Navigating the student journey: ASU Online’s commitment to student success

What does success look like? For EdPlus at Arizona State University it looks like tens of thousands of students accessing education online and achieving their dream of earning a degree.

In the United States, there are approximately 40 million learners who started college but did not earn a degree. The reasons vary but the outcome is the same: A student with some college but no degree. 

For Nancy Cervasio, deputy chief operating officer, it’s not enough to help a student enroll in a degree program. To be truly successful, universities need to support a student along their entire academic journey. 

She and her team of student success coaches are strategizing ways to make that happen. 

When student success coaching first launched for online students in 2010, ASU recorded an uptick in semester-to-semester retention by as much as 7%. 

By the time EdPlus reorganized its Success Center in 2016, it was ready to expand its coaching efforts beyond listening to students and engaging in meaningful conversations. 

“What we discovered was that we really needed to have not only the coaching aspect but the proactive outreach aspect so that we could influence student success,” Cervasio said. 

That meant reaching out to students rather than waiting for them to wander through the virtual doors.

Today, success coaches engage regularly with approximately 50,000 students each semester via telephone, text message and Slack.

Coaching roles have also expanded to include senior success coaches, re-entry coaches and financial intake specialists, all of whom work together to ensure learners are prepared financially, meet eligibility requirements, have required documentation and, yes, succeed in their classes. 

“We look at the student comprehensively and all the other unique variables and experiences that complete that person,” Cervasio said. “And we try to take that into consideration in how we work with them. Not only in the resources that we provide to them but the understanding of how other influences in their life affect their academic success and progress. And we try to customize the success coaching experience for each student based on that.”

According to Cervasio, coaches across the success center and re-entry team have engaged with 130,000 learners this year. That includes students who are currently enrolled and those that have temporarily stopped out. 

“If you say, ‘Oh my gosh, how is that?’” Cervasio said. “The success coaches don't drop the students the minute they're out of attendance. We stay with them and provide support to help them overcome the life situation that caused them to pause the pursuit of their degree. Once you're a Sun Devil, you're always a Sun Devil.”

Welcome back, Sun Devil

From the beginning, Cervasio recognized that proactive outreach couldn’t stop once a student decided to drop out. It needed to extend to stopped-out students, specifically students out of attendance for a year or longer.  

“It is at times when students stop out they need us the most,” she said. “Navigating a return can be emotionally challenging and we are here to help them through that process.”

Establishing the re-entry team was crucial. 

As the re-entry team reconnected with past students, the door to return to school cracked open and students began pouring through. 

Some students needed help resolving issues, including the challenges that pushed them out in the first place. The coaches were there to help.

Before Cervasio’s arrival at EdPlus, success coaching was contracted through a third party. Bringing the operation in-house allowed Cervasio to evolve the model and focus on helping learners navigate the larger university landscape and build affinity and a sense of connection to ASU. 

“Now we work with students from the time they first engage with us through graduation,” Cervasio said. “They will have a dedicated success coach, one person. That helps us create a bond and we have a relationship. There’s accountability. It shows ‘I’m someone you can count on.’”

That bond and accountability are especially important for students who might not have a network of support for their education. The success coach becomes that support system for them. 

According to Nicolette Miller, senior director of student success initiatives at EdPlus at ASU, while isolating the impact of coaching can be challenging, what has been observed is that the “continuing student” population and graduation rates have both been growing. 

“Many of our learners have attended other institutions prior to coming to ASU,” Miller said. “We seek to provide a different experience in which we truly care about them as individuals. We approach coaching from a relationship-first mindset. We know things can go wrong, but success coaches are here to be students’ advocates and help them reassess and move forward when things don’t always go right.” 

Thus, by introducing a coach and new strategies, students who may have historically stopped-out now demonstrate perseverance instead and stay in school.

What’s more, as of 2024, the re-entry team has successfully returned over 12,500 online students to classes. 

Of those students, over 2,100 have already graduated. 

“That shows that the coaching has influenced them,” Cervasio said. “Had we not established that team, they probably never would have come back. Our coaches deeply understand the student experience and know how powerful completing this goal, despite a temporary setback, means to them in their life’s trajectory. ”

Scaling success 

When looking at the evolution of the success coaching role, Cervasio is hard-pressed to recall any institution that invested in student success the way ASU has. 

“As more and more people would hear about us by visiting and coming to ASU Online, they started to try to start up their own programs,” Cervasio said. “It's not the same model in any two places. Some combine roles, success coaching and advising. I don't know that others have experienced the same retention increases that we had because of that, and then obviously the graduation outcomes that come from retention.”

As her team continues to reach out to current and stopped-out students -- 130,000 and counting -- she’s looking to scale her team’s efforts. 

“We've been able to increase the number of students we support because we introduced different technologies, different automations, and different services that we didn't have in the beginning,” she said. “Now coaches have the time, because of these enhancements, to work with the students in a more meaningful way.”

This year, ASU Online celebrates its 100,000th graduate, an achievement made possible in part because the Success Center evolved to serve the ever-growing and geographically diverse student body.   

Scaling the Success Center’s future efforts includes looking at emerging technologies that won’t detract from the student experience nor replace the human interaction that lies at the heart of the center’s success. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) sits at the forefront. Cervasio sees the new technology as a tool that will ultimately help deliver more timely responses, ensure the accuracy of responses and information, and assist with onboarding so that new coaches feel more capable of providing better services faster.  

Additionally, using AI to process questions and provide answers isn’t just beneficial for students looking for information, it gives capacity back to coaches to have more meaningful discourse with the students to whom they’re assigned. 

Perhaps most ambitious when scaling the Success Center is the idea that student success itself is scalable. 

The Student Success Center of the future looks beyond graduation to students’ career outcomes and personal goals. It identifies steps students can take within their program -- like earning a certificate -- that could have a positive influence on their career track even before they graduate.

Cervasio has already taken the first steps to expand student offerings into career coaching and beyond. 

“We're trying to focus a lot on student career outcomes, so that's why we're working with one of our partners on this career coaching piece and looking for new innovative career partnerships that are out there to give more resources and tools to our students, in addition to what ASU offers, that really align with today's market,” Cervasio said.