This topic is unique in that the President had three focus areas within the Institutional Efficiency + Effectiveness topic he wanted the university community to prioritize: retention, career services, and student advising and support. We held four traditional, open design sessions for faculty and staff, as well as one student session the covered all topics; all sessions allowed participants to contribute their feedback on the given topic and questions. We then scheduled invitation-only sessions for each focus area, or sub-group. The Office of the President asked university leadership to identify experts in their areas who were then invited to a series of focused meetings on each subject of interest. The sub-group meetings followed a different structure than our traditional design sessions because it was critical for us to document how we currently offer student services to collectively design the best path forward.
Over 350 pieces of feedback from the all-inclusive Institutional Efficiency and Effectiveness discussion questions. From this feedback, 35 overarching themes represent some of our community’s thoughts on the current obstacles to retaining DePaul students, and ways to improve our retention rates across all student populations. We connected many of these themes to the initiatives developed by career services, retention, and student services experts among the DePaul community. 69 potential initiatives emerged from the excellent work completed by experts from all sub-groups, the four all-inclusive design sessions, and the single student session.
Read the Executive Summary