Building Toward Student Success: Rationale
Rationale
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The State University of New York at Fredonia embraces a student-centered focus that emphasizes learning and teaching as a core institutional value. Faculty and staff engage as partners across divisions, units, and departments in the common goal of helping all students succeed. The university is reevaluating institutional policies to ensure that they support, rather than inhibit student success; it is revising official communications to students so that they are clear and supportive, reflecting institutional values of student success; it is providing faculty and staff with extensive professional development in best practices for student success; it is implementing effective retention programs focused on the most vulnerable students, first-year, second-year, and lower-division transfer students; and it is reimagining campus spaces to encourage and support engagement among faculty, staff, and students.
Student support services at Fredonia are currently located in at least eight buildings across the campus. As a result, students often travel from building to building looking for the right office or department to assist them. Furthermore, the physical discontinuity creates challenges for student support services to work collaboratively in support of students. One-person offices work without support, creating inefficiencies in the organization. Fredonia’s initiative, Building for Student Success, will centralize students support services in two adjacent buildings. Daniel Reed Library will be renovated to house an academic commons sufficient to support 21st century learners, and Jewett Hall will be renovated to house a one-stop Student Success Center. Physically aligned with the Williams Center, these buildings will form a student success corridor in the heart of the campus.