FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
Miami, Florida
Florida International University (FIU) significantly improved student success by implementing major educational reforms in its Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and gateway courses while launching a series of university-wide innovations in the areas of advising and support through their Graduation Success Initiative. This effort resulted in improved passing and graduation rates across all courses. The six-year graduation rate for first-time-in-college (FTIC) students at FIU increased 15 points in the first four years.
FIU’s Graduation Success Initiative is a comprehensive, university-wide system of innovations that introduced a professional advisor model, adding 74 advisor lines (considerably lowering the student-to-advisor ratio), and provided students with several electronic tools. Crucial to this initiative was the My eAdvisor Student Dashboard, which allows students and advisors to monitor academic progress. These interventions help students identify a major, provide a clear path to on-time graduation, remove barriers, and add support.
Core elements of these initiatives are interventions that
1. Adapt evidence-based instructional practices to the FIU context
2. Require engaged active learning by students in the classroom
3. Are initiated by external grant or foundation funding
4. Integrate undergraduates, faculty, and multiple administrative units.
‘I realized when I became president […] I was going to philosophically reframe my efforts around an optimistic, forward-facing, unapologetic framework […] a thought process that was not cursing the darkness, not benchmarking against the past, but trying to look into the future and […] figure out how to utilize our demography and our geography as assets rather than liabilities. […] We don’t want to measure ourselves by who we exclude. We want to measure ourselves by who’s included and how well they do and what we can do with them’.
— President Mark B. Rosenberg
MARK B. ROSENBERG
President of Florida International University
Mark B. Rosenberg earned a BA in 1971 from Miami University of Ohio and a PhD in 1976 in Political Science with a focus on Latin America from the University of Pittsburgh. Rosenberg began teaching at FIU in 1979. As provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, he played a significant role in the growth and expansion of FIU as a major public research university in the region. He was the first FIU faculty member to become university president, serving as its fifth president since 2009.
In many ways FIU is the demographic future, and Rosenberg has been instrumental in guiding his institution forward. During his tenure, student enrollment has increased along with the addition of over 500 new faculty, accompanied by a focus on improving graduation and retention. FIU leads the country in granting minority degrees in science and engineering and has developed trailblazing partnerships with schools and businesses of Miami.
How has your personal journey informed your motivations to do this work?
I was raised in a university community, but my father was a businessman in town, so I was raised around the sons and daughters of university professors. A lot of my formative years were spent in a university environment. However, I never thought that I would be a professor, much less a university president.
Fast forward to being an undergraduate at Miami University of Ohio. I got a great liberal arts education surrounded by deep-thinking faculty, and the further I got into my undergraduate education, the more windows in my mind were opened by these faculty. The academic life began to call. I thought I’d be a lawyer, but I didn’t like the pre-law courses. I found myself heavily influenced by a number of faculty members who encouraged me to go to graduate school. I chose to study Latin America. I was very interested in poverty because I was raised in one of the poorest counties in Ohio, Athens County. There was so much poverty around me, I wanted to understand its political causes and consequences. The University of Pittsburgh—I got an excellent education there at a very difficult time. The Vietnam War was winding down and there were very few job opportunities when I graduated. I was lucky to get a job. There were four hundred applicants for the political science position at FIU.
I liked the idea of FIU because having been raised in a community in one of the old public universities, the history of that university was basically written. I could come to a new public university and the history had yet to be built. And a new university where nobody could tell you, ‘We don’t do things that way’. It was only four years old when I started. Latin America … in Miami. What a great opportunity. You mean I could actually get a job in a place where we used to take vacations, get paid for it, and be in the closest Latin American city to Latin America, namely Miami? It was perfect. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, and truthfully I feel that same way 41 years later.
We’ve built this university, and the thing that’s carried me through is the students and their determination to succeed. This is a community which has the highest generation of foreign-born people, right here in Miami. I identify with that because my mom was an immigrant. She was a survivor of Auschwitz. She was liberated by my dad, whose parents were immigrants. He was born in the States and he was an army officer, came across at Normandy, but he was an officer of all black troops. So it’s an interesting juxtaposition, coming from my family, then coming here to a community where so many people had been displaced or were immigrants. I aligned with that.
What does innovation mean to you in the context of your work as an institutional leader?
Innovation needs to pivot around our context and our ability to see into the future. Vision is the art of seeing the impossible. What does the future look like? How must we adapt? What do we need to maintain from an institutional perspective? In a mainstream North American university context, what do we need to change to get to where we need to go? We’re lucky at FIU because we don’t have a lot of traditions. In the olden days, that would have been a deficit. Today, it’s probably an asset.
