NEW ORLEANS—Universities can turn challenges into opportunities through resilience. That was the central focus of the annual Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) meeting that brought senior-level college administrators together to strategize on how best to serve their students.
University leaders were encouraged to “embrace innovation and adopt new strategies” in an effort to attract and retain as many students as possible.
Student success was a major tenet of the three-day gathering. On Sunday night, Dr. Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spoke about the economic benefits for students who earn a college degree.
“Getting students to complete and to graduate, in some ways isn’t a huge mystery,” said Blank, adding that affordability, quality of teaching, curricular coherence and advising and mentoring continues to be critically important to retaining students.
“Affordability is a necessary but hardly sufficient condition for college completion,” said Blank. “It is important that we make college affordable and seemingly attainable for students from lower income families, but free college is by itself not a complete policy and there have been a good number of examples where free college by itself simply failed.”
Research, Blank said, has shown that “not only is college more valuable than it has ever been for the average student going into college, but even more for those marginal students.”
Blank’s keynote address was followed by a panel of experts who shared best practices about how they created “student centered” institutions.
