Sam Houston State University

The Challenge

Manual degree planning contributed to unnecessary workload and graduation delays at Sam Houston State University.

Results

• Smart Plan's automated and personalized degree planning simplifies students' academic journeys
• Smart Plan facilitates support and retention of at-risk students
• Transfer-in students experience streamlined, optimized paths to completion
• Early indications show a rise in student satisfaction feedback

Sam Houston State University (SHSU) is a public four-year higher education institution located in Huntsville, TX, an hour's drive north from Houston. In Fall 2021, they deployed Ellucian Smart Plan — an academic planning platform that tailors plans for each student and automatically adjusts them for any changes — making on-time completion not possible, but probable. Since then, the university has enjoyed a number of benefits. Advisors can reallocate time for more meaningful dialogue, students can register more confidently, and everyone can understand how plan changes impact the cost of education.

Megan St. Vigne, Associate Vice President of Enrollment Success at Sam Houston State University, explained why SHSU adopted Smart Plan and how it's improving enrollment, simplifying registration, and bolstering retention.

Helping Students Map Their Futures with Smart Plan

SHSU serves a population of roughly 20,000 students, a high proportion of which transfer in and/or are first-generation students. St. Vigne was frequently told by advisors that these students wished to see their entire educational path from admission to graduation.

"Nine times out of 10, a transfer student in their first meeting [says] 'Tell me how much longer I have'," St. Vigne said.

In the past, advisors manually extracted course catalogs from software and mapped out student classes by hand – a time-consuming process that diverted time from other student support tasks. Additionally, students often dropped critical sequencing courses without consulting advisors. Some of these courses are only offered during the fall or spring semester, delaying time-to-graduation rates by as much as a year.

St. Vigne said that SHSU needed a planning tool that empowered students to visualize their entire educational path. The tool had to offer real-time plan updates, allowing students to see the financial and educational impacts of schedule changes instantly. They selected Smart Plan for its ability to provide these features and more.

"[Smart Plan] makes that planning piece, of finishing out their curriculum here, so much smoother," she said. "It helps change the conversation that takes place in that initial meeting with a student. Instead of all course planning, [advisors] can start providing some of that wraparound support for the student straight off the bat, instead of having to wait to the next time they see the student."

Simplifying the Registration Process with Real-Time Class Availability

Academic planning and registration are two sides of the same coin, but generic online forms, errors, changing seat availability, and other hurdles have caused problems for registration in the past. Smart Plan revolutionizes course registration by allowing students to register directly from their plan, reducing errors that reduce on-time completion. Without it, students are more likely to encounter errors that cost them and the school time and money. Smart Plan also instantly shows students which classes are full and offers real-time alternatives. Without Smart Plan, students would have little in the way of a backup plan in case some of those courses filled up prior to the students registration window.

"[Smart Plan] streamlined the registration process for a lot of our students," St. Vigne said. "We don't see as many hiccups when registration cycles open. Students have gotten in, they've planned everything and they hit their button and everything's good. It seems to go smoother than it did; it just is more intuitive for our students. We see fewer issues because it's more user-friendly."

Smart Plan Empowers Students and Streamlines Advising

Smart Plan gives students ownership and a new degree of independence in their postsecondary education journey.

"The students are becoming more of their own advocate," St. Vigne said. "They're getting in and using the plan. They like it, they drag and drop things around and they're contacting their advisors and saying 'Hey, can you check my plan that I made? I think this is going to work.'"

"It killed two birds with one stone for us in that it reduced some of the manual workload for our advisors and is teaching our students to be more self-sufficient."

St. Vigne noted that SHSU advisors are committed to maintaining strong engagement with students. With less focus placed on manual academic planning, advisors can provide more focused efforts on meaningful student interactions. Students who do not persist to another term are known as "stop outs" at SHSU, and this increased ability to provide more holistic interactions has allowed advisors to proactively support students at risk of stopping out, ensuring that they receive timely assistance and guidance to stay on track with their academic journey.

"Now that [advisors have started] to have more time in their schedules they can do some of that more holistic outreach to try and retain our students, whereas before there was no bandwidth," St. Vigne said.

SHSU Sees Improvements in Student Satisfaction with Smart Plan Integration

St. Vigne highlighted the positive impact of Smart Plan's planning and registration capabilities. With more effective advising, easier registration, and clearer academic roadmaps for students, SHSU has observed notable improvements in student satisfaction during the registration process. Previously, their student satisfaction rating fluctuated between 3.0 and 3.8 on a five-point scale. However, since fully implementing Smart Plan, the average weekly rating has risen to between 4.1 and 4.4, with several weeks achieving perfect scores of five.

"There is still room for improvement," St. Vigne acknowledged, "but we've certainly seen a significant boost in how students perceive their course planning and registration experience."

She emphasized that these results demonstrate how other higher education institutions can also benefit from Smart Plan by ensuring comprehensive support across advising units and gaining buy-in from department chairs and IT teams. "They've been really integral in helping support and keep this moving," St. Vigne said.

Planning for Additional Future Degree Optimization

As SHSU continues to use Smart Plan on campus, they're also evolving their processes for helping students get credentials. The university will soon launch a new college within SHSU, Polytechnic College, that will be a workforce-based college, and St. Vigne said that she plans on building out more associate degrees within Smart Plan. This will ensure the new college enjoys the quicker, clearer, easier planning and registration processes that the existing schools do now. Additionally, it will assist students in seamlessly transitioning from an associate degree to a bachelor's degree, leveraging Smart Plan's efficiency in both time and cost.

"It's a stackable credential and I think Smart Plan is going to help a ton," St. Vigne said.

SHSU is also in the process of implementing Ellucian Award, a solution that analyzes higher education students' academic experience and determines which credentials they may have earned without even realizing it — and how close they are to earning others.

"That's going to be foundational in how we pair it with Smart Plan and help our students work through their time to completion and getting them back out into the workforce," St. Vigne said.

St. Vigne's student body prioritizes optimizing their time to completion.

"Award is going to do that for us without advisors having to remember all the different degree plans. Additionally, we have a lot of students who stop out, and we want to use Award to go back through and say 'Hey, look, you're only six hours away from this degree plan,' or 'Hey, you actually earned this credential and you didn't even know it, so we've awarded you this credential.'"

"We're really excited about the possibilities."