TRIO Student Support Services Annual Report 2021-2022

Note: Student Support Services is a TRIO program funded by the United States Department of Education to provide academic support services to students from low-income and first generation college-going backgrounds. The mission statement and program goals (objectives in the U.S. Department of Education framework) are specified by federal regulations and policies and cannot be altered without approval from a program officer at the U.S. Department of Education.

I. Mission Statement

The mission of Student Support Services (SSS) is to improve the academic standing, retention, graduation, and graduate and professional school enrollment rates of eligible students who are receiving project services.

Department Goals

Performance Objectives (required by the U.S. Department of Education)

1. Persistence: 63% of all students served by the SSS Project will persist from one academic year to the beginning of the next academic year or graduate.
2. Good Academic Standing: 92% of all enrolled participants served by the SSS Project will meet the performance of good academic standing (2.0 or above).
3. Graduation: 61% of new participants served each year will graduate within six years.
   • These performance objectives are in alignment with division goals to increase the retention and graduation of students.
   • The services offered by SSS also contribute to recruitment efforts by reassuring students and their families that individualized support is available to students from disadvantaged backgrounds at CSU, Chico.
   • The date of last review was February 7, 2022 when the project submitted the TRIO Student Support Services Annual Performance Report (APR) to the U.S. Department of Education.

II. Departmental Accomplishments

• Partnered with Academic Advising Programs to hire a Retention and Graduation Coach.
• Hired our Student Development Coordinator.
• Successfully met all Department of Education program objectives on retention, graduation, and persistence.
• Successfully improved our TRIO Student Support Services application to make it accessible to recruited students.
• Successfully returned to campus at high capacity in order to serve and offer all of our activities virtually to our 172 participants.
• Continued to operate our 5-year funding that represents 1.4 million dollars to continue to accomplish our program goals.
• Continued our partnership and collaboration with the Recreation, Hospitality, and Parks Management Department to allow our students to volunteer and experience the outdoors.
• Further increased our study sessions to include the spring semester for all new first-year students.
• Worked with 10 peer mentors to continue to offer services to our students.
• Successfully transitioned to Chico State 360 in order to better fit university advising practices and advising tracking.
• Partnered with the Cal-Fresh program to provide the best service to our program. This relationship continued as we transitioned back to campus.
• Successfully recruited a new fall 2021 cohort amongst news from other SSS programs of difficulties of meeting their recruitment goals.
• Participation in Chico State’s Giving Day and fundraising – this resulted in flexible money to help offset the restricted budget that we get from the Department of Education.
• In partnership with the Financial Aid and Scholarship Office, we successfully awarded 31,500 dollars in grant aid to our income eligible students.
• Increased our offered workshops to our students. Mainly in the area of Life After College series that works with our students who are within a year to graduation.
• Required that all first-year participants, new transfer students, and students on AP to take the LASSI online assessment and follow it up with a one-on-one coaching session with a peer coach to discuss improving their approaches and strategies to their studies using proven-effective practices.
• Refined our process for working with students on academic probation, and more closely supported our students to work with Academic Advising to receive help.
• Required attendance at mandatory financial wellness workshops for all first-year and second year students.
• Successfully assisted our students with new university grading policies to help them meet university grade point average requirements.
• Unlike other university support programs, we have allowed online students to participate in our program.
• Transitioned our contract services to an online format where students are able to more easily review where they stand with their requirements.
• Offered mandatory fall semester seminar course for first year participants.
• Continued to encourage participants to safely participate in civic engagement opportunities – these opportunities were online or locally in Chico.
• Continued our transition to campus and were able to successfully move our department back to in-person and online services.

Highlights:

Recruitment
In years past, our TRIO program could easily rely on filling our grant’s participant numbers by recruiting many of the students that had been denied acceptance into the Educational Opportunity Program. Since the pandemic and drop in university enrollment, our program has had to shift our recruitment processes. We now highly rely on the partnerships with Office of Admissions, as we get a list of students who have declared their intent to enroll and have identified as first generation. This partnership also helps with their “freeze” goals to keep students engaged over the summer.

Our first-generation students made a return to campus with a variety of needs.

