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UNM President Robert Frank will act as an academic coach for incoming freshmen to improve student success and retention rates.
Director of Student Academic Success Jennifer Gomez-Chavez said members of the upper administration will participate in an academic coaching program, the Success Through the Academic Year (S.T.A.Y.) Initiative. She said the initiative will pair academic coaches with incoming freshmen who could benefit from additional support and guidance.
“We’re really thrilled that the upper administration is committed to participating in the program,” she said. “The new president is going to be a coach, and so are the provost (Chaouki Abdallah), the vice president for equity and inclusion (Josephine De León), and the Associate Provost for Curriculum Greg Heileman.”
She said each coach will be assigned to one or two students to help them create a plan and determine what they need help with most, but parameters have not been set to determine what students need additional advisement. She said the initiative includes a voluntary action team and data-collection procedures to figure out which students would benefit from an academic coach.
Gomez-Chavez said the program is a campuswide effort to improve advisement practices and better understand students’ needs. She said the initiative is in the first phase and will recruit about 100 academic coaches including upperclassmen, faculty, alumni, community members and retirees.
“The whole goal is really to provide resources, service and guidance to students so that we can increase third-semester retention rates,” she said. “We lose about 24 percent of students before their third semester starts, so we’re trying to answer critical questions about our students, like why students are leaving.”
Gomez-Chavez said some students who don’t return to UNM for their sophomore year leave because of financial barriers. She said losing the Lottery Success Scholarship and financial struggles often stop students from returning to UNM.
“I think part of the problem is that students with financial barriers can’t figure out how they are paying for school,” she said. “They’re struggling with how can they juggle school and maintain an income to help their family.”
Gomez-Chavez said students sometimes don’t feel connected to the University because they come from rural areas and have difficulty adjusting to a big campus in the city. She said the initiative aims to better understand students and will help students become better acquainted with the University and the UNM area.
“We see that some students don’t quite feel connected, they’re not as engaged and they don’t feel that sense of community because our institution is really big,” she said.
Gomez-Chavez said the initiative is a more interactive academic advisement process. She said the initiative will allow the administration to develop critical resources to determine what negatively impacts student retention rates and follow up with students to ensure they stay on the right track.
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“Advisement looks at, you know, are you in the right major and taking right classes, but coaching looks at all the different areas to help a student succeed,” she said. “It’s extra support and an extra reminder so students succeed.”
Gomez-Chavez said although the program is part of the Provost’s Academic Plan, money allocated for the plan is not being used to fund the program. She said the program uses resources that already exist, such as reports from Enrollment Management, the Provost’s office and advisement.
“We’re taking a little bit of existing resources and human power to support the program now,” she said. “We don’t have a budget line item given to us because we’re rededicating existing resources so that we can set a template and demonstrate success and then go after funding and resources.”
