GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY
Atlanta, Georgia
Over the course of five years, Georgia State University created a new type of data-informed advising platform, Graduation Progression Success (GPS) Advising, which identifies more than 800 challenges and tracks every student daily for emerging problems. University initiated a Summer Success Academy for students underperforming in high school, and introduced Panther Retention Grants (PRG) to cover the gap between what college students can pay and the full cost of their tuition and fees, helping students stay enrolled.
Because of a data-informed, campus-wide commitment to student success, Georgia State’s graduation rate improved 22 percentage points over ten years. Rates are up 36 points for Latinos (to 58%) and 29 points for African-Americans (to 58%). Latino, African-American, low-income, and first-generation students now all graduate at rates at or above the overall student body—not just narrowing achievement gaps, but closing them. Georgia State now confers bachelor’s degrees to more Hispanic, Asian, first-generation, and low-income students than any other university in Georgia. For the last six years, it has conferred more bachelor’s degrees to African-Americans than any other non-profit college or university in the United States.
‘We have to educate the students we get. It can’t be like when I showed up to college and they said, “Look to your left, look to your right. In four years one of you won’t be here”. That’s no longer acceptable. […] Our mission is to provide a level playing field for all students, so that education contributes to closing the gap between haves and have-nots that’s dividing our nation today’.
— President Mark P. Becker
MARK P. BECKER
President of Georgia State University
As a first-generation college student who began at a community college, Mark P. Becker is personally and professionally committed to helping students from all economic backgrounds to succeed. He attended Harford Community College in Maryland and earned his BS in Mathematics from Towson State University, and Doctorate in Statistics from Pennsylvania State University. He taught at the University of Washington and the University of Florida and spent over a decade at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, also serving as associate dean for Academic Affairs. Becker was executive vice president for Academic Affairs and provost at the University of South Carolina, and dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. He began his tenure as Georgia State University’s seventh president in January 2009.
His ambitious vision has fueled Georgia State’s emergence as one of the nation’s premier urban research universities, which has helped revitalize downtown Atlanta and raise the university’s global profile with international partnerships. Georgia State has become a national leader in innovating programmes and initiatives to foster student success; in eliminating disparities in graduation rates based on race, ethnicity or income; and in offering financial support to students. Georgia State was ranked the fourth most innovative university in the country by U.S. News & World Report in 2017.2
How has your personal journey informed your motivations to do this work?
It’s an evolutionary process, as you would imagine. I decided I wanted to be a professor when I was an undergraduate. I did not go to a strong high school. The thing that set me apart was I was really good at math. It was the way my brain was wired. My parents wanted me to be an engineer, so I started at a community college engineering programme that fed into the University of Delaware and University of Maryland. Most of my classmates went on to be engineers.
I really enjoyed figuring out problems, hard problems, and I had the mathematical ability to do it, so I switched from engineering to physics to math, graduated in four years, and figured I was going to become a math professor. I got to graduate school and majored in statistics because of an interest in solving problems across a range of disciplines. I had a specific interest in health care.
In my first faculty position as Assistant Professor of Statistics, I did a very unusual thing and took a leave from my tenure-track position that got me in the field of biostatistics and public health. There was again this sense of wanting to address substantive problems, not just academic ones.
My transition from faculty to higher education leadership happened at the University of Michigan. President Duderstadt knew higher education was going to change a lot. I was on a committee that regularly met with him. I learned the man was prescient and understood the challenges facing higher education, and I wanted a seat at the table when higher education faced those changes.
I had this sense back in the mid-1990s that we couldn’t let a changing world destroy what is probably the most important asset this country has, a very rich higher education system that doesn’t work as a system per se. It’s not tightly integrated, but there is an opportunity for everybody. Whether it’s Harvard, Yale, or a community college, everybody can get into the system. It’s a mistake to think everything should be the same. The real strength of American higher education is its heterogeneity. We need a range of institutions that meets people where they are when they are ready to pursue an education. My father was a soldier, my mother was a secretary, and my brothers and I were the first in our family to go to college. Higher education had created opportunities for us. Out of three boys we’ve got two with PhDs and one with a master’s degree who was a colonel in the US Army and had a highly successful career in the Department of Defense. That’s okay for three kids who benefited from public higher education.