• We served a lot of students – both in-person and online. We’ve made ourselves available to all of them. Since returning from the pandemic a shift has occurred in the type of student that we serve. Before the pandemic our program served only students who were in-person. The new shift has allowed us to start accepting students that are only online students.
• The pandemic still continues to impact the learning of our first-generation college students. We had our largest number of students who decided to transfer out of Chico State due to health concerns, family care responsibilities, or challenges with paying for college in Chico.

Increased online student population. Change in shift from pre-virtual learning to now – we now are able to offer support to these students.

Our program operated over 3352 hours of both in-person and online services, and successfully continued all of our key and federally required services in an online format. We have creatively moved our identification and selection process into an online format. We continued to improve all three of our TRIO applications that were quickly moved into an online format to be more accessible for our students and not require students to pay for the cost of mailing in their applications. Since moving into our new online Cognito forms application, we have seen a large increase of submitted applications into our program. The use of the online form allows us to make a higher amount of contacts with first generation college students. These applications have been combined into one application in order to make it easier for students to complete. All applications now begin through our TRIO SSS website as an interest form and then go into an automated email from our Cognito form builder. Our program worked closely with Chico State Web Services to build an application that helped our staff and students.

Although we will continue to serve our online/virtual students, we will continue to grow our welcome activities in-person in collaboration with Associated Students and Facility Reservations. We will continue to offers two parent/ally welcome options that connects our program to the support systems of our students. This relationship is important to allow our program to win the support of the family, and hopefully convince them of the importance of supporting their students throughout college. Many of our first-time freshman students will be moving to Chico. While a little under half of our transfer students will be fully online students, and a majority will be moving to Chico. The new online cohort of students who are entering our program have different needs than our more traditional transfer students. Between our two groups of new students, we will continue to offer vital services to all students.

Online Application Improvements–
With the approval from Department of Education, our program is now able to receive and accept digital signatures. This was a major benefit for our program and our ability to improve our application. We have been using Cognito Forms, Qualtrics, and email communication in order to process applications. We have not completed our recruitment period for the summer, and we have already received more than 200+ applications.

Retention and Graduation Coach –
In partnership with Academic Advising Programs, we have participated in the recruitment and hiring of a Retention and Graduation Coach (RGC). Julie Heisler is paid through the Academic Advising Program, and works directly with our students and our program. Having her expertise in our program has allowed us to give our third year and beyond students more detailed connection. Our Retention and Graduation Coach provides advising and coaching to our third year and beyond students in one-on-one meetings and group workshops. Since arriving into our program, our RGC has meet with over 75% of our third year and beyond students to design and update their path towards graduation. Many students are challenged with changes in majors or a novice understanding of the graduation requirements. With the detailed support of the program, our students learn what each semester towards graduation looks like for them. With an understanding of how many semesters a student has remaining before graduation, the student is able to make plans on their financial aid, and possible minors or certifications. These discussions are helpful to our students who know they are only a few semesters from graduation so they should start planning to collect letters of recommendations and grad school applications. The Retention and Graduation Coach has been a large success in our program’s support of the graduation initiative.

Diversity Efforts:

• Inclusion efforts – male participants – male participation has continued to be a challenge for our program and I understand that it is not unique to our program. This challenge has been around for our program since before 2016 and is an issue that we have working to overcome. Representation is an important piece to our program and we have continued to employee students who are representative of our student participants. Male participation has seen a small increase in our program over this last year. We highly seek and recruit male students into our program. We hope to begin offering male specific programing for the males in our program.
• Equity and Education efforts – Diversity Workgroup –
  In the last year, the director of the program has participated in the newly formed diversity workgroup. The diversity workgroup was created under the direction of the Vice President of Student Affairs office to work with a group of professionals to understand the diverse needs of the professionals in the division. The workgroup was part of four other workgroups that were all created after the vice president recruited professionals from the division to lead the workgroups. Since co-leading the workgroup, the director recruited professionals from PATH Scholars, International Education and Engagement, Accessibility Resource Center, Athletics, Student Learning Center, and Upward Bound/API Council. Together the workgroup has established goals moving forward to assess the diverse needs of professionals in the division, and start to explore the possibility of finding a middle manager EDI training series. This workgroup led to the director to participate in the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity. At the conference, a possible training was found and ideas to bring back to the TRIO program were all collected.
• Campus Collaboration, Representation, and Outreach
  • First Generation Faculty and Staff – The student development coordinator participated in First Gen Faculty and Staff committee meetings and events. He has now accepted the position of secretary on the association.
  • Latino/Chicano Council – The student development coordinator was a part of the Latino/Chicano Council. He attended multiple events and multiple meetings.
  • Hiring Committees – with so many open positions on-campus, the director has been called to multiple search committees. In each of the search committees the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the forefront of evaluating each candidate.

