Student Success Team ensures support for every Dragon

As soon as students step onto the Minnesota State Moorhead campus, they are surrounded by a network of faculty and staff dedicated to supporting their academic ambitions.

This web of support was recently strengthened with the launch of the Student Success Initiative, an integrated, collaborative model bolstered by the addition of new staff and technology.

Thanks to federal grant funding through Title III, Moorhead has welcomed three student success specialists to the Academic Success Center, expanded an online referral portal, implemented a text-message-based chatbot, and added an assistant director of experiential learning to the Career Development team.

The network surrounding Dragons throughout their college experience also includes academic advisors who help with short- and long-term academic and career planning; student peer mentors in Learning Communities, First Year Programs, and Housing & Residence Life programs; and student relations coordinators who do it all in terms of student support. In addition, a student might be a student-athlete or a part of the Honors College or the GRIT Program, other encouraging communities.

"We have an amazing culture across campus of wanting to support students in all facets, wherever they're at," says Loren Baranko Faught, associate director of academic success. 

The new success specialists - Emma Mueller, Franci Rogers, and Jessica Brooks - help first-year students, assigned to cohorts by their last names so that students have a consistent point of contact even if they change majors in their first year. The student success specialists provide individualized, holistic support for new students, while paying special attention to those at the highest risk of attrition, such as first year students and freshmen transfers. Just in the first few months of the first semester, the student success specialists have had 255 success coaching meetings with 165 individual students. The student relations coordinators, located within each of Moorhead's academic colleges, then work with students when they are sophomores, juniors, and seniors – supporting their holistic success and progress toward graduation.

"We don't want to let go of the baton until someone else has it in hand, with a grasp on that student," Baranko Faught says.

All faculty and staff have a hand in supporting students. With a new referral portal, any Moorhead employee can refer a student for academic concerns, success coaching, access to basic needs resources, or career support. "We have extensive campus resources to support our students, so making it easy for our faculty and staff to connect students to these resources is a priority," says Erika Beseler Thompson, director of academic success and interim executive director student success.

Students also can connect 24/7 by responding to the Scorch chatbot, a retention-based framework of regular check-in text messages that gauge the well-being and academic and social engagement of each undergraduate student.

The Title III grant also funds holistic student success training for 13 coaches, which include the student success specialists, student relations coordinators, and Academic Success Center staff.

Ultimately, the goal of the Student Success Team is to have a cohesive network of support for each student and to equip them with the skills they'll need beyond the completion of their degree.

"We want to help students develop agency - to learn the skills to not need us," Baranko Faught says.