When this opportunity at Georgia State presented itself, something inside me said the important change in the 21st century is going to happen in cities. Urban universities have to be a part of that.
How did you experience the severity of external pressures on your institution?
For better or worse, this wasn’t the first time I was in a leadership role in a recession. The metaphor was, ‘Look, we’re in a storm, we’re being tossed about. It’s dark, the clouds are swirling, and we’re on a sailing ship. Our responsibility is to get things in order so that when the storm clears we’re headed in the right direction with wind in our sails’. It was a very difficult time, but it was also an opportunity to position the university for what we would do after the recession.
I was offered the job in October 2008, not a good time for the country economically, but it was also leading up to the historical election of an African-American president. I chose as my start date 1 January 2009. While I was preparing to become a president, there was a lot of buzz about the first 100 days of the Obama presidency, and it got me thinking. If the president of the United States has a first 100 days, so does a president of a university. I did what any modern person would do. I went to Amazon and typed in ‘first 100 days’ and found a plethora of books on those first 100 days. The recurrent theme was the need to know the heart and soul of the organization you’re going to be responsible for. The books in different ways recommended going through a structured interview process, a listening process, in your first fifty to sixty days as you work toward coming up with a language, a vocabulary, for what you hope to achieve—your vision.
I settled on a basic five-question interview: ‘What do you most value about Georgia State University?’, ‘What do you most want to see change?’, ‘What are you most hoping I will do?’, and ‘What are you most afraid I will do?’. And that fifth question, ‘Is there anything else you want to talk about?’. I conducted that interview over the first thirty to forty days with thirty different campus leaders, the president of student government, the chair of our staff counsel, the executive committee of our university senate, the deans, and the vice presidents. What really stood out to me and became clear when I analyzed the results was that in 29 of the 30 interviews, what respondents most valued about Georgia State was the diversity of the student body, and that includes race and ethnicity. But there’s more to it than that.
They started talking about non-traditional students, military learners, because Georgia has a large military presence, people of all ages, of all social and economic statuses, races, and ethnicities. It hit me that there was something about Georgia State that was not like any other university where I had worked. I’d spent my faculty career in flagship institutions. This was clearly very different, so the goal was to capture that and turn it into a strength and a distinctive feature of the institution.
Factoring in our urban environment and the diversity of our students, we crafted a vision that we were going to create an urban university that would have the features of a premier research university, but with a very different student body and a deeply committed faculty and staff. We undertook a lengthy strategic planning process in February 2010. We used a broadly inclusive process because we committed to using the resulting strategic plan to drive the budget, which we’ve done every year since then. We kicked that process off with a public presentation where I drew on Apple’s famous ‘Think Different’ campaign.
My message was, ‘Okay, we’re going to do the strategic plan, we’re going to use it to advance this university, and we’re going to have to think differently’. You know, crazy things can be achieved—crazy in the sense that they’re out of the ordinary, not crazy in that they’re impossible.
The first semester of 2010 the planning process was very open. The committee conducted online surveys, wrote white papers, held town hall forums, had lots of discussion, and collected ideas. The only constraint I put on the process was that we could have no more than five goals because people can’t remember more than that, and you have to fit it on one sheet of paper. If it’s so complicated we can’t get it down to a sheet of paper, we’re not going to be able to use it.
We tested out drafts with external stakeholders, including major donors, elected officials, leaders of not-for-profits who would be partners, and potential supporters. The interviewees were unanimous in their assessment. The plan sounded impressive to them, but they didn’t know what it meant and didn’t know why they should care about it. The strategic planning committee was distraught. They said, ‘Does this mean we start over?’. I said, ‘No, that’s not what they told you. What they told you is that they don’t know what it means, and they don’t know why they should care, because you wrote it in our academic language. I’ll try to rewrite these five goals in a language that will be more broadly understood, and people will get a sense of what we’re talking about and why they should care’.
At that point, increasing graduation and retention rates was Goal 3. We were already getting some progress with student success work, so my instinct was if we made this a real priority, it would be something worth doing. There would be tremendous value from a social justice point of view and as an economic imperative, and success would enable the university to distinguish itself in a way that is natural for an urban institution with a diverse student population.
When the plan was approved by our university senate in January 2011, our goal was a 60% graduation rate. I think at that time we were in the low 40s. It was going be a heavy lift, but once we got there, we’d set our sights on 100%. I know that’s probably not realistic, but if we don’t aim for it, we’re going to become complacent and fall short.
How would you describe the leadership structure you created?
I’m naturally an impatient person. This “things playing out over a long period of time” horizon was something I had to learn. It goes back to when I was an associate dean; I became an associate dean expecting to become a dean. I figured it would take me three years. Well, I was an associate dean for five years and then became a dean. I realized I had learned much more in years four and five than I’d learned in the first three. And I realized if you want lasting change, if you really want to change something for the long term so it sticks, you’ve got to invest a lot of time. It takes time.
As president I have a cabinet, people who report directly to me and have major areas of responsibility. I’ve restructured the cabinet in various ways. We now have a chief innovation officer. It is a technology role, but it’s focused on how we use technology to change what we do and how we do it. The big addition to the cabinet was the vice president for enrollment management and student success who manages everything from student recruitment to graduation. We put career services in that portfolio because, in my mind, career services are linked to the academic programme. They are linked to our student advising model now because students start with career advising as freshmen. We also have an administrative council. It’s the deans, the VPs, and the associate provosts. We do a report on enrollment every week and ask ourselves what obstacles we’re facing. We’re not resting on our laurels. We’re going after whatever is the next thing.
I’ve flattened the administrative structure. I have more direct reports, but I don’t micromanage people. The hardest thing for me, for making the change from being an academic to being a leader, was letting go. Your success early in your career as a professor was determined by what you did. You got credit for your individual accomplishments.
Over time I’ve learned that if I empower people by hiring people with talent and giving them room to spread their wings, we’ll all enjoy the benefits. And that’s certainly worked. I ask lots of questions, but I don’t call people up every day or require frequent reports. If somebody’s not performing, I find somebody else to do the job. You’ve got to surround yourself with good people.
Skilled hiring is part of building a strong management team, but so is the commitment to fire ineffective people because you cannot do the disservice to the organization to keep people in roles where they don’t belong. If you can’t do that, you’re never going to get where you want to go. It’s recognizing you can’t be all things to all people, as an individual and as an institution. I accept that I can’t make everybody happy, but I’m always going to be very clear about our goals and priorities.
One lesson I’ve learned in higher education is if you get the process right, you can do just about anything. The faculty will embrace a lot of new ideas if you get the process right. If you don’t get it right, you can end up with a brilliant idea that leads to great controversy.
How did you frame your vision for this work? What was the story you told about why this was important?
One priority was to organize our language so everyone would clearly understand our priorities. My first year became the first year in its history the university had more tuition revenue than state funding. The recession had taken $40 million out of our budget. It was clear to me the state was not going to be our savior. We had to get our message out. We had to get it out right, and we had to raise a lot more money than we were raising.
Our vision was to become a premier urban research university. We spent a lot of time telling people Georgia State was becoming a “complete university”. Transformation was the word I used a lot. We were going to transform Georgia State into a real major research university that would be accessible to all college-ready students.
One of the unique features of Georgia State is the recent consolidation of Georgia Perimeter College, a two-year institution, into the university. Just about everybody who applies to Georgia State gets an admissions letter. The letter says you’re admitted into a bachelor’s degree programme at the Atlanta Campus or you’re admitted into an associate degree programme at one of our Perimeter College campuses of your choosing. We admit everybody, but there are different pathways based on their preparation.
We have to educate the students we get. It can’t be like when I showed up at college and they said, ‘Look to your left, look to your right. In four years one of you won’t be here’. That’s no longer acceptable. Back then, college was almost free. Now these students are taking on substantial debt. Our mission is to provide a level playing field for all students, so that education contributes to closing the gap between haves and have-nots that’s dividing our nation today.
I’ve told everybody here that the whole country’s watching us. We’ve got to get it right. Not because the country is watching, but because it is crucial for the thousands of people across the nation who are flunking or dropping out of college.