III. Changes in Policies and Procedures

Our program has now accepted the largest cohort of online students in the liberal studies, sociology, and social work programs. These students have a wealth of diversity and needs that our program has identified as excellent candidates to receive support from our program. As we headed back to campus, the ability to serve and support online students was re-evaluated and led to our program deciding that we could easily serve online students. The students understand that they will have a different experience than our in-person student, and all of them are so thankful that we offer a connection to the university. The change to serve online students will give us the ability to continue to serve diverse students.

IV. Resources Summary

*Note: Fiscal year is based on a September 1, 2021 – August 31, 2022 timeline.

Staffing:

In July of 2021, our previous Student Development Coordinator took another job on-campus with Basic Needs. They were a backbone for our program and for many students. As a result of this, many students did not visit our office as frequently, since they had the strongest relationship with our Student Development Coordinator. Working with Chico State Enterprises to get the position posted also slowed us down much more than we would have liked. The open position, plus the retirement of our administrative support person left our program severely short staffed. The director was left to operate the program without much other support until October of 2021. Even after the new Student Development Coordinator was hired, a long training process commenced.

Facilities/Equipment:

N/A

V. Program Assessment of Past Year

Program Objectives (Performance Objectives required by the U.S. Department of Education)

1. Persistence: 69% of all students served by the SSS Project will persist from one academic year to the beginning of the next academic year or graduate.
   
   Of the 152* participants enrolled in 2020-21, 95% either graduated or have registered for the fall 2019 semester.
2. Good Academic Standing: 91% of all enrolled participants served by the SSS Project will meet the performance of good academic standing (2.0 or above).
   
   Of the 152* participants enrolled in 2020-21, 98% were in good academic standing (GPA above 2.0) by the end of the academic year.
3. Graduation: 59% of new participants served each year will graduate within six years.
   
   Of the 22 participants admitted into cohort 2016, 74% graduated within six years of their point of entry into the program.

*This does not include new first year participants or transfer participants admitted summer 2021.

Program Annual Objectives for 2020-2021

1. Recruit, hire, and successfully onboard a new Student Development Coordinator into our TRIO SSS program.
   
   Outcome: Enrique Galvan was successfully recruited and hired into the Student Development Coordinator position.
   Chico State Enterprises was going through an unplanned change in staffing during our recruitment and interviewing period. This showed as we slowly moved to get the position posted, receive all the applicants and have time to interview all of them. This change made it so that the entire process lasted close to 12 weeks. The loss of support to the program and our students was impactful. Meetings got held up and students didn’t have anyone in our office to make an appointment to ask questions.
   
   Our new Student Development Coordinator is working super hard for the program, but still has a lot to learn since he hasn’t spent an entire year in the position yet. During both semesters some time was lost due to paternity leave or not being hired yet. We continue to advocate to Chico State Enterprises to update their HR processes.
2. Compile and analyze recruitment data from the last three years of student recruitment in order to understand areas of improvement, areas of success, and areas that are broken. Use this data to continue to improve our recruitment and application process to yield healthy annual cohorts.
   
   Outcome: Successfully accomplished and currently active. With the implementation of our new application process, that incorporates Cognito forms, Qualtrics, and other emailing programs, we have been able to greatly increase how many applications we receive for our program. This has meant that we spend more time with more students who are potentially not eligible for our program, and we deny more applications into our program. This is a better problem to have compared to the low amount of applications our program received before making the changes to recruitment.
   In looking through the compiled data, we see that our annual applications have gone from 84 in 2019, 176 in 2020, and 218 in 2021. We continue to receive a lot of applications, but we still need to form more relationships to continue to make it easier for students to join our program.
3. Create a partnership with the STAR Center in order to increase male involvement in our TRIO SSS program, and offer programming to male identifying students in order to increase retention and participation in activities.
   
