Ithaca College Announces Center for Student Success and Retention

By Danica Fisher ’05, April 12, 2022

Center will bring synergy, efficiency, and effectiveness to student retention.

The Center for Student Success and Retention is focused on the student journey, from matriculation to graduation. (Photo credit of 2019 Commencement: Natalie Daffinee '09)

Ithaca College has announced the establishment of the Center for Student Success and Retention. The center’s leadership will guide the 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: Elizabeth Bleicher as the dean of student success and retention; and Jacqueline Winslow as executive director of student success and retention. Both are agents of change partnering on aligning campus efforts with the goal to improve student success and retention.

“Creating the Center for Student Success and Retention positions us to achieve our Ithaca Forever goal of becoming a national model for student success, engagement, and well-being,” said President La Jerne Terry Cornish. “This is a strategic and intentional move to invest in improving student retention using both a macro-level, systemic approach as well as a micro-level approach that will impact individual students. As I like to say, our students are our ‘why,’ and they deserve nothing less than for us to wisely direct our energy and resources to ensure we are the best institution we can be when it comes to delivering on our brand promise.”

The center will provide 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. This is a hybrid, interdisciplinary center that fosters collaboration and shared purpose among faculty, staff, students, and senior leadership.

"Creating the Center for Student Success and Retention positions us to achieve our Ithaca Forever goal of becoming a national model for student success, engagement, and well-being. This is a strategic and intentional move to invest in improving student retention using both a macro-level, systemic approach as well as a micro-level approach that will impact individual students. As I like to say, our students are our ‘why,’ and they deserve nothing less than for us to wisely direct our energy and resources to ensure we are the best institution we can be when it comes to delivering on our brand promise.”

President La Jerne Terry Cornish.

Laurie Koehler, vice president for marketing and enrollment strategy, who built and led a successful retention team while at George Washington University, said that while Ithaca College’s historical retention rates—the percentage of first-year students who return for their second year—are well above the national average for higher education, they are also below the average for IC’s peer schools.

“We know we have a huge opportunity to maximize our enrollment by thinking about what happens after students matriculate,” said Koehler. “Our enrollment is a function not just of who comes to IC, but who stays and who doesn’t and why. If we can improve our retention, we have better prospects for building long-term thriving enrollment numbers and financial sustainability.”  

The center will be a place to create synergy, efficiency, and effectiveness for student retention, and will also include a student success coach to implement target population interventions.

“There is also an important relationship between retention/graduation and recruiting and yielding new students,” said Melanie Stein, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “There is a strong reputational component which is cyclical – the stronger our retention and graduation rates are, the stronger our market position, the better the word of mouth, and the better our likelihood of recruiting and yielding new students.”

Elizabeth Bleicher (Photo submitted)

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. Both will communicate and consult with campus partners to create a culture of shared purpose, student care, and continuous improvement.

Bleicher, 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.

“Students who work with me know that I take their success very seriously; it is personal to me,” said Bleicher. “I feel very privileged to concentrate my teaching and researching practices on student success. The Center for Student Success and Retention is not just for students, because their success is so dependent on what we do as an institution. I want staff and faculty colleagues to come to trust that we have their backs, to trust that we are researching solutions to the problems they bring to us, and to trust that we will help them test the strategies and tactics we bring back to and formulate with them.”

Jacqueline Winslow (Photo submitted)

In 2013, after a decade in progressively more responsible positions within residential life at the University of Delaware, Winslow 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.

Winslow says she is eager to continue listening closely to students’ stories to help them strategize and to promote practices and policies that allow them to feel intellectually, socially, emotionally, and financially well.

“I am confident the center’s focused attention on student success will both bolster our students’ collective experience and help us ensure that students who might have grappled with leaving IC will remain part of our community because of the care and attention we can offer at the individual level,” said Winslow.

The Center for Student Success and Retention will provide a designated team to focus full-time energy on accelerating the work of the Retention and Engagement Strategy Team (REST), a campus-wide committee born out of the dramatic circumstances students faced with the COVID-19 global pandemic.

“We know we have a huge opportunity to maximize our enrollment by thinking about what happens after students matriculate. Our enrollment is a function not just of who comes to IC, but who stays and who doesn’t and why. If we can improve our retention, we have better prospects for building long-term thriving enrollment numbers and financial sustainability.”  

Laurie Koehler, vice president for marketing and enrollment strategy.

The process of creating the center has been ongoing for the past two years and is a very intentional cross-unit approach to aid in student success. Bleicher said they used the urgency of the pandemic to identify barriers to student success and develop short-term strategies and solutions.

“While putting out fires, we were also studying ways to create the best infrastructure for this work,” said Bleicher. “We envision the center as a catalyst for collaborations among groups across campus and have already seen exciting results from these partnerships. Now we can be more planful and deeply engaged in identifying and addressing obstacles that discourage students and cost our staff and faculty colleagues valuable time and energy.”

“Most students don’t enter IC thinking that they will leave before graduating. Every student we admit, we believe could be successful at IC,” said Rosanna Ferro, vice president for student affairs and campus life, who along with Cornish, Stein, and Koehler have worked to create the center. “We have an obligation and commitment to doing all we can to meet our brand promise. Every student who leaves is a lost opportunity to fulfill our mission.”