How did you experience the severity of external pressures on your institution?
So much of what we do is routinized and institutionalized and formulaic that it’s easy to stay in traditional channels. I realized when I became president that I had to make a choice. It was a choice I hadn’t been willing to make prior to becoming president, but I knew that I had to figure out how to make sure that the glass was always at least half-full. Given the route that we followed to build this university, given the context, the wider context of so much difficulty, so much pain, so much uncertainty, so much negativity, I made a choice that I was going to philosophically reframe my efforts around an optimistic, forward-facing, unapologetic framework.
The university being so new, a lot of us, including me, used to curse the darkness. That is to say that we dreamed about being able to have graduate students. We dreamed about being able to have residence halls. We dreamed about being able to become a research university with serious research labs and a major library with two million volumes. It was essentially a deficit thinking, always trying to figure out how to fill the gaps between who we were and who we wanted to be.
In the process of trying to think through how I would provide leadership and work with people and be optimistic about that, I realized I needed a thought process that was not cursing the darkness, not benchmarking against the past, but trying to look into the future and understand where we needed to go, what we needed to do, and how we were going to get there. And more importantly, to figure out how to utilize our demography and our geography as assets rather than liabilities.
Ours was a demography of recent arrivals, immigrants, people in exile, people carrying around identities that were inconsistent with traditional notions of Americana and traditional notions of assimilation. As we began to think through who we were and where we were, and as we began to embrace a more forward-facing logic, we realized our geography could be an asset. Our demography most certainly is an asset, because we are where America’s going in terms of demography. Today we’re 72% Hispanic, 14% African diaspora. What an asset to have that different kind of outlook, everybody brought together with an exile, immigrant, get-up-and-go, let’s-get-things-done attitude.
The major drivers have varied across time. I do think that demographics and the geography, they are the context. Anybody who forgets those drivers is not going to survive here long. You have significant boom/bust cycles that affect Florida and Miami, as a consequence of the sharp connections we have here. We’re a global city and a global community, so we reflect those dynamics. We’re sitting on the edge, driven by different global and international factors.
Within the state we are getting a thousand new people a day, this overall population pressure. We don’t have this sunset mentality, this ‘What do we have to do today to get to the next day?’ in terms of meeting people’s needs.
We also have more recently had a powerful entrepreneurial input. Entrepreneurship is taking off in this community. Some of those are traditional mom-and-pop operations as a consequence of immigration and the nature of it, but some of it is creatives who want to be in Miami, and they find what’s going on in Miami conducive to their innovation and entrepreneurial instincts.
So we’ve had demographic inputs, we’ve had financial economic inputs, we’ve had creative inputs. We also have a huge digital divide. We also have huge income inequality. So we have issues that we have to address.
State support is up and down, so anybody who thinks they can build a responsive institution dependent upon state support in this era is not going to get much done. I don’t pay much attention to student/faculty ratios anymore. I want to know what our students learn, that’s what I want to know. And that’s where we need to be in the twenty-first century.
How would you describe the leadership structure you created?
Structure is less important than mindset and leadership. I’m pretty eclectic as it relates to structure. I’ll look at what works. I don’t have an instinctive knee-jerk reaction to talent per se. I like to work with people where they are and get them to the next level if possible. I like to work with people who are competitive; that’s very important. I like to work with people who take risks. I like to work with people who will challenge authority, but who will also be good team players when necessary.
I like information; I don’t like vertical relationships. The best relationships are horizontal, and people need to talk with each other and communicate with each other. Having said that, I meet regularly with all the vice presidents and sometimes we get into operations. I try to leave the operations to them, but since I know so much about this university and I’ve been raised here, I will tell people, ‘Listen, you may think this is micromanagement, but really this is just curiosity’. I helped build the programme, I know the people, I dreamed the dream to create the thing because I have been privileged to be here for so long, which is perhaps a disadvantage.
I have these operating rules that help manage the tensions between the urgent, the important, the short-term, and the long-term. Number one: The key to success is a mastery of routine. Number two: You build from that base. Everybody wants a tree with a lot of branches, but if you don’t have a strong trunk, the tree will fall over. Number three: You’re always stressed by the contradiction between being and becoming, and what’s urgent will always replace what’s important. Then the final: In terms of working with my team and mentoring, I always challenge myself with the question, ‘Do I want to be right or do I want to be effective?’.
I prefer sins of commission rather than omission. Omission drives me crazy because we have a responsibility to get better every day and to learn from our mistakes, and to be unapologetic for pointing out where somebody could do better. I expect people to do that with me, too.
