By Tia Brown McNair, et al
Introduction:
When I heard the words “student-ready college,” something clicked. I thought, “We’ve got to pursue this!” That’s what ran through my mind as I listened to Eric Brandt, LBC’s Associate Provost for Online Education and Joe Brown, LBC’s Director of Global Student Success, lay out their plan to improve online retention. An essential underpinning of this plan was “becoming a student-ready college.” That interaction and those words piqued my interest and propelled me to read this book and write this review.
The book in a sentence (or two):
Becoming a Student-Ready College is NOT about dumbing down our educational institution, lowering our academic or admission standards, or trading a robust educational experience for life on pedagogical easy street. It IS about transforming the culture of our educational institution to better serve admitted students. It is flipping the traditional mindset that places the onus for college readiness on the student and instead laying it on the “back of the college,” that is, ensuring the institution owns responsibility for taking students from where they are to where they need to go.
About the authors:
Becoming A Student-Ready College (Second Edition) is a multi-author effort. A close look will reveal that all authors are advocates for making college accessible and ensuring student success.
Tia Brown McNair: Dr. Tia Brown McNair is a Partner at Sova, a higher education consulting firm, and a Senior Consultant at the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U).
Susan Albertine: Susan Albertine is a writer and a civic wellbeing volunteer. She served recently as president of the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County, Maryland.
Nicole McDonald: Nicole McDonald is a strategic, visionary leader with 20 years of experience supporting student success in postsecondary education at institution, system, state, and national levels.
Thomas Major, Jr: Thomas Major Jr. is associate general counsel at Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all.
Michelle Asha Cooper: Michelle Asha Cooper, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized leader and advocate for college access, affordability, and value in higher education
My quick take on Becoming A Student-Ready College:
Higher education is caught in the perfect storm: Demographics (fewer students, socially-economically different from the past), Economics (affordability, debt), Enrollment (declining), Cultural Pressure (political left and right), Modality (rise of digital platforms), and Technology (its impact on institutions and students who have only known the smart phone). These factors are combining to create challenges for students and the colleges that serve them.
While every institution intends to serve students, the forces noted above leave many colleges and universities fighting to keep their financial heads above water while at the same time in a quandary as to how to educate current students, many of whom seem less prepared for college than their predecessors. What’s more, faculty, who are exceptional at their craft, may grapple with the demographic and educational challenges of a student body raised in the age of the smart phone and shaped, in part, by a global pandemic. Added to this are the unique challenges of work and family older adult students bring to their educational journeys, which are mostly pursued online.
Professors, administrators, and staff that provide critical support functions must continually assess our readiness and willingness to respond to higher education today. To borrow from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Becoming a Student-Ready College seeks to provide a pathway to Oz and greater student success.
Overview and Analysis:
This is a book about student success, about helping collegiates young and old matriculate, learn, grow, enjoy a great college experience, and expand their horizons (sociologically and economically) upon graduation. Particularly, Becoming A Student-Ready College is “an effort to reframe the dialogue on student success” (xiv). How so? For years, the responsibility for college readiness, that is being prepared for the rigors of college life – academically and socially – has been squarely on the shoulders of the students. Students must be ‘college ready.’ Without denying the importance of preparation, this book re-frames the dialogue. It shifts the paradigm from student to college: What does it mean to be a college that is ready on every front (academics, student experience, financial affairs, administration) for the students? In short, what does it mean to be a “student-ready college”?
Becoming A Student-Ready College is divided into five chapters:
The Time Is Now: A Call for Student-Ready Colleges
The authors advocate for a vision of student success that, while not denying the importance of college readiness, i.e. the work done by the prospective student before college, looks to the college as the “optimal setting,” i.e. the work done by the institution before, during, and after the student arrives on campus.Leadership Values and Organizational Culture
Here the authors argue the importance of the values of the leader and the institution for establishing an institutional culture adapted and adopted by the entire campus workforce) and backed by helpful governance structures and practices. The issue here is “Perspective Taking.”Intentionality by Design to Support Student Readiness
“For this book, we are focusing on strategies that can be applied when students arrive on college campuses—strategies that every educator can implement to change the institution’s environment to support student success” (82).Leveraging Ecosystem Partnerships in Support of Student Readiness
“In this chapter, [the authors] contend that student-ready colleges and universities demonstrate an awareness of their role within and across not only the higher education landscape but also the broader ecosystem” (109).Educating the Whole Student
Student-ready colleges believe in students – every student has the capacity to learn. However, to move from belief to action, the campus community will have to take a “whole-person approach” to the students they serve. This approach takes into consideration cultural background and particularly focuses on student capacities rather than deficits.
An important note:
It is no secret that the DEI movement has been viewed with equal amounts of celebration and outrage, whether that was strong cultural and political pressure to conform from the left, or the equally diligent current efforts to undo DEI policies from the political right. One need not set aside his or her convictions when reading Becoming A Student-Ready College, however, to reap the benefits within this excellent volume, one would do well not to get sidetracked by that discussion, but to see such calls as part of the broader perspective of serving students, particularly welcoming those who are increasingly first generation, of color, and who are making up a larger portion of the overall U.S. college population. Contextualizing this effort to the mission, vision, values and organizational culture of one’s own institution is helpful.
