Track graduation rates and time to degree by academic major and department to establish where academic delays are most prevalent. Have chairs assess their course offerings over the last four years to determine whether students could have completed their degrees within four years given the courses that were offered and when.

1. Establish financial aid tags and alerts, including early SAP and CPoS status information, and make them accessible to interdivisional enrollment, student success, and support staff. EAB Navigate affords VCU the opportunity to activate financial alerts to advisors.The Student Financial Management Center (SFMC) and the Office of the Registrar should regularly participate in cross-campus and interdivisional training sessions for faculty and staff on how students access resources to resolve their financial issues.
2. Leverage university messaging systems–including texts–to send students personalized nudges indicating specific aspects of the financial aid and scholarship application processes they need to complete with links to assistance.
3. Set up alerts for students with balances, financial holds, SAP issues, or running out of aid eligibility. Use communication systems to reach out proactively to students to offer steps for resolving financial issues. Leverage staff across student support units—e.g., advising, registration—to help proactively reach out to students identified as financially at-risk.

1. Implement and scale VCU’s centralized strategy to focus available scholarships and student financial aid resources toward positively affecting student retention and academic progression, coordinated by the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships (OFAS). Determine available student-oriented funds across the institution, assess how they are awarded to students, and analyze ways they may be reappropriated to maximize their use.
2. Determine funding plan to continue implementing and scaling retention and completion grants–small, analytics-based grants awarded proactively to students who can either not pay a small fraction of fees and fall under Financial Aid’s centralized strategy or students close to graduating who are running out of eligibility for grants and aid. When well administered, the grants pay for themselves.
3. Implement and scale anaid-retention/recovery program strategically targeting students no longer eligible for aid, such as the VGAP and Virginia Commonwealth Award, but can earn eligibility back in a limited window.

1. Use coordinated communications originating from the Financial Success Center to promote financial wellness to support and increase awareness of financial wellness resources and services. Ensure all faculty and student support staff are prepared to deliver these resources and can direct students to financial wellness support staff for additional assistance. Assess the effectiveness of financial wellness outreach as a part of VCU’s journey mapping process. This step may require a charge from leadership to coordinate OFAS and the SFMC with the FSC to ensure that each unit is operationalizing the centralized financial aid communications strategy.
2. The bandwidth for VCU’s financial aid staff is limited. Employ a centralized, data-informed approach to drive the creation of a robust outreach component that systematically delivers financial wellness supports for students when problems are first identified by the data and staff. The creation of effective and proactive financial wellness structures will expand capacity by helping address financial issues before they arise.

1. Use the results of the mapping process to have the SCC develop and propose a better designed system of coordinated communications —one that makes it clear to students the issues that are to be prioritized and that delivers these messages in an impactful fashion that cuts through the current communications clutter and institutional jargon.
2. Commit to a process of standardizing the timing and content of the communications most critical to student enrollment and academic success. This process will be aided by limiting the offices that can send mass emails to VCU students (for instance, blast messages to large student groups) to no more than a few, such as the Registrar, Financial Aid, and the central communications team. Other units wishing to send mass emails will send them forward, where they can be vetted for content and style, prioritized for timing, and sent out in a coordinated fashion.

1. Use student data proactively to support coordinated, centralized student communications by delivering personalized emails and texts to students based upon their individual needs rather than blasting mass messages to large groups of students or having multiple offices reach out to individual students in an uncoordinated fashion.Such coordinated, data-informed communications will support advisors, financial aid staff, and other support staff by reducing confusion and off-loading frequently asked questions.
2. Expand the use of texting to all students with the help of scaling the use of the AI-enhanced chatbot to aid students in navigating registration and resolving academic issues from matriculation through graduation. Impacts of this approach have been shown to disproportionately benefit students from underserved backgrounds.
3. Run all texting nudges and messages through a central chatbot team that can coordinate the number and cadence of text messages being sent to students and thus help to minimize students who “opt out” of texting because of irrelevant or excessive messaging.

1. Empower the Academic Advising Administrators Committee (AAAC) to play a prescriptive role in standardizing policies, procedures, and practices for all advisors and ensuring all VCU students receive a standard quality of support from academic advising across institutional units and colleges. The AAAC should work to ensure that a student’s chances of graduating do not depend on whether the student is fortunate enough to be assigned differences in resources and ratios across the institution. The AAAC should be empowered by the President and Provost and co-chaired by the AVP of University Advising and Technologies and another member of the Provost’s Leadership team, and it should include cross-divisional leadership and representation from advising leads from across campus. The AAAC must meet at least on a monthly basis.
2. Charge the AAAC with operationalizing established, optimized, and accurate advising caseloads—including students who have not registered but require proactive outreach from their assigned advisor. Implementing and scaling SMART Ratios will allow units to focus resources on students who most need support.
3. The AAAC must be responsible for ensuring the seamless transition of students between majors. Appoint a small group of professional advisors as transition advisors—either using cross training or integrating this into VCU’s advising career ladder—to help standardize the change of major process and assist students in leveraging degree maps when moving between majors and to advise students on the impacts on time-to-degree and wasted credit hours of various options. Require that students meet with a transition advisor when moving between majors.

1. Develop and deploy up-to-date Student Educational Planner (SEP) degree plans proactively by using them in all advising sessions with students, having advisors work to ensure students are registered for appropriate courses before the start of the term, and guiding students to make informed decisions.This exposure to degree plans will help students better understand where they are progressing and what classes they should take in upcoming semesters for graduation. Additionally, leveraged degree plans will help advisors track courses students need to ensure timely progression and graduation. Collaborate with departments to keep degree plans up to date in the bulletin and DegreeWorks.
2. Operationalize the most critical, established “early alerts” at scale across campus as documented in the Shared Advising Commitments document to ensure that all advisors address problems students are facing before the students drop out.
3. Broaden the financial indicators visible to advisors by including early SAP status information about the students to lessen the impact of late-cycle SAP appeals and equip advisors with basic financial information to make sure that students’ academic choices are compatible with their financial realities.

1. Develop and employ a standardized calendar for launching targeted advising campaigns, population review, and monthly email or text communication. Partner with SEMSS communications team to determine which messages should originate from advising on a communications calendar for advising as a part of the institution’s ongoing journey mapping project. See: Advising Campaigns | NISS
2. Institute a protocol for advisors to review student registration records pre-term. Proactively reach out to students who have registered for off-map courses before the start of the term to help them register more appropriate courses.
3. Importantly, each of these strategies will require an institutional assessment of resources necessary to support the ideal advising ecosystem at VCU.