Demonstrating the value of a first-year leadership experience

Strategic question: Does participation in Emerging Leaders align with stronger academic progress, continued enrollment, graduation, and later campus engagement?

• Evidence Connected | Emerging Leaders participation records were connected to term GPA, retention, graduation, demographic characteristics, and later involvement data from Fall 2012 through Spring 2024.
• Analysis Revealed | Participants had a 0.39-point higher average term GPA and a 9-point higher one-year retention rate than first-year peers. They also demonstrated significantly higher 4-, 5-, and 6-year graduation rates. All told, 85% of Emerging Leaders went on to participate in another program, organization, or initiative, compared with 47% of peers.
• Action Informed | The findings created an evidence base for decisions about sustaining, strengthening, and potentially scaling first-year leadership development—and for communicating its value beyond participation counts.

LEADERSHIP TAKEAWAY: A focused leadership experience can be evaluated as part of the broader student-success strategy, not only as a developmental program.

Reframing campus employment as a student-success strategy

Strategic question: Is on-campus employment simply a source of income—or is it also associated with student persistence and graduation?

• Evidence Connected | Employment duration and division were connected to enrollment, persistence, graduation, GPA, first-generation status, and student characteristics across more than 88,000 undergraduates from Spring 2018 through Fall 2025.
• Analysis Revealed | Student employees outperformed non-employed peers across retention, persistence, and graduation. Even one term of employment was associated with more than twice the odds of persistence; four or more terms were associated with more than twelve times the odds. Advantages remained after matched comparison analysis.
• Action Informed | The evidence supported an institutional initiative to expand on-campus student employment opportunities and strengthen compensation—positioning campus jobs as an investment in student success as well as financial support.

LEADERSHIP TAKEAWAY: Campus employment can be managed as a strategic student-success lever. The leadership question shifts from “How many jobs?” to “How do we expand access to high-quality employment experiences?”

Targeting engagement as a pathway to persistence and graduation

Strategic question: Where should leaders focus to strengthen persistence, graduation, and connection for first-generation students?

• Evidence Connected | More than a decade of institutional data connected first-generation status with GPA, persistence, graduation, sense of community, and engagement across Student Affairs programs and experiences.
• Analysis Revealed | First-generation students reported a sense of community comparable to continuing-generation peers, while historical academic outcome gaps were modest and narrowing. Engagement emerged as a strong differentiator: highly engaged first-generation students were more than four times as likely to persist and nearly three times as likely to graduate within four years as non-engaged peers.
• Action Informed | The findings supported approval to expand first-generation programming and sharpened the strategy toward increasing meaningful connection to leadership, mentoring, recreation, and student organizations.

LEADERSHIP TAKEAWAY: The most actionable insight was not simply who faced a gap. It was where the institution had a practical lever: creating more pathways into meaningful campus engagement.