The university's focus on Success by Design has shown compelling results, ranging from a first-year retention record to continued upward progress in persistence and graduation rates. The coordinated care provided by advisors and others in the new First Year Student Success Hub will solidify and expand those gains in the coming years. Effective coordinated care requires seamless communication and a unified strategy. The hub demonstrates how centralization sometimes serves that purpose. The Norse Academic Commons is the next big step in centralizing and operationalizing coordinated care within our Success by Design strategic framework.
Our university's extensive student academic success machinery is widely and unevenly distributed. We hope that students are directed to or encounter those support services independently. And many do. However, as we did with the decentralized first-year advising system on campus, we worry that students are falling through the cracks.
The Academic Commons will consolidate appropriate academic student support services within a single administrative unit, and as quickly as possible, within one space in the Steely Library. It could also house Honors College - our most complete and self-contained student success community.
The goal of the Academic Commons is to:
