I. Mission Statement
The TRIO Student Support Services (SSS) program at CSU, Chico is committed to increasing the rates of academic achievement, retention, and graduation among historically underrepresented students. This is accomplished by providing holistic and individualized support services that maximize students’ innate abilities and draw upon available resources within and outside of the University to benefit students, families, and the larger community.
II. Accomplishments
- The TRIO team has successfully taken on the new STEM Peer Mentoring program. This is Chico State’s first non-federal award grant that comes from an HSI Innovation Hub at California State University, Northridge.
- The TRIO Director was the 2023 Tipping Point Summit chair and with a large help from the TRIO team the event was a success for over 211 attendees.
- In January 2023 we successfully transitioned our Student Development Coordinator. Against every attempt that Chico State Enterprises (CSE) tried, we were able to get our Student Development Coordinator hired. CSE listed the position incorrectly when posted, resulting in the annual salary being higher than originally budgeted for when the position was created. When asked about the discrepancy they pushed back and shared that our department would be responsible for the annual cost of the position as the salary offered to the employee could not be lower than what was posted. This was a major issue for our program as the annual cost would continue as long as the person was in the position. Luckily the candidate and the director corrected the mistake and bailed CSE out of their mistake. CSE was unwilling to hold itself accountable for the mistake.
- TRIO SSS purchased and implemented a new financial wellness platform, VicTreeFi. This was a missing part of our program as we had removed a Dave Ramsey product that did not match the values of our program. After seeing different programs, we decided to land with VicTreeFi as it would allow us to track student engagement hours and it would allow us to give students asynchronous work. After one semester of use, the program has been successful for staff and students. The program will grow into the next academic year.
- To grow our Life After College series, the program applied for a Board of Governor’s Award and successfully received $5,000 to support the series. The funds will go towards incentivizing attendance to TRIO workshops, events, and campus-wide programs that benefit students in their last year before graduating. Examples of events could be Career Fairs, Career Center workshops, Graduate Studies workshops, and other community events.
- In partnership with Academic Advising Programs, TRIO successfully wrote and received a Student Learning Fee award. This award will go toward supporting new transfer students that join our TRIO program by giving them more advising support. Our TRIO program has typically been a first-year student-focused program, and at times has neglected our transfer students. The grant will allow us to hire students to support the advising of the transfer students.
- Increased our partnership with AAP in our recruitment of interns to support our program.
- Continued to increase our support of online students. Online/Remote students have not typically been served by our program, but virtual learning has allowed us to rethink how we can serve online students. We have begun recruiting these students and working with these students. The students have responded well as they are often looking for a sense of community as remote students.
- Participated in the Advancing Equity Project 4 Team: Mentoring Network to ensure that TRIO could learn from the other support programs. The network includes First Year Experience program, Educational Opportunity Program, Black Leadership Mentoring Program, and Reach.
III. Diversity Efforts
- Diversified the representation of our staff men/women to be a better representation of the student population that we serve. In our key student staff, we also built a staff that is representative of the students we serve.
- Both the director and the student development coordinator have successfully completed the Avoiding Bias in Hiring, Undocumented Ally Training, and other campus training.
- We began and quickly grew our services for online virtual students to help them create a community at Chico State.
- Supported and volunteered during Latinx Graduation and Early Outreach and Support Programs Graduation
- Moved a large portion of our financial wellness programming to an online platform in order to make the work asynchronous. The program allows us to track student engagement hours and minutes on the program, and we use this to allow students to work on the topics during their own time. We did see an increased engagement and a higher quality of discussion as part of the outcome of this change to the program.
- For the first time since virtual learning, we offered our remote students an online Student Transfer Enrichment Program.
- Annually we offer a parent/guest welcomes in Spanish and English.
- Our student staff that was available participated in the Dreamer Ally training in the spring 2023 semester. This allows us to better serve students from different citizenship statuses and mixedstatus families.
IV. Program Statisitics and Assesment for Past Year
- 69% We achieved a sixty-nine percent persistence rate amongst our TRIO students ● 94% of our students were in good academic standing during the academic year.
- 74% student graduation rate achieved during the academic year.
- 182 total students served
- 1648 total meetings with students in an academic year. For a program that serves 182 students, we remain a high-contact program with excellent results. This meeting count (taken from a Microsoft Bookings report) means that we met with each student an average of nine times.
- 32 students successfully graduated in the 2022-23 academic year.
- 462 of our 1648 meetings were directly related to financial wellness support for our TRIO students.
- 365 of our 1648 meetings were directly related to career readiness support for our TRIO students.
- We wrote over 60 letters of recommendation to support our student’s Wildcat Scholarship applications.
V. Key Objectives for Next Academic Year
- Our program will increase our financial wellness support to our first- and second-year students. As we continue to grow our use of online financial wellness platforms and restructure the TRIO course, we will redesign the first- and second-year financial wellness services that we give students.
- Transition our mentor hiring and fall course to be aligned with the Advancing Equity Project’s Mentoring Network. The Mentoring Network includes FYE, EOP, REACH, and BLMP and has a spring mentoring course planned for Spring 2024. This course will take our mentoring students and get them trained on common mentoring practices with students from the other program. Our current hiring practices don’t align with the spring mentoring course but we hope to move into alignment once we know that the spring course has been fully developed for the spring semester.
- Serve and report on forty students in the STEM Peer Mentoring program. The STEM Peer Mentoring grant will come to completion at the end of November 2023. The grant was written to have forty students served by the coordinator and fourteen mentors. The goal is to meet these promises and be able to successfully continue the project if more funding becomes available.