That said, one will see the author’s backgrounds and bias come through, particularly in chapters two and three in calls for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Like Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus (Acts 17), you may differ with the authors and that quite strongly (he certainly did). You may view DEI initiatives as cultural compromise, reverse discrimination, anti-Bible, anti-American. You need not compromise your stand to see the intention behind such calls and the broader picture of what colleges can do to better serve students. Paul was able to commend his audience despite disagreeing with them on many points. Christians should always be ready to do the same.
My Takeaways:
Chapter 1: The Time Is Now: A Call for Student-Ready Colleges
Student ready: “Ensuring that every student receives what is needed to be successful.” This includes building a campus culture to ensure student success and engaging as members of a broader postsecondary ecosystem to help ensure student success” (6).
Reframing conversations about student success: from one of pre-college readiness and student deficits to one of student assets and institutional opportunity: admissions, classroom, policy, budget, business decisions, leadership, and accountability. It is meeting students where they are – helping them pursue their dreams and achieve the student learning outcomes of the institution (7).
Demographics: “Only about 25 percent of high-performing students with low incomes are likely to graduate from college, compared with 30 percent of low-performing students with high incomes” (11). Profile of today’s student:
Source: Becoming A Student-Ready College, page
Historical trends: About one in five part-time students finish a degree after 6 years (NPR, 2019). Only 26 percent of low-income students earned bachelor’s degrees compared with 69 percent of higher-income peers (2).
Student readiness, a means and an end: SRC=Student-Ready Colleges
SRCs know who their students are, how they are doing, and what they need to succeed.
SRCs are intentional; they embrace their role, prioritize it, evaluate it, improve it.
SRCs foster a culture that includes all campus employees.
SRCs are self-aware and opportunistic in all the best ways: They seek feedback, improve systems.
SRCs understand the big picture and think long-term. They are proactive, design-focused, diligent about implementing improvements, and patient.
SRCs focus on student outcomes.
SRCs observe, act, innovate, and prioritize accountability (22-25).
Confronting the issue of value: Is college worth it?
Student-ready colleges consider other avenues to equip than just the bachelor's degree pathway.
Chapter 2: Leadership Values and Organizational Culture
Participation: Invite staff colleagues across the institution (including the Board) to join the quest to become a student ready college. Witness an outpouring of talent.
Remember: Life’s most important lessons often occur outside the classroom.
Professional development: Assess and improve professional development.
Chapter 3: Intentionality by Design to Support Student Success
Goal: To focus on strategies toward students that every educator can implement to make the educational environment more favorable for student success. Essential is prioritizing student’s assets, institutional responsibility, and personal accountability over student deficits and limitations.
Think Ecosystem: Assess and improve roles, action plans, and processes that support student success.
Removing systemic barriers and challenges: The author’s wording is retained for the purposes of this review, despite the highly connotative and controversial use of “systemic.” When one considers the changing nature of the college student in 2025, this admonition makes sense. Consider the following profile prepared by Eric Brandt, Associate Dean of Online Education at LBC:
Unless an institution has monitored the changing demographic of its campus and adjusted to meet these challenges, it will be effectively asking students who are accustomed to driving an EV to happily get behind the wheel of a Model T for the next four years, metaphorically speaking. Christian educators might look to the challenges in the early Church when the Grecian widows were being overlooked in favor of the Hebraic widows in the distribution of food. The apostles worked to address and improve this situation noting the inequity and systemic challenges (to borrow those words). See Acts 6:1-7.
Caring educators: Student-ready colleges need empathetic educators, not teachers who will look the other way and “give a pass” to shoddy work, but it will require “each and every person who is part of the ecosystem to make a personal decision to take responsibility and ownership for student success” (89).
Embrace a paradigm shift: Am I living with deficit-minded thinking, i.e. blaming the student for being underprepared, stereotyping any group of students who may be different from me economically, ethnically, socially, etc.?
Create a culture of belonging: Do our students feel that our college is their home? Are we cognizant of the cultural shifts many will make to become part of our college community (e.g. food, language, ethnicity)? Are we welcoming?
Define student success: Few things are as important to the institution as to its definitions and particularly this one, “WHAT IS STUDENT SUCCESS?”
High Impact Practices (HIPs): What institutional practices for faculty (e.g. faculty onboarding, faculty development workshops) and students (e.g. embedding essential practices/preparatory engagement opportunities into the curriculum/co-curriculum) (100). See “Eight Key Quality Elements of HIPs” on page 101.
Chapter 4: Leveraging Ecosystem Partnerships in Support of Student Readiness
Partnership: Student-Ready Colleges think and act holistically when it comes to providing services that help their students thrive. Partnering in the broader community ecosystem becomes part of the institution’s identity.
