Creating a diverse student success infrastructure: The key to serving today’s student body and catalyzing cultural change

Abstract

While there have long been campus efforts to better support students from diverse backgrounds, these programs, services and interventions have not been systemic. This paper documents student success infrastructure elements which share similar features that enhance their effectiveness, suggesting some basic ways of re-orienting the way higher education is organized that better support student success. The shared features of effectiveness within the student success infrastructure include broad stakeholder engagement, collaboration, learning, clarity & transparency, equity, and alignment.