How did you frame your vision for this work? What was the story you told about why this was important?
Plans are important, but planning isn’t everything. I do believe in planning, I do believe in preparing. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but we’ve also gotten a lot done because we’ve had a lot of risk-takers. We’ve done pretty good in setting a plan, but we’ve never been rigid.
I use my bully pulpit a lot to talk about change, how important it is, and to make sure that we’re in the process of creating change, not reacting to it. For higher education in the next decade and a half, that will be determinative. We are in the service industry in the end. You have to get better and better at offering those services, because particularly for us, in our domain, students have choices now. In the old days, they didn’t have choices.
We don’t want to measure ourselves by who we exclude. We want to measure ourselves by who’s included and how well they do and what we can do with them. We see ourselves as a “solution center”. We see ourselves taking responsibility for our community. My point is that we have the blessings of talent here, and we need to put that talent to work to solve problems. I’m pretty explicit in talking in those terms.
We don’t feel we can turn our backs on our community. And we can’t curse the darkness, because if you think about it, 35% of the teachers in Miami Dade County are FIU graduates. So if we’re not happy with the quality of students we get from K-12, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. In other words, we take responsibility and figure out how to address the problem.
We know in the end that we have something special in universities because people identify in important ways with their universities. We are very good at building an experience that has value both in and out of the classroom. You should work toward having a place that symbolizes the aspiration, a place that is hospitable and safe and responsive. But we can’t get overextended. We’re not going to be all things to all people. But the organizational philosophy should be that if we can be, we should be. If we can be, then we can do it well.
Florida International University Visual Case Study
Executive Leadership
As a prior faculty member, President Mark B. Rosenberg inspires a compelling emotional narrative about the importance of inclusion, the necessity of removing barriers to student success, and the value of teaching and learning. He understood that people closest to students—and the students themselves—were the experts on supporting student success.
Spark
In 2007–2008 FIU faced a budget crisis which required downsizing and closing programmes. University leadership took this challenge as an opportunity to strategize about how to rebuild when funds became available. This crisis catalyzed the university to become clearer about its goals, decision-making process, and use of data and evidence.
Sense-Making
FIU knew it could not rely on traditional university models, which were not designed to serve students on the margins; traditional methods would continue to exacerbate inequality. Improving student success would require classroom impact, evidence-based experimentation, and a focus on teaching and instructional design.
New Vision
The bold new vision for the university paralleled the vision it had always held for its students. The leadership wanted to ensure the university could emerge from the margins, experience financial stability, and act as a community leader. To that end, the university determined to become the research institution of the future through its unique identity as an urban university with over 50% first-generation students and nearly 80% minority student population.
Team/Mandate
The pathway was not always linear or mandated from the top, but rather a coalescing and focusing of initiatives across the organization. Central to the process of innovation and experimentation was an organizational culture open to new ideas and to failure, and to learning quickly to adjust.
Iteration
‘You have to want to make an impact. You have to want to roll up your sleeves and work. We are about infrastructure and building and continuously improving. We’re always focusing on it’s never good enough, but I like to look at it as we can do better. We can build, we can build, we can build’.
Florida International University Graduation Success Initiative
GRADUATION SUCCESS INITIATIVE (GSI)
Core elements of the GSI programme include helping students identify a major early-on, delineating clear paths to on-time graduation, and providing additional supports.
PROFESSIONAL ADVISING
Students receive high-touch, professional advising in conjunction with digital advising dashboard and tools.
MODIFIED MASTERY FOR GATEWAY COURSES
High-tech labs and high-touch teaching assistants provide extra support for critical “gateway” courses in STEM, resulting in a pass/fail reversal from 30/70 to 70/30 in College Algebra.
CENTER FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF TEACHING (CAT) AND STEM TRANSFORMATION INSTITUTE
Many of the programmatic innovations began in physics, with results so promising that the CAT and STEM Transformation Institute scaled them throughout STEM and core curriculum.
LEARNING ASSISTANT (LA)PROGRAMME
Undergraduate students build skills as facilitators in the classroom, contributing their cultural competency and content expertise and supporting other students in their learning success.
Who They Serve
The majority of FIU’s students come from historically underserved backgrounds, including over 50% first-generation students and nearly 80% minorities.
Providing Access
FIU provides multiple pathways for admission with varying standards depending on the programme. Some students are admitted directly into a four-year graduation track, some through partnerships with a local community college, some through a more supported and stepped entry.
Enabling Success
By providing comprehensive student support services and by maintaining an optimistic and forward-leaning view of possibilities for both itself as an institution and its students as future leaders, FIU ensures greater student and community success.