Winthrop is an example of higher education success in SC

With Gov. Henry McMaster’s inaugural address laying out the need for bold education reform, those of us in higher education are watching as the General Assembly focuses on how to improve teaching and learning in the Palmetto State.

We only have to look as far as the statistical abstract of the Commission on Higher Education to see Winthrop’s success story with graduation rates. In the most recent abstract (2017), Winthrop exceeds the average for the public comprehensive teaching institutions for the 2010 cohort for 4-year, 5-year and 6-year graduation rates.

Even better, as of fall 2018, 61.4 percent of the 2013 cohort of students have graduated within six years, and there is still room for that number to increase as more students could graduate this spring or summer. This year’s rate will be the highest ever, or at least the highest as far back as we have data to compare.

This success is a particular point of pride for Winthrop, and it signals that we will surpass our own 2025 target (61 percent) for graduation rate that is among the metrics for our strategic plan, the Winthrop Plan.

Moreover, the time to graduation is decreasing for Winthrop students. Since 2013, the percentage of students graduating in four years or less has gone from 35.9 percent to 46.5 percent, an increase of more than 10 percentage points. Decreasing the time to graduation is important to our students and their families and helps to lower student debt and gets them into the work force or on to graduate school more quickly.

Our success in graduation rates extends to minority student achievement as well. In the Education Trust’s national report on black student success, Winthrop was listed as No. 2 in the nation for top-performing public institutions. At that time, Winthrop’s black student average 6-year graduation rate of 59.7 percent was 5.1 percentage points higher than the average graduation rate of the university’s white students and 14 percentage points above the national black student average graduation rate.

These achievements would not be possible without the work of the Winthrop community in creating a supportive, inclusive environment for every student to succeed. We have found that, in order to graduate students at a higher rate than some of our peers, our efforts must focus on how to best retain all of our students and help them persevere when they face academic and other obstacles.

We have a long list of Winthrop initiatives to address retention and move students to graduation more quickly, including creating more online and second half of semester courses to allow students to stay on track, checking on new student grades at mid-term, and offering peer academic coaching in addition to our Academic Success Center tutoring programs, to name a few. Moving forward, we will continue to expand high-impact practices like undergraduate research and study abroad, which have been shown to increase student retention.

Continuing to improve retention and graduation rates are important to our ultimate goal to become a national model for a student-centered university experience.

When legislators talk about successes and best practices in higher education in 2019, I hope Winthrop will be prominent in their discussions.