Co-Curricular Engagement Matters

Shay Little, Vice President for Student Affairs, Georgia Southern University

Shay Little, Vice President for Student Affairs, Georgia Southern University

John Morgan, Ed.D., is Director of Technology at Menifee Union School District in California. He oversees district technology strategy, infrastructure and instructional systems, drawing on experience as a chemistry teacher. He also founded Edasi Systems to develop affordable classroom AV control solutions.

I believe in the transformative power of higher education and the impact student engagement has on student success. There is significant data showing the connection between student engagement in the classroom with student success. With respect to student engagement in the co-curricular environment, data has been collected and analysed inconsistently. In addition, there were not technological tools available to easily track student co-curricular engagement.

For nearly 32 years, I have worked in student affairs in higher education. I see students leading, learning and having impact in campus jobs, in registered student organizations, and pursuing their own passions. In the last few years, I have advocated using technology to show the correlation between student co-curricular engagement and student success. I always believed that co-curricular engagement positively impacted student success; I could share numerous accounts where I watched students propel their success through co-curricular involvement. But, I never had data to prove it or assess it. If I did have any data, it was in targeted areas and not across many types of engagement.

As an example, our team has shown that students affiliated with a fraternity or sorority show first year retention of 90 percent while unaffiliated students retain at 76 percent. In addition, Campus Recreation and Intramurals reports that first year students who utilize the recreation facilities 20 or more times in the academic year retain at 83% while students who never utilize the facilities retain at 71 percent.

“While my belief in the transformative power of engagement was once rooted in observation, it is now reinforced by the undeniable data.”

For the past five years, our team tracks student attendance at events sponsored by units across campus, not only those events hosted by student affairs. This data is then aligned with our student system academic data to show its relationship to student success. Our institution partners with Modern Campus using Involve to track student attendance. As one example, the Office of Student Activities reports that first-year students attending student activities events retain at 84 percent while students never attending student activities events retain at 72 percent. More broadly, our institution’s partnership with Liaison to implement Othot, a retention model, shows a significant relationship between co-curricular engagement and retention. When our institution shared data such as student credits earned, term grade point average, courses passed, financial standing, other academic progress indicators and co-curricular engagement; student attendance at co-curricular events was the 6th most impactful characteristic. The Othot model showed us that for first year students, attending 8.3 events in the fall term was the average attendance for retained students (to the second year) whereas for unretained students, the average event attendance was 5.5.

We had calculated retention information from our Involve data showing that first year students who attended 10 or more events retained to the following fall at several percentage points higher than the institutional average. When collected and assessed alongside key academic data, our student engagement information was impactful in our mission to see students persist to graduation. Student engagement does matter.

Like any initiative requiring change, our process to use Involve has been challenging. We use student IDs to track student attendance and in our first year, the technology we used to scan IDs (essentially scanning bar codes) was cumbersome. As tracking student engagement has become a university priority and our IT partners have implemented tools (mobile reader devices) that allow us to capture student attendance in a more efficient manner, we have seen exponential growth in total and unique student attendees we track each year. I believe the technology makes the process of capturing the data easier and now we can talk broadly of the impact of student co-curricular data across the institution. We have distributed card readers to units across the institution and our team works with liaisons in departments to train them on the Presence tool and how to set up events and collect attendance information.

From the start, I talked with my cabinet colleagues about how using this technology could tell our story of the impact of student co-curricular engagement. My provost colleague was immediately a strong ally and advocated for the use of Presence in academic units. I share reports each semester filled with basic information about student engagement so university leadership sees what is happening across campus.

32 years ago, I never could have imagined how we would use this new technology to tell our story about how student engagement is meaningful and impactful. Today, I still believe co-curricular engagement matters but now I have data and documentation to show it. While my belief in the transformative power of engagement was once rooted in observation, it is now reinforced by the undeniable data that proves student involvement is a cornerstone of institutional success. Yes indeed, engagement matters.