Quality Matters at Penn State

Damon Sims, Vice President for Student Affairs moderated another successful Quality Advocates conversation about student success.  This time the focus was on connecting policy to practice and the panel addressing the topic included Robert Reason, Andrea Dowhower, Mohamed Raodua, and Kirin Kennedy.  A summary of the session can be found at  http://www.psu.edu/president/pia/advocates/2009/11/.  As usual, there were many good questions than time allowed for discussion.  To continue the conversation, we've posted some of the questions here.  Let us know what you think. 

*Should policies and practices related to student success vary across the campuses given that we know that student outcomes are not the same at each campus?

*Does the pressure on tenure-track faculty members to produce research affect the implementation of good and innovative teaching practices?

*How should Student Affairs work with Academic Affairs to better facilitate students using class time to engage in outside activities?

*Is there a relationship between class structure in terms of when and where they are held and student success?

*How do we attract students to the honors program that might just see it as more work?

Some of the key concepts in Lean come form Toyota's identification of the seven wastes: overproduction, waiting, transportation, processing, excess inventory, unnecessary movement, and defects or spoilage (with an eighth of unused employee creativity added later by some authors). In our internal discussions at OPIA we have thought that 'waste' can be

Mike's review of the recently published book, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities gives an overview of the book's most interesting findings, Some of them reinforce what research from our office found several years ago: lower-income students are less likely to complete college, even after controlling for a number of other characteristics.

On October 9, Terrell Jones moderated a panel of student and staff who discussed the factors that contribute to or deter a student from being successful. A summary of the discussion is on the OPIA website and was announced in the October newsletter.

This is the first of three Quality Advocates sessions focused on student success to be offered this semester. The second session will be November 13 and will be moderated by Damon Sims. In this first session,many issues and concerns were raised by the panelists and there wasn't time for questions.It might be worth extending the discussion to the blog. So once you read the write up, let us know your thoughts about how you would define student success, what you consider the policies and practices that facilitate or hinder student success and what advice you would give a student who asked you what it takes to succeed at Penn State.