Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success

Reimagining the Culture of Leadership for Student Success

A revision to the practical and popular guide, this book asks the crucial question within today's environment, "What's a student-ready college?" Higher education leaders are responsible for preparing their institutions to serve the students they admit in the best way possible. By asking ourselves how we can transform our institutions into student-ready colleges to create a new culture of leadership that is responsive to current challenges and focuses on understanding and utilizing student assets and social capital to achieve shared goals for student success. Becoming a Student-Ready College shows you how.

Conversations in higher education tend to focus on defining college readiness for students. Too often, we forget to ask the question from the other side, and we miss important opportunities to develop institutions in ways that can help students thrive. Higher education leaders and educators can better serve today's college students through responsive and redesigned practices and policies. This updated edition features revisions and new material that speak to the social realities of today's incoming students and cover the latest strategies and techniques for connecting with learners to foster equity and success.

• Leverage existing resources to the benefit of students and deliver the right support at the right time to achieve equity in student outcomes and build on students' assets
• Design eco-systemic partnerships and support programs that nurture the relationship between the student and the institution
• Strengthen institutional capacity-building for achieving defined student-ready goals
• Build shared governance to promote agency and to foster change and collaboration

Becoming a Student-Ready College explores leaders' shared responsibilities in advancing student success and provides practical recommendations for educators at all levels.

TIA BROWN McNAIR is the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and the Executive Director of TRHT campus centers at AAC&U. She is co-author of From Equity Talk to Equity Walk.

SUSAN ALBERTINE is the retired Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success at AAC&U.

NICOLE McDONALD works as Assistant Vice Provost for Student Success Strategies at the University of Houston.

THOMAS MAJOR, JR. is Associate General Counsel at Lumina Foundation.

MICHELLE ASHA COOPER is the Acting Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Office of Post-secondary Education.