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Today we proudly announce the establishment of the Center for Student Success and Retention. We recognize that improved retention requires a greater emphasis on cultivating, supporting, and measuring student progress to degree completion. The new center will aid us in this process by providing vision and coherence for IC’s initiatives to improve the student journey from matriculation to graduation by creating clearer pathways to equitable student success and engagement. 

With an initial focus on undergraduates, the center’s leadership will guide Ithaca College in research, development, and implementation of strategies to improve student retention and success, making Ithaca College a first-choice, fiscally sustainable institution in a highly competitive landscape. 

The center will be based within the Division of Marketing and Enrollment Strategy and will be led by two complementary positions filled by two extraordinary servant leaders: Dr. Elizabeth Bleicher as the dean of student success and retention and Dr. Jacqueline Winslow as executive director of student success and retention. As co-chairs of the Ithaca Forever working group on Student Success, Elizabeth and Jacqueline demonstrated their passion and commitment as change agents working to improve student retention. The dean of student success and retention is the chief liaison to academic affairs and the provost’s leadership team while the executive director of student success and retention is the chief liaison to the vice president for student affairs and campus life’s leadership team.

In 2013, after a decade in progressively more responsible positions within residential life at the University of Delaware, Jacqueline joined IC and has served for the past four years as the Director for New Student and Transition Programs. Within this role and as a first-generation college student herself, she oversaw the foundation of IC’s First-Generation Center and worked closely with the Division of Philanthropy and Engagement to establish IC’s growing Family Council.

Elizabeth, a professor in the Departments of Literatures in English and Education, was tapped in 2011 to lead the exploratory program at IC, and over the next eight years, demonstrated her passion for researching and implementing solutions for student success, transition to college, and the first-year experience. She co-authored IC’s Strategic Student Success and Retention Plan in 2018, and in 2020 accepted an appointment as an IC Presidential Fellow with a focus on student success. In addition, she has been serving as interim director of student success and chairs the Retention and Engagement Strategy Team.

They have spent much of the past two years combining their distinct skill sets and academic and student affairs expertise to analyze problems, build consensus, and create data- and research-informed practices and programs that address the whole student. We are thrilled to have such talented, invested leaders focusing their energies full time on work of such critical importance to IC. 

In word and deed, the center will embrace the challenge of pedagogical and administrative transformations necessitated by the COVID era, while maintaining Ithaca College’s commitment to both our mission and our most vulnerable students. This is a hybrid, interdisciplinary center that fosters collaboration and shared purpose among faculty, staff, students, and senior leadership.

With the creation of the Center for Student Success and Retention we are confident we will advance IC’s progress toward achieving our Ithaca Forever goal of becoming a national model for student success, engagement, and well-being. Learn more about the Center for Student Success and Retention.

Sincerely,

La Jerne Terry Cornish
President

Melanie Stein
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Rosanna Ferro
Vice President for Student Affairs and Campus Life

Laurie Koehler
Vice President for Marketing and Enrollment Strategy