Symbiosis: Student-Ready Colleges seek out and collaborate with external groups (e.g. health and human services, parachurch organizations, workforce boards, employers) to create mutually beneficial relationships and opportunities.
The Higher Education Ecosystem: Student-Ready Colleges and universities demonstrate an awareness of their role within and across the landscape of higher education and the broader eosystem of local government, business and non-profit sectors.
Lancaster Bible College/Calvary Homes Partnership: “Partnerships represent the commitment of different organizations to work together around common interests and respond to a specific problem or opportunity” (121). LBC and Calvary have created such a partnership – leveraged the broader ecosystem – to provide off-site student housing to meet LBC’s rising enrollment and housing needs.
4 Keys to a great partnership (Lumina Foundation, 2015):
(1) Ensure the right partnerships are at the table.
(2) Develop a set of desired outcomes.
(3) Formalize partnership expectations.
(4) Leverage opportunities for open communication and shared learning (122).
3 Levers (strategies) that higher education institutions can use: See the excellent questions for these levers on pages 133-139.
Building Internal Institutional Infrastructures: “Take stock of existing internal structures and systems for communication, policies and practices, and data and information, and identify opportunities for them to [improve] (123-126).
Leveraging Institutional Influence: Eliminate Ivory Tower thinking. Colleges and universities cannot afford to work in isolation from the surrounding community and employers. Building networks that facilitate sharing expertise, expanding data capacity, drawing together community influencers, and networking opportunities that pair students and graduates with local employers is key (126-128).
Investing in and Incentivizing Innovation: Institutions intent on becoming student-ready look for ways – “incremental changes and/or large-scale disruptions – that improve the experience of students and address their needs.
Expand the boundaries of your educational enterprise: Leveraging ecosystem partnerships is ultimately about looking beyond the campus boundaries, seeing and engaging the surrounding ecosystem for the benefit of students and the community served by the institution.
Chapter 5: Educating the Whole Student
Essential: “A student-ready campus is a place where the belief in students is palpable.” (145)Student and Faculty: This requires focusing on how both the student and the educator are formed within the academic community.
Student Outcomes: Can student success outcomes be conceptualized in a multidimensional way?
Carry out a policy audit: Are success practices linked to policy?
Engaging the broader ecosystem: The educational institution is a system within the broader community ecosystem. Does the institution acknowledge and act as such? How so?
Transformative ideas need to become transformative practices and programs.
Capacities or deficits? Do educators on the campus place a belief in student’s talents and cognitive capacities ahead of, and in place of focusing on, any deficits that students may be perceived to carry? (150). “The language of under-preparedness and unpreparedness is euphemistic. It eclipses the belief that students can succeed in college” (160). Leadership includes “an implicit belief in students’ capacity to learn and leaders’ capacity to create the conditions for learning” (173).
Taking responsibility: “It’s on me to get them up to speed.” Being ready for students who need help getting up to speed (156).
Take the long view: Educating the whole student is a long-term institutional investment (163).
The authors piqued my curiosity about these books:
Braskamp, Larry A., Lois Calian Trautvetter, and Kelly Ward, Putting Students First: How Colleges Develop Students Purposefully (2006).
Felten, et al, A Guide to Mentoring Communities Among Colleagues in Higher Education (2013).
Hernandez, Paul, The Pedagogy of Real Talk: Engaging, Teaching, and Connecting with Students At-Promise (2021)
Words to ponder:
“A student-ready college is one that strategically and holistically advances student success and works tirelessly to educate all students for civic and economic participation in a global, interconnected society” (183).
Conclusion:
“A student-ready campus as a whole makes belief in students intentional, heartfelt, and mindful, and inviting expectation of everyone who works there—from the ground up, and from the top down, keeping an eye on the horizon and welcoming new idea from beyond the institution” (178).
There is much to appreciate about Becoming A Student-Ready College:
The authors beat the drum for flipping the prevailing idea that calls for a college-ready student to convey the message that “instead of striving and struggling to make students ready for college, we could work hard, as a society and locally, on individual campuses, to make college and ourselves ready for students” (181).
The series of guiding questions found at the beginning and end of chapters 2-5. They are discussion starters and help the reader think more deeply about the subject at hand, how the subject relates to their institution, as well as how to act on matters learned.
First-hand perspective and case studies scattered throughout the book.
The authors make an essential and overriding point at the end of chapter 3 that warrants attention. The point has to do with being empathetic educators: “As important as it is to know who your students are, it is just as important for you to understand who you are as an educator and what limitations may hinder your ability to fully educate all students, especially those who are different from you. . . . We must learn to be empathetic educators and focus on students’ assets, not their deficits” (103).
Writing as a college president, it is that empathy that will enable those of us in higher education to challenge our presuppositions about college readiness and responsibility and work to engage a new generation of students. This is not an empathy that accepts or promotes educational shoddiness. It is, however, an empathy that meets the students where they are, recognizes both their challenges and opportunities, and takes full responsibility to work with them to achieve their dreams by equipping them with the best =higher education has to offer.