   Outcome: Partial Success and still needs work.
   In the fall of 2021, major changes occurred within the STAR Center at Chico State. The former director received another position in the CCLC, and respectfully moved most of his men’s programming with him into the CCLC. In moving to the CCLC, the men’s programming became slowed for the semester and didn’t allow for a lot of partnership with our program. The new STAR Center plans on having a stronger relationship with the Student Learning Center and have a more academic focus for all students. The partnership for men’s programming has been put on a brief hiatus until another opportunity presents itself.
   However, in spring 2022, our program took it upon ourselves to start looking at possible workshops or content that we can start planning for our own men’s programming. We do not plan on duplicating services, but instead plan on having our programming compliment the programming that is coming out of the CCLC.

VI. Ongoing Assessment Efforts

Demographic Reporting

Federal legislation requires that SSS participants must be first generation college students (neither parent has a four-year degree), come from a low-income background, and/or have a documented disability. Two-thirds of students must be both low-income and first generation. SSS met these demographic requirements in 2021-22.

• Gender – Female: 61% Male: 39%

VII. Analysis

• Continue to hire staff that is representative of the Chico State students and the students that we work with in the program. This goal includes both professional and student staff – with the latest transition of our past Student Development Coordinator in July 2021, this provides an opportunity for our program to continue to grow and diversify our staff. Our program primarily serves Hispanic first-generation students and it is important for university diversity, and representation that we have students that have staff that understand and have closely worked with students from similar backgrounds of those that we serve in our program. Our newest Student Development Coordinator is a person that comes from similar backgrounds as our students. He is a first-generation college student that was low-income. He is from northern California and knows what it’s like to come from a Hispanic family. He has already begun to form strong relationships with our students.
• Improve our First Year Experience seminar – Since taking over the first-year experience seminar, the course has suffered from poor planning and no direction. We have started looking at developing learning outcomes for the course and have directed course sessions for each meeting. We are heavily working with one of our Academic Coaches to develop a foundation for us to lesson plan each week and improve the course. As a liberal studies student with experience in the classroom he is pushing us in the right direction.
• Continue to increase recruitment efforts toward underrepresented groups – Having our new online students has given us the opportunity to work with new diverse students. Online students tend to be parents, formerly incarcerated, or facing higher difficulties with income. Working with these students has allowed us to further extend our services to students in need. This will mean that we will have different programming before classes get started, and during the semester more online programming will continue. Many of our online students will be from similar majors so we will do our best to create community with them online.
• Continue to seek and obtain supplemental funds – We have had fairly successful Giving Days in the past two years. Our fundraiser is more successful each year, but it isn’t enough to run our full program. It’ll be important to seek funding from other sources each year. The U.S Department of Education imposes strict guidelines governing the use of project funds to pay for food and hospitality. This presents a challenge when scheduling overnight field trips, as well as daylong workshops and trainings for project participants from low-income backgrounds who cannot afford to supply their own meals/accommodations. With the increase of need now that we are starting to use on-campus and in-person activity, it’ll be vital that we secure supplemental funds. We hope to continue with our successful fundraising campaign that we completed in February as part of the university’s Giving Day. These funds are extremely limited and will not cover the expenses of an entire year of programming.
• Continue to tie grant aid to completion of TRIO SSS agreements – Our TRIO Agreements continue to be such an important part of our success. We will continue to use each of our agreements at tools to meet our requirements from the Department of Education and help our students succeed. Quantitative (cumulative GPA) and qualitative (student evaluations) data for first year and 2nd year participants indicate that the activities required by the 1st and 2nd year student support plans have a positive impact on student success in all areas pre-identified as important by our competitive grant priorities.

VII. Program Objectives for the next academic year

Program Annual Objectives for 2022-2023

1. Collaborate with the Chico State Admissions Office in order to review the transcripts that their office receives from each of the students that also applies for our program.
2. Expand study sessions past the first year into the second and possible third year. Second year students often describe that they miss the weekly facilitated study sessions. This will allow us to give voluntary study sessions for our second-year students.
3. Grow our partnerships with Regional and Continuing Education to improve our service of online and virtual students who join our TRIO program.