excellence, or diversity. It requires more than aggressively implementing an assemblage of disconnected, piecemeal, or niche programs and initiatives to improve student recruitment, retention, and completion. Being a student-ready college is as much about how higher education institutions define student success and their relationship with students—and how they take action—as it is about the strategies they implement. Student-ready colleges take an intentional, systemic, holistic, and transformative approach to ensuring student learning and ensuring that every student receives what is needed to be successful. At student-ready colleges, students are responsible for doing the work needed to complete the path to a higher education credential, and the college takes leadership, ownership, and accountability for everything associated with curating the path through the institution and aligning learning and post-college outcomes. And all activities and services facilitate an equitable opportunity for every student to make steady, efficient progress toward completing their studies and to become fully informed and educated for civic and economic participation in a global, interconnected society.

Being a student-ready college is about how higher education institutions enact a culture across their campuses to ensure student success, and how they engage as members of the broader postsecondary ecosystem to help ensure student success. Student-ready colleges appreciate their role as complex, dynamic organisms within the larger postsecondary ecosystem, and they operate systemically within and across their various internal functions to support students. Moreover, they fully appreciate that students operate as fluid parts, moving organically between both the college and larger postsecondary ecosystem. In honor of the student–institution relationship, student-ready colleges challenge the status quo, and stay attuned and responsive to the opportunities presented by the broader ecosystem as well as the implications the current context may have on the needs of students.

Student-ready colleges define student success in a way that represents a paradigm shift—reframing the student success conversation from one of pre-college characteristics and student deficits to one of student assets and institutional opportunity, leadership, and accountability. Student success is defined in terms that go beyond traditional notions and predictors of completion to include a focus on student learning, growth, and development that meets students where they are and addresses the needs they have along their journey through higher education.

At student-ready colleges, all services and activities facilitate an equal opportunity for every student to make steady, efficient progress toward completing their studies and fully participating in twenty-first-century life, work, and communities. Attention and accountability extend from admissions to the classroom and to every policy, practice, budget, and business decision that affects the student experience on campus. Financial aid office? Check. Student services? Yes. Informed choice and options for scheduling classes? Absolutely. Health, wellness, and other wraparound student support? Yes. The unique mix of institutional mission and academic programs? Absolutely. All of the above.

Further, student-ready colleges enact an institutional culture in which organizational learning and improvement are central institutional values and serve as the primary drivers of institutional and individual action. All principles are aligned with the mission of the institution and shared among members of the campus community. At student-ready colleges, the commitment to leadership and collaboration is so elevated—all members of the campus community are empowered to be engaged as leaders and educators. Student-ready colleges are committed not only to student achievement but also to identifying and removing systemic barriers to the achievement of every student. They promote excellence for every student by ensuring and engaging every student in integrative learning experiences and high-impact practices. Instead of reserving these experiences for only a select few students, student-ready colleges make these experiences universally available so that all students have opportunities to engage in first-year seminars and experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, undergraduate research, diversity and global learning, integrative and service learning, internships, and capstone courses and projects.

In the first edition of Becoming a Student-Ready College, we shared a new lens through which campus leaders can view existing and emerging issues and the opportunity to transform institutions for the success of their students. We highlighted promising and innovative practices that we have witnessed in our work. These practices are not exhaustive but reflect a range of interventions occurring all across the higher education community. In the second edition, we seek to do the same, and—based on ideas and practices learned and observed in years of work with colleges across the nation and internationally—we offer recommendations to minimize the threats posed by current and future challenges to higher education students, institutions, and communities. Although individual leaders can pursue the strategies outlined in this book, we recommend a collaborative approach—bringing administrators, faculty, and staff across the campus together with the broader postsecondary education ecosystem to mobilize, scale, and sustain these efforts. We recommend steps for collaborating with those outside the campus community, as progress will require partnerships—both internal and external—that represent concerted action for impact that benefits every student. We anticipate that for many institutional leaders, the transformation necessary to become a student-ready college will require more than tweaks or marginal changes and temporary pivots. Rather, becoming a student-ready college will require transforming institutional policies and practices as well as individual and shared attitudes and values.

We are honored to have served higher education in a variety of leadership positions within and alongside higher education institutions. We have worked with higher education institution, policy, and philanthropic leaders who seek to advance and support efforts aligned with quality education, racial equity, and college attainment. Our commitment to today's students—and the institutions that serve them well—is reflected in our recommendations. We hope this book adds to the collection of tools and resources that faculty, administrators, policy and philanthropic leaders, and all those who care about today's college students can draw upon for practical solutions.

As we continue to frame the vision of the student-ready college in this chapter, key elements regarding the new lens through which campus leaders must look to transform their campuses include looking at today's students and redefining readiness; amplifying the intentional, systemic, and holistic approach, or science, of student readiness; and connecting the importance of student-ready colleges and positive post-college outcomes in the emerging economy.

The Quest for College-Ready Students and Redefining Readiness

For most educators, the goal of becoming a student-ready college is not difficult to embrace. After all, supporting students is an aspiration of all campus leaders. Although this concept will resonate with many, we recognize that, for some, enacting these recommendations may pose a challenge. The problem is not necessarily a lack of will; rather, some colleges simply are not structured to...