Ensuring Students Flourish: NYU’s Initiative to Eliminate Barriers

Prioritizing student success is a multifaceted effort that can be especially challenging in a decentralized university. To be done well, it requires a holistic focus on helping all students flourish both in their education and beyond to post-graduation. New York University (NYU), the nation’s largest private research university, is at the forefront of this effort to remove barriers and propel students to the next phase of their educational and career journey.

Join NYU’s Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs, Dr. Mark Siegal, and Kaplan’s Vice President for University Partnerships, Kim Canning, along with our moderator, Kaplan’s Chief People Officer, Yvonne Cowser Yancy, for a discussion of how NYU approaches the challenge of advancing the academic success of all of its students.

Key topics include:

• Using data to identify opportunities to advance equity.

• Engaging faculty and students in improving university courses and curricula.

• Scaling high-impact practices to reach more students, more equitably.

• Smoothing the path for students’ next steps to graduate school by providing free access to test prep for standardized exams, such as the MCAT^®, LSAT^®, GRE^®, and GMAT^®.

What follows is an edited transcript of this interview.

Tell us about New York University and what you are most excited about right now.

Mark Siegal: New York University (NYU) has over 60,000 students, half of whom are undergraduates. NYU is the largest private research university in the U.S. We have 13 schools that admit undergraduates, and 16 locations around the globe where our students study. We are a large, decentralized, research university.

Our founding was quite different from that of some other big research universities. NYU was founded in 1831, during a time when going to higher education was a privilege for the privileged class. NYU had a different mission. It was about equity and access from the beginning and it aimed to be a university that was in and of the city.

What is really exciting right now is that the university has had this amazing upward trajectory, especially over the last few decades. We have joined the ranks of the elite research universities. But we are in a moment where we are continuing that trajectory and at the same time, intentionally embracing our founding identity.

President Linda Mills and Interim Provost Georgina Dopico have laid out four strategic pathways to guide us forward. The one that is most relevant to our discussion today is about flourishing. It is about building and sustaining a welcoming and supportive community where students, faculty and staff can flourish and timely graduation is a top priority.

This brings me to another thing I am excited about. NYU's focus right now aligns with broader conversations about higher education, particularly at research universities. I point to the Boyer 2030 Report commissioned by the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities. The current challenge for research universities is to simultaneously promote academic excellence and equity. As the report compellingly argues, you cannot have one without the other.

This is a really exciting moment not just at NYU but across higher education, because this focus is really what everyone is talking about.

One of NYU’s strategic pathways centers on this concept of “flourishing” and building a community where students can flourish. What does this mean to you and how are you bringing the concept to life?

Mark Siegal: This is a very multidimensional thing, "flourishing." There are numerous ways we are approaching it. My role is in academics, so I will focus on that. One key area we are focusing on is, maybe surprisingly, maybe not surprisingly, teaching. One of my favorite provocations from the Boyer 2030 Report asks, "How will we ensure that our students, all of them without exception, are educated using evidence-informed pedagogy in intentionally inclusive and empathy-based educational environments?" That is a real challenge for us, and we are trying to take up the challenge at NYU.

One of the things we did this past year was to create an unapologetically named Teaching Quality Committee. Provost Dopico charged that committee with researching, reviewing and recommending best practices to define, support, measure and honor teaching excellence at NYU. I co-chair this committee with our wonderful Assistant Vice Provost for Pedagogy Anandi Nagarajan.

The committee has done a lot of great work cataloging what is already happening at NYU and identifying gaps and opportunities. In an extremely decentralized university, this is crucial. It is crucial we take stock of what we are already doing and start sharing our successes. There will be experiments out there. And if they happen in isolation and are not shared across the entire University, a big part of their value is lost. One big area is focusing quite squarely on teaching quality.

Another key area is academic advising. This work is led by our amazing Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Sarah Beth Bailey, who is taking charge of developing a shared university framework for academic advising. Individual schools have their own way of operating. In some of our schools, academic advising is done by faculty. In other schools, academic advising is done by professional academic advising staff. We do not want to impose a central operational model for how advising should work in these schools which have very different focuses.

But there are things we do want to do. For example, providing professional development opportunities for advisors—this is part of flourishing too. The people who are doing the work to promote student flourishing need to be able to flourish themselves, creating spaces where the advisors can come together from across schools, find a shared purpose, share best practices, learn from each other, and develop common onboarding resources for new advisors. There are some universal aspects of advising, and those should be part of the startup moment of every academic advisor.

Third, we talk a lot in this industry about high-impact practices for student success—the transformative experiences that students can have that really influence their academic journey and set them up for success later in life. We have been putting a lot of energy into what I call, the high-impact practice that’s at the center of a research university, and that’s undergraduate research.