There’s no unique way to do things, but we’ve established a model that has been recognized nationally for demonstrating that students from all backgrounds can achieve and graduate at high rates. That has given us a powerful story to tell when we go to the Board of Regents for funding increases. Our priorities align with our university system strategic plan. Not surprisingly, the Board of Regents also has a graduation goal. We need more college-educated people, especially in Georgia and specifically the Atlanta metro area. The new jobs being created are for people with bachelor’s degrees and above.
Students who come to Georgia State tend to be very gritty, very practical, very much about getting the education to make a better life. We are a practical institution. We are very strong academically, but we’re not an “ivory tower”. We want to level the playing field and provide an outstanding education in a research-rich environment in a way that connects to and takes advantage of this city.
When we started all this at Georgia State, I think some people thought I was crazy. ‘We’re Georgia State’, they’d say. ‘We can’t say we’re going to do something at the national level. That’s just not who we are. That’s not how it works. We love these students, but we’ve got to be realistic about what’s possible’. So, borrowing a phrase from Steve Jobs, I adopted a “reality distortion field”. If you want to accomplish something people think is impossible, you must zone in on it and believe with all your heart you’re going to do it. It doesn’t always work, but it’s worked in our innovative student success initiatives and our rapid development into a major research institution. We’ve done things people didn’t think possible.
Georgia State University Visual Case Study
Executive Leadership
President Becker set ambitious goals and empowered staff and administration to solve problems with guidance on priorities and reduced bureaucratic barriers. One employee described the atmosphere as ‘extremely empowering and helpful because the team knows that if they made a good argument and can show something to be helpful, it doesn’t have to go through layers of bureaucracy to make it happen’.
Spark
President Becker joined GSU amid a recession and political climate that demanded cutting costs and doing a better job of serving students of color as well as low-income and first-generation students. In his first 100 days he conducted more than 60 listening sessions, which led to a strategic planning process.
Sense-Making
President Becker designed a collaborative strategic planning process to ensure faculty support. He challenged the planning committee to “think different” and shared stories of ambitious transformation to set a high standard. To focus efforts, the planning committee was constrained to five aspirational goals. The committee collected ideas from across the university through surveys, town halls, and open discussions.
New Vision
The university emerged with a vision to increase its graduation rate to 60 percent without changing its student body profile. To accomplish this vision, Georgia State developed a platform to rigorously investigate student outcome data, and to use this data to design and implement innovative strategies and programs.
Team/Mandate
The focal point of the innovation was a data-driven, centralized advising system. The advisors’ role was reimagined with high performance expectations. The organizational structure was streamlined to be more focused on advising and student’s needs. A culture of freedom and autonomy to deliver accompanied a commitment to let go of those not contributing to the organization’s success.
Iteration
Data is used to continuously improve advising interventions and campaigns and test new strategies.
Georgia State University Improving Graduation Rates
SUMMER SUCCESS ACADEMY
A seven-week summer programme is offered for students who perform poorly in key high school classes. Students take college-level courses and receive tutoring, advising, and academic and financial skills training.
GPS ADVISING
The Graduation Progression Success (GPS) Advising platform tracks student data daily to flag risks and support aggressive advising.
DATA
In the face of changing demographics and declining funding, Georgia State asked some simple questions: What if we took student outcomes data seriously? What if we used data to diagnose why students were dropping out, then innovated and applied interventions to keep students on track to graduate?
PANTHER RETENTION GRANTS
Small awards cover the gap between the cost of tuition and fees and what students can pay.
Who They Serve
The Georgia State student body is broadly diverse in terms of age, social and economic background, race, ethnicity, and military status.
Providing Access
Every applicant to Georgia State receives an admittance letter. Students enter either a bachelor’s degree programme at the Atlanta Campus or an associate degree programme at one of the university’s Perimeter College campuses, which prepares them to transition to the Atlanta campus or transfer to another college or university.
Enabling Success
Georgia State uses robust real-time data modeling and aggressive advising to diagnose at-risk indicators. To drive student success, the university is committed to continuous innovation of its advising and intervention model.
2 ‘Georgia State Fourth Most Innovative University in U.S. News and World Report Best Colleges Edition’, Georgia State University News Hub, 12 September 2017, https://news.gsu.edu/2017/09/12/georgia-state-fourth-innovative-university-u-s-news-world-report/