Early alert processes help head off a host of students’ issues. Connecting with those students where they live strengthens those efforts.
Even the best-prepared student must overcome a succession of hurdles as they race through their first year on a college campus. An ill parent, financial issues, a blown exam, homesickness, poor time management, mental health episodes, and so many other factors may threaten to derail their progress. Identifying if and when these issues occur and stopping them from snowballing as quickly as possible is vital to strengthening student success.
This responsibility, while often considered the domain of faculty and academic advisors, is becoming increasingly cross-functional, drawing in counselors, student affairs staff, health services, student leaders, and athletic departments. Also in that mix, unsurprisingly, are campus housing departments, which are well-positioned to connect with first-year students.
Alyssa Stephens, assistant director of four-year advising and academic intervention at the University of South Carolina, has witnessed the value of these partnerships both in her day-to-day work and as a contributing author to a report released late last year by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, housed at the University of South Carolina. The report uses data from a 2023 national survey of more than 330 institutions, examining how they support student success. Initiatives include orientation, common reading projects, first-year seminars, and learning communities.
Stephens and her co-author Michael Dial explored data connected to first-year early alert and intervention programs, reviewing their prevalence, the populations addressed, and strategies used. “Effectively implementing early alert initiatives presents challenges and requires buy-in from multiple campus stakeholders,” the report states. “Faculty or staff tasked with submitting alerts must understand the value of the alerts and their effect on students. Additionally, staff need to understand the process used for alerting on student concerns; technology-based platforms require effective training and ongoing support to verify the systems work as intended. Established processes to follow up on alerts are also important to ensure faculty concerns are fully addressed, and faculty buy-in is enhanced.”
To learn more about the role housing departments can play in the early alert process, Talking Stick brought Stephens together with housing professionals experienced in the area. Joining the conversation were Audrey Elworth, assistant director for residential education at Central Michigan University; Amanda Krier-Jenkins, associate director of university housing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; Daniel Rosner, associate director of housing operations at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville; and Amanda Virag, assistant dean of students and director of residence life at the University of Dayton.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
While it's common knowledge for everyone on this call, for the sake of our readers, Alyssa, could you provide a baseline definition of what early alert looks like in today's world?
Alyssa Stephens: The more specific answer is that it looks very different on different campuses with different resources and structures. But, in general, when we are talking about early alert, we're looking at systems of raising flags or recognizing any indications that a student might be struggling. Often, this can be seen in their performance in a class. The early alert process flags that student or their behavior and tries to connect them to a support network. I really think about early alert and intervention as going hand in hand.
But then there are the intervention pieces and what do we do afterwards. We have flagged a student and said something's wrong, but what steps do we take after that? What resources do we have on campus to connect them? Early alerts are most effective when they are collaborative, and I am not aware of any campus that has a one-stop shop that can address all of a student's problems.
One of the things I noted was the distinction between early alert and academic intervention. Is it an oversimplification to say that housing’s role stops at early alert? Or can housing and residence life move into the intervention side as well?
Stephens: We have a structure in which our advisors focus on impacting student success through academic support. Then there are the pieces that residence life can help with in connecting students. I don't know if I have the answer to your question, and I am curious to hear about your experiences with early alert processes, intervention, and how you support students.
Audrey Elworth: I oversee all our assessment processes, and we've been trying to figure out how to get ahead of some of these folks who are leaving campus for whatever reason. We have an academic early intervention process that works in tandem with our care team, and they are excellent partners. We have them in our residence halls. Sometimes students don't pop up in the academic early intervention process, which, to answer the question a little bit, is where residence life comes in. Sometimes, the person that the student will go to for help the most is the staff member who's on the floor with them.
Our annual survey data over the past few years show that students mentioned their student staff member as the person who made the biggest impact on them, so we thought about how we could be more proactive. This year, we implemented microsurveys where, every few weeks, we ask folks about their sense of belonging and engagement. Do they know their staff members’ names, for example? We take those responses and break them down for hall directors, assistant directors, and paraprofessionals so they can connect back in with folks.
What’s interesting is that some people never want to share. They're not popping up in academic spaces, but we've been able to connect with some who have said, “I'm not feeling connected yet.” Having that conversation just a little bit earlier has been interesting. We're not quite sure, long term, what that's going to look like, but our programming is now more responsive. Maybe before the non-payment deadline or maybe before some of those withdrawal deadlines, we can see who said, at week two, that they don't feel like they're connecting yet and give them an extra round of support.
Amanda Krier-Jenkins: I'm proud to say that the early alert work started in housing. We brought on a platform well over a decade ago, and some people were afraid to try it. Housing said, “Let's do it,” so we did the surveys and interventions and then let people know what was going on. As it should, this intervention work now fits in a different realm of campus, and we're key partners in it. I'm actually one of the app admins for the tool representing student affairs.
Alyssa, I'm thrilled to hear that you're from advising. Our advising and housing departments have co-presented countless times, and everybody in the audience is always shocked at how this partnership works. You make it work, right? It’s all about relationships and follow-through.
Depending on what the early alert is – whether it's academic, social, or something that emerges from a microsurvey – there's a huge map behind the scenes of who gets what assigned to them. We cross-train all our staff, including our resident assistants (RAs), and provide them with enough information to close out the case or the alert. Sometimes the students don't make it to our behavioral intervention team because they're not a threat to themselves or others, but they are stressed out and are missing class. Or sometimes they don't know how to use the meal plan, so they've been afraid to go into the dining hall, and our dining hall will trigger an alert because the student hasn't used their card in a while. We've gone from one of the two departments being responsible for all the interventions to student and academic affairs working more broadly, depending on the topic. It's a much lighter lift because other folks are doing the work as well.
Amanda Virag: We've used a combination of both these responses. This year, for all our first-year students, we have implemented holistic academic advisors who are cross-trained in a lot of student development areas, as well as academic-focused ones. Next year, every student at our institution will have a holistic advisor. Not only is that a great way for students to feel connected, but they know that the person they're meeting with is connected to other areas beyond academics.
That has fed directly over to housing and residence life, specifically, because as a part of that holistic advisor model, every student has what we call a flight crew, which includes key partners across campus that the student is connected with. Housing and residence life shows up on that main page as a resource for students because the person they might be most closely connected with might be the same person behind the front desk or someone they see in their offices every day. Housing has definitely played a part in how that flight crew puts things into practice.
Daniel Rosner: Our early response has been renewed since the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the challenges has been faculty and staff leaving institutions and retiring. Thankfully, we've been in a place where we've been able to spend some time rebuilding connections and relationships across units. We have more formal processes, which include care reports, and we partner with enrollment management, while a couple of us are pretty involved in Starfish, “an early alert and connection tool utilized to support student success and retention at SIUE.” We have success coaches for non-residential students, and our staff provides some of that support because we just don't have enough success coaches to provide an intervention for everyone. Over the last few years, we've been able to repurpose some positions within our department. With changes in technology and our traditional administrative professional roles, we've been able to engage with them almost as caseworkers. Quite honestly, they've loved the change in work. They’re not just managing keys, receipts, and procurement cards; they’re also connecting with students, checking in on them, and funneling that information back.
This is a bit more of an institutional culture piece for us. Our role in housing is connecting students with the experts who can provide them with the help they need. We see a little less cross-training than I have seen in other institutions, but I don't think that's necessarily a negative. We're walking students to financial aid or directing them to their advisor or helping them set up an appointment – and then following up with them as appropriate.
Similar to what Amanda shared, dining is a separate office. However, we are responsible for the actual meal plan management; we run reports each quarter or every four weeks through the semester. Then we do some outreach work to find students who are either overspending or underspending. The first thing we do is make sure they're not running out of their meal plan. We work with information technology to see who hasn't swiped in a while and, again, try carefully to follow the line of not being too Big Brother-ish.
What we've found is that, not surprisingly, students who had something traumatic happen at home tended to go home; by the time we find out about it, though, we're not in a great position to be able to help them, because we're in week 13 or 14 of the semester, and our options are limited. Our purpose, then, is to find this out earlier so we can present students with the best possible options, whether it be meeting with their advisor or getting help from the dean of students’ office or academic affairs – but for us it’s about how we present these options as we walk with them through what they're experiencing.
Dan, that's a perfect segue into the next question. Alyssa’s chapter in the report notes differences between the academic and non-academic factors that might raise a flag. I'm probably overgeneralizing here, but on the academic side, it feels more quantitative, while the non-academic side is a little more qualitative. My question is whether campuses have policies or procedures that help staff determine when a behavior warrants an early alert.
Stephens: The national survey data didn't really dig into the exact reasons why someone might submit an alert. We know, generally, the challenges that students are facing, but I don't believe there was a specific survey question that addressed thresholds, because, again, it looks different case to case.
Some campuses pull learning system data, so if a grade falls below a certain level, it triggers an alert. But according to the survey data, it's primarily a human-based system. To me, this means that many alerts come from a person simply recognizing a behavior. Maybe they see a grade and raise an alert, or they notice that a student hasn't shown up or used a meal plan, is not attending classes, or hasn’t scheduled an advising appointment.
A number of alerts on our campus are sent in because of grades. We have a way for faculty to initiate an alert that says a student is struggling with their course. That gets them connected with our tutoring center for academic support. But there are also times when we'll get an alert that says the student is not passing their tests, not because they don’t understand the material, but because of something personal: a parent passed away, the student had a significant illness, or they are working three jobs and don't have the time needed to study and prepare for an exam. Though the alert is triggered because of a grade, there's something more personal happening behind that.
The important thing is that once someone notices something, there is a clear process for finding the needed support. We have holistic advising approaches in our office, so our advisors are having conversations with students about careers, where they live, and how they are getting involved, but there's a limit to that as well. I tell our advisors that I am not expecting them to knock on residents’ doors, since residence life staff already have those relationships and are maybe better suited to initiate a wellness check-in.
I may have strayed from the original question, but there is a numbers piece to it. As I have worked with intervention, I’ve seen the why behind that iceberg of numbers. Maybe a student didn't come to class X number of times, but the why behind that is usually a lot deeper. Yeah, sometimes they need tutoring help. But it's really about having a process for digging deeper. The student may say, “I'm having trouble with my roommate, I don't know what to do, it's stressing me out, so I'm not going to class.” Well, let's connect you back to the staff in the hall who can help you.
That makes me think about the guidance an RA or a hall director would be given. How do you prepare the face-to-face workers within the housing department to find that sweet spot between being solely reactive and overly proactive?
Krier-Jenkins: What we found is that the training piece truly comes down to communication skills. We in student affairs and academic affairs often get caught up in our own lingo. And I'll speak for my campus: We're about 35% first-gen students. Our lingo isn't their lingo, and what we've learned is that it’s not about “Amanda Krier-Jenkins, the associate director of university housing, is calling on behalf of” whatever; it’s more “Amