How the University of Kentucky and University of Connecticut are building stronger connections across academic and student affairs to create a more integrated approach to student success.
For decades, higher education has divided much of the student experience along a familiar line. Academic affairs focuses on what happens in the classroom. Student affairs supports much of what happens around it.
That distinction may make sense on an organizational chart. It makes considerably less sense from the perspective of a student.
“They don’t see an org chart,” said Kirsten Turner, the vice president for Student Success at the University of Kentucky (UK). “They don’t see the different units and where they ladder up, and they don’t experience their time as a siloed experience.”
Instead, students simply know they attend UK.
That premise has helped guide a decade-long effort at UK to integrate areas responsible for the student experience. It has also shaped the way Turner and her colleagues define student success, organize their teams and use data to determine when and how to intervene.
More than 800 miles away, the University of Connecticut (UConn) has been working toward a similar goal through a somewhat different structure. Dr. Tadarrayl M. Starke, the vice provost for Student Success, sits within Academic Affairs, but his portfolio and partnerships regularly cross the traditional boundary into Student Life.
The two institutions offer different models for addressing a challenge becoming more pressing across higher education: If institutions are serious about improving retention, graduation and the overall student experience, academic affairs and student affairs have to understand their roles as interconnected.
For student affairs executives, the conversation is taking on added urgency as presidents and provosts increasingly expect their divisions to demonstrate how they contribute to institutional measures of student success.
Turner hears the question regularly from colleagues around the country.
“Colleagues are saying, ‘My president or my provost is putting pressure on me about my team’s role in student success, and we don’t have a good definition of what that is,’” said Turner.
According to Turner, the opportunity begins with creating that definition together.
Defining Student Success Together
The phrase “student success” can carry very different meanings depending on where someone sits within an institution.
Turner sees that firsthand because her role crosses areas that have historically approached the subject differently.
Academic leaders may look closely at bottleneck courses, DFW rates, persistence and graduation. Student affairs leaders are more likely to think about belonging, engagement and well-being.
Both perspectives describe factors that influence whether a student ultimately succeeds.
“I personally think that there’s a space of understanding what we mean by student success, and understanding how you build that holistically,” said Turner.
UK has spent years building a framework around that broader definition.
The university identifies four interconnected factors that influence whether students succeed or fail: academic readiness and success; belonging; financial stability; and mental and physical well-being.
Those categories intentionally cross traditional institutional boundaries.
Academic readiness may involve advising, tutoring or classroom performance. Belonging encompasses areas such as residential life, student organizations and fraternity and sorority life. Financial stability includes financial aid, basic needs and financial wellness. Mental and physical well-being brings in areas such as recreation and counseling.
The framework reflects the way students actually experience challenges.
A student working two jobs may have difficulty getting to a tutoring center. Falling behind academically can create stress. Financial pressure, academics and well-being begin to overlap.
“We depict it as a swirl because we know that those four intersect,” explained Turner. “We have yet to find a student who leaves us that we can’t map [the reason being] to one or more of those four areas.”
At UConn, Starke similarly sees student success as a concept capable of bringing different parts of the institution together.
“I like to look at student success being that kind of unifying idea,” said Starke. “It’s about how do they succeed in the class, but also how do they connect, build belonging, see their value, and see how they matter at the institution.”
Those dimensions reinforce each other.
“Students won’t do as well in class if they don’t feel that they belong or feel connected to the institution,” said Starke.
That creates a broader responsibility for both sides of campus. Academic affairs contributes to the student’s sense of progress and purpose. Student affairs creates experiences and conditions that can strengthen what happens academically.
“It requires all of us together to be able to help that student be successful,” said Starke. “At UConn, we look at holistic student success, not just how are you doing in class, but what are the metrics of persistence and graduation. We’re looking at how does a student feel they connect? How do they feel they connect and belong at the institution?”
Organizing Around the Student Experience
UK’s approach has resulted in significant structural integration.
Turner’s portfolio brings together teams responsible for different pieces of the student experience within a common framework. The Office for Student Success is organized around the same four dimensions UK uses to understand student success: academic readiness and success, belonging, financial stability, and mental and physical well-being.
That alignment creates a common way of approaching the work. The four dimensions guide how UK organizes its teams, structures its data and evaluates interventions.
The benefit becomes especially clear when the university identifies a need or wants to try something new. Leaders from the four areas already work as part of the same broader team and come together frequently.
“If we want to implement something new, you got everybody from all the different student experiences lined up, and we can all row in the same direction in ways that allows us to shift and try new things at a really fast speed,” said Turner.
UConn demonstrates that institutions can also build integration across existing divisional lines.
Starke works in the Provost’s Office and Academic Affairs, while many of the initiatives he described are intentionally co-created with colleagues in Student Life.
One example is UConn’s Student Success Conference. Starke co-leads the effort with a colleague in Student Life, with employees from both divisions helping plan and facilitate the program.
“We bring together a committee of folks from both sides, both divisions, to be able to plan what does this look like and how do we help our staff become better practitioners to engage our students?” said Starke.
The same approach extends to peer leadership development. Academic Affairs and Student Life bring their programs and staff together to train student leaders.
UConn also used a cross-functional task force to rethink the first-year experience. Leaders and practitioners from Student Life and Academic Affairs worked together across UConn’s campuses to consider what should define the experience for a first-year student.
Residential learning communities provide another example. Although learning communities sit within Academic Affairs, their success depends on coordination with campus housing. Residence hall staff and RAs work alongside student mentors and faculty directors so their programming complements rather than competes with one another.
The partnerships can extend further depending on the focus of the community. A wellness learning community, for example, creates an opportunity to involve Student Health and Wellness.
The operating philosophy is straightforward: identify where expertise already exists and bring those people into the work.
“I don’t have to recreate the wheel,” said Starke. “I don’t have to do your job for you, but I know you’re a willing partner. Can we work together at doing this?”
Building a Shared View of the Student
Organizational collaboration can only go so far when every office is working from a different set of information.
UK has made data integration another component of its integrated student success strategy.
A decade ago, Turner said, the university had dozens of separate systems of record. A career center might know when a student used its services. Campus recreation had another system. Advising had its own information.
Today, those data flow into a common environment that gives the university a much more comprehensive view of student behavior and outcomes.
“We’ve got one data warehouse, one data lake,” said Turner.
UK has also developed an in-house predictive model using roughly 30 variables associated with retention. The university can estimate retention and graduation probabilities at both the individual and aggregate levels, allowing leaders to examine groups ranging from residence hall populations to advising caseloads.
The model changes as the university learns more about a student.
Midterm grades can be incorporated. Academic and behavioral alerts can contribute additional information. UK tracks certain student engagement activity through ID-card swipes. An entering freshman survey adds another layer of information about expectations and preparedness.
For leaders, that creates opportunities to identify patterns across populations. For practitioners, it can provide context around an individual student’s experience.
“If everyone shares the notes, if everyone shares the data analytics, you can log on and say, ‘Oh, okay, I see that this student just met with their financial aid counselor,’” explained Turner. “If you have that fuller picture, I think that helps.”
That fuller picture can inform support when a student is struggling and help institutions connect students to opportunities when things are going well.
UConn has also invested in tools that cross divisional lines. Its homegrown Nexus platform began as an advising platform but has expanded to include mentoring, activity check-ins and communication across different areas.
An advisor might be able to see that a student attended a particular program. Information from another student-facing office can help an advisor identify a concern or recommend an opportunity. Patterns in where students engage can also help staff identify potential partnerships.
“It gives us a common tool that we can use,” said Starke.
The technology itself is only part of the equation.
“It starts with leadership,” said Starke. “It includes intentionality. And then having tools where we can communicate across division lines is important as well.”
Keeping the Academic Mission at the Center
Greater integration also asks student affairs leaders to understand the work and priorities of their academic colleagues.
Turner brings a particular perspective to that relationship. She spent the first 12 years of her career at UK in the College of Arts and Sciences before moving into her current work.
“The colleges and the academic programs are the core of what we do, right?” said Turner. “And the educational experience is the core of the students, why they’re there.”
Student affairs provides much of the infrastructure that allows students to take full advantage of that educational experience.
Students need places to live and eat. They need opportunities to develop relationships. They need financial support, co-curricular experiences and resources that help them remain mentally and physically healthy.
“All of that is important, it’s critical in order to do it, but it’s never losing sight that the core experience is the education between the faculty members and the students,” said Turner. “And so how are we rowing collectively to help that really critical and centrally important experience?”
That perspective gives student affairs executives a useful starting point for conversations with provosts, deans and faculty.
The connection between the divisions becomes easier to establish when student affairs can demonstrate how its work supports the institution’s educational mission and when academic leaders recognize the conditions outside the classroom that influence what happens inside it.
Starke sees considerable room for that exchange.
Student affairs can extend classroom learning through experiential opportunities. Academic partners can help student affairs understand and respond to academic barriers. Staff from both areas can contribute expertise without needing to own every part of the solution.
At UConn, that exchange has become part of the regular way people work. “It’s really just a continuous conversation back and forth,” said Starke.
Moving From Handoffs to Shared Responsibility
The deeper change underway at institutions such as UK and UConn may ultimately be cultural.
For UK, the starting point is the idea that students should not have to understand the institution’s internal structure to receive support.
“We try to really operate from the student’s perspective,” said Turner.
That affects policies, processes and the handoffs that inevitably occur among offices. Anything happening behind the scenes should remain there as much as possible.
“The student shouldn’t have to be navigating that space,” said Turner. “It should all just be seamless.”
UConn approaches the same idea by putting the student at the center of conversations across divisions.
For Starke, successful collaboration requires leaders to move beyond questions of ownership and recognition. “It’s not so much, ‘Who’s getting credit for this, and how do we own this piece here?’” he said. “But it is really conversations and how we can move forward to support our students.”
That mindset may be increasingly important as student affairs executives take on greater responsibility for institutional student success goals.
Turner said she is frequently contacted by colleagues trying to understand how UK brought its various pieces together. The questions reflect the changing expectations surrounding student affairs leadership.
UK and UConn offer two ways of beginning to answer that question.
One has spent a decade aligning organizational structure, data and interventions around a common student success framework. The other has developed deliberate connections across Academic Affairs and Student Life through shared programs, systems and leadership.
Both approaches begin in the same place: with the experience of the student.
At UConn, Starke’s title places student success within the Provost’s Office. He is quick to point out that the responsibility extends far beyond his position.
“My role in student success, again, I have student affairs, I have academic affairs. I am out of the Provost office,” said Starke. “But it is that reimagining that student success is not an academic thing, it’s not a student affairs thing, that is truly one of those — it spans all divisions, all units.”
His final point captures the direction both institutions are moving toward.
“It’s my work, it’s all of our work,” said Starke. “Student success requires both.”
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With more than a decade of experience in B2B journalism, Rachel Chonko is Editor-in-Chief of Student Affairs Executive and Peake Media. She specializes in connecting leaders with the ideas, strategies and peers that can help them navigate complex challenges and strengthen their organizations.
Through Student Affairs Executive, Rachel works closely with senior student affairs leaders across higher education to explore the issues commanding executive attention — from student success, data and assessment to organizational strategy, financial leadership, technology and stakeholder engagement. Her reporting is grounded in conversations with the leaders doing the work, with an emphasis on practical insights, institutional case studies and peer perspectives.
Rachel also helps shape the Student Affairs Executive Summit, an intimate, discussion-driven event designed to bring senior student affairs leaders together for candid conversations, relationship building and shared problem-solving.
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