We have a wonderful new Director of Undergraduate Research for the University, a central position, Ethan Youngerman and he is working tirelessly to help faculty create opportunities for undergraduate research, to help students navigate to those opportunities and prepare for those opportunities and benefit from them. We are really excited about expanding opportunities to those less traditional fields. We see a lot of room for growth in these areas. And the goal is to bring this high-impact practice to many more students than have benefited from it in the past and to make students aware that these opportunities exist and can be transforming.

» Related News: Students now able to take free test prep courses with new NYU partnership

NYU recently launched a new initiative to foster the success of all students called the Academic Excellence Equity Action initiative. Can you tell us more about this, and how you are using data to advance equity?

Mark Siegal: First, the name is shamelessly taken from the Boyer report. It is one of the most downloaded things in higher education right now. The Academic Excellence Equity Action initiative started with a presentation that Provost Dopico and I made to the Senior Leadership Team—deans and senior administrators at the University. We started with data. We showed how D and F grades and withdrawals (DFWs) from courses negatively impacted the progression to degree of NYU students. This is NYU data, not general data—and how these obstacles to success were unevenly distributed across demographic groups.

It is important to say that NYU is not unique in these respects. In fact I think it would be hard to find a university where some other pattern was held, where there were not any high DFW courses, where there weren’t equity gaps in the data. This is not an issue that is unique to NYU, but I think it was important that we presented our data. Basically, this is us, and we have to address this.

It is also important to realize it is one thing to show the big picture, but that is an aggregate of many individual students in classes with individual faculty members. Where do these Ds and Fs and withdrawals come from? This says two things to me. There is no top-down, one-size-fits-all solution to equity gaps. This is a very distributed thing we have to work on. And we cannot get in the business of blaming. As I said to the Senior Leadership Team here, there is no shame except the collective shame of our entire industry.

And so, this is an opportunity to really do something and to lead. One of the things I did in the presentation, because I wanted to emphasize this point, is share my own experience as a professor of a large STEM course. I teach a course with over 300 students—all biology and neuroscience majors have to take it. If you go back a few years, that course had a high rate of Ds and Fs and Ws (over 10 percent) and an equity gap. For example, with first-generation students, we were seeing higher rates of Ds, Fs, and Ws than with continuing-generation students.

I think of myself as a good teacher, as a teacher who pays attention to these things. And to see the data in my own course was hard. But what does it take to change that? And so, we actually made a lot of changes to the course: more active learning, instilling a growth mindset in students, using more inclusive examples, and examples of real-world impact to illustrate key concepts. Some other changes included lowering the stakes of exams and providing more and varied opportunities to demonstrate understanding. These are all evidence-based practices.

I think I can relate to a lot of faculty members for that very reason. You think you are doing a good job, but you may be unaware of what the ultimate impacts on student progression are. You teach your material well, but at the same time, you are using practices that might not be the things we know now as an educational community work to promote student success. They work to reduce equity gaps. Things like active learning, taking a more varied approach to grading, and more ways to demonstrate understanding.

The good news is it works. There is research out there that says it works. For my course in Fall 2023, the DFW rate was less than 3%. I say this because when I have to talk to faculty or department leadership about where we are and where we would like to be, I speak from a position of individual experience, of hopefulness, that if we really do pay attention to the research and what our colleagues are doing, we can actually change this. We do not have to have a defeatist attitude about this: there are ways forward. We have to celebrate the incremental successes, share them, and convince each other that this work can happen and should happen more broadly.

Career readiness is an ever-increasing conversation in higher education. How are you infusing career readiness into the student experience?

Mark Siegal: Much of this work in student success is individual to individual. There are a lot of on-the-ground conversations with faculty or advising moments with students. The work of student success is very localized. Collectively, we want to have an impact, but a lot of it is very localized. Because of that, there is very little we can do to have a big impact instantly across the entire student body. This is why Kaplan’s All Access License program is a game-changer. We can actually flip a switch and say, “NYU students, you now have access to the leading test prep courses for these professions and career goals you have.”

For me, this was important because every day we are doing this work, of one more conversation, one more convert to the cause kind of thing. There is an excitement that comes with that, but at the same time, also a frustration because it’s slow, painstaking work. The ability to do something right away that we knew our students would value—and would value across the student body—was huge for us.

It is important to think about career readiness in multiple frames. One frame is getting to professional goals. There are other frames, like a lot of skills, that we want our students to have no matter what career path they are entering because we know they will be valuable, especially if careers change to things we cannot even imagine right now. But for impact now, part of that journey is saying at the end of the college experience, I am stepping onto a really great path.

We know how many students are choosing professional paths and for whom preparing for this key event in that path, which is the standardized test that goes along with it, is a moment of not just anxiety because they are taking a big test and it matters for their life. It's anxiety because how are they going to pay for this? Are they going to pay for this?

We launched the All Access License two months ago, and the response has been amazing. We get emails from students where you literally can feel the emotion in it. I was shocked by how quickly students started signing up for these courses. I was amazed and happy but I was also very surprised by how quickly the students got there.

Kim Canning: I also want to give you and Provost Dopico credit for the way you rolled this out and announced it to the whole student body. The messaging you used and tying it into the bigger framework was also really impactful. It is not lost as just another resource, but it was part of the solution. We are not the solution in any way, shape, or form. But we want to be part of the solution, and you all positioned it so perfectly for students to understand and take advantage of.

For context, the All Access License enables institutions to provide resources university-wide for a flat fee, under four pillars: 1) admissions prep, 2) licensure prep, 3) credentialing, and 4) workforce readiness. The idea is that institutions can broaden access, as we are talking about this robust set of tools, that can meet students where there might have been obstacles, whether it was from knowing about these resources, affording these resources, or understanding how these resources fit into the bigger picture. But moving that cost away from the students and opening access to the resources that get students to the next step in whatever path they are going down.

Response from NYU students after launching the All Access License has been remarkable. What has the implementation been like for people to engage?

Kim Canning: Students can engage with this through a portal which has the resources defined by the school. In this case for NYU, we started with a focus on GRE^®, GMAT^®, LSAT^®, MCAT^®, DAT, OAT, and Fundamentals of Engineering. Those Kaplan test prep courses are all in a portal that students can access and sign up for independently.

From an ease-of-use perspective, going back to what Mark said, we “flipped a switch.” Because we did not have to use NYU resources on a large scale or coordinate a whole lot across the university, we could literally send out a link to students. University students could access it right away. In the first two months, we have had almost 1,300 individual students enroll—and that is across close to 1,700 courses. It is a significant number, very quickly, which is very exciting for us and the school.

» Related News: Fast Company Names Kaplan’s All Access License as a Winner in its 2024 World Changing Ideas Awards

In thinking about where we’re heading in the future of higher education, what do you think is the biggest opportunity for student success?

Mark Siegal: One of the things I see as really important, and I am excited that is happening at NYU is collaboration across units. Other big research universities probably know this as well: there is siloing of activities. Academic Affairs are separate from this thing we call “Student Success,” which is separate from this thing we call “Student Affairs.”

A big development at NYU that will carry us forward for these next few years and is an opportunity is bringing together leadership around these issues. We have what is called the Student Flourishing Leadership Collaborative, led by Senior Vice President for Global Enrollment Management and Student Success, MJ Knoll-Finn, Senior Vice President for University Life, Jason Pina, Vice President for Student Success, Research and Experience, Georgette Edmondson-Wright, Counselor to the President, Kristie Patten, and me. We are intentionally saying there are no silos here: we are working together on this. Because the work is so multidimensional, it requires that kind of collaboration between Student Success, Academic Affairs, and Student Affairs.

I see a lot of promise in this collective work in enforcing the notion that this is what the university needs to do. We are all on board here, as the convening power of that leadership group. We have already had two great retreats, where we brought together school leadership, deans, and their key leaders in those schools, around topics on retention and graduation, related to belonging and sense of academic identity. These have been really impactful events.

It is great to see everyone coming together and taking basically a full day out of their schedule to focus on this and share, being honest about challenges and gaps and to really learn from each other and try to make plans to work on these issues.

To me, that is where we are going. Another way to put it is, if we do not go in that direction we are not going anywhere. We need to collaborate: we need it to be an all-hands-on-deck moment to achieve student success goals. I am optimistic about it because of the collaboration I’ve already seen.

How do you think about creating career pathways early in the student experience, and how do you integrate business and industry?

Mark Siegal: There is a lot of discussion right now on the right approach to career pathways in the university. One of the things we're leaning into is the idea of more intentionality on the part of the student. We want to give students the tools to understand themselves as learners, to understand themselves as going through a journey and developing in a certain way, and to constantly reflect on that path and reevaluate that path.

There is some really great work being done here for example by Bethany Godsoe, Senior Associate Vice President of Student Affairs, to develop a course called, Authoring Your NYU Story. Thinking about the student as an agent in their own education and imparting the tools to do that, whatever their career path is, and acknowledging their career path might change as they proceed through college, is really important right now, and I think there is some very innovative work being done here.

NYU is a place where integrations happen. It’s a very entrepreneurial place. We have majors that partner, such as Music Business, real education not just in music and not just in business but in the pairing of the two. At the curricular level, there are people at NYU thinking a lot about how career pathways work with a broad-based education. And leveraging the strengths of NYU—we have an amazing business school and an amazing School of the Arts—these should have curricular ties to each other. That kind of thing is happening.

The other thing is, when we survey students about the things they have learned, such as asking seniors, have you developed critical thinking skills? “Yes.” Have you had opportunities to work in teams toward shared goals? “Yes.” Have you had a global educational experience? Have you had internships or other experiential learning? “Yes, yes, yes.” Have you gained career readiness? “No.”

Despite the fact that employers are looking for all those things that were answered “yes,” students still have this view of career readiness that might be different from what employers actually have.

And so part of the education is saying, that there are some specific career skills and things you do to really prepare yourself for a particular pathway. And we should provide that as part of our education. But also somehow, imparting to students that the rest of the education is also career readiness. And also seeing it through that lens ourselves to make sure we are actually delivering on those things. That is part of it too.

What are your best practices for student engagement? Student engagement is meaningfully different than it was before the pandemic and there is research that students are still struggling. Any advice?

Mark Siegal: There is a lot we can do, and there is a lot of activity. I think everyone realizes that student feelings of isolation, and feelings of disengagement are real things that we need to come to terms with. I was on a panel recently talking about undergraduate research. We had our Director of Undergraduate Research, Ethan Youngerman, and three faculty, one from the arts, one from nutrition studies, and one from engineering. You can see how different those faculty members were from each other. But they all described experiences where students were working collaboratively on teams—in the engineering lab, in a collaborative arts project, and in the nutrition space.

It hit me that despite these differences, this particular high-impact practice is giving not only a potentially transformative relationship with the mentor, the welcoming into a discipline, and a deep sense of scholarly production, but also is a form of fighting against disengagement because the activity is so collective.

I tell students about this in science all the time. There is this image of this lonely scientist toiling away in a lab. I do not know where it comes from, maybe Hollywood. But it is not true. Science is a social activity, and one of the things students gain from being in a lab or being in one of these other research settings is being part of a collective. Being part of this group that cares about you, that is interesting to you, and that shows you these different stages of progression in a field. In a lab, for instance, if you are an undergraduate student, you see graduate students, you have postdocs, you have faculty members. You see the progression laid out in front of you. And so, there is a strong mentoring ladder there, and there is a strong sense of shared purpose.

It is activities like this that we should think about not only as individually transformative if the student does engage with them, but as an important form of reinforcing engagement.

And similarly, residential experiences are supercritical. At NYU, we have Faculty Fellows in Residence in our undergraduate dorms. They do programming with students and they meet students socially, which is super important too. And so the living/learning community aspect of it is really crucial.

It is always a challenge: the engaged students are the engaged students, and the disengaged students are the hard ones to identify and hard ones to reach. But this is where the effort has to be, where you study, where you live and gain experience in your field, it is all about engagement. And I hope we see this trend turn around.

Leaders in higher education tend to talk a lot about enrollment, retention, persistence, and graduation. How does what happens after graduation fit into your strategic plan?

Mark Siegal: Ultimately, this is what flourishing is all about. It’s not just flourishing during your time in college. It’s about setting yourself on a path to thrive in the future.

And so, we have to think about how we make the environment in college one that supports thriving—but the purpose of college is to support thriving. One of the things I love about NYU is how diverse the career goals are of our students. We have these 13 schools that admit undergraduates and then they go off and do these amazing things in multiple fields. Professional preparation is a huge piece of that. This is why the All Access License is having a really huge impact on campus right now.

But it is also important to consider the lasting skills and perspectives that students gain that allow them to pivot when careers change. This is not an “either/or,” this is a “both/and.” We need to attend to the immediate goals of our students. We know students have these goals. And when we flipped the switch, and the All Access License portal opened up, and hundreds of students immediately started signing up, this tells us something really powerful: they need this and see it as an extreme value.

We also have to impart these lasting life skills. Being a lifelong learner, being a critical thinker. Being someone who does not just enter a profession but makes their mark there. Someone who crosses boundaries in traditional fields and creates new careers.

And so, it all has to happen together. In the ideal world, it happens together and that college is for thriving. I think this is what President Mills and Provost Dopico recognized, that this is all the same thing. And we have to recommit ourselves to making college that experience that leads students to whatever. We want students to define their own success and achieve that success.

Learn more about Kaplan’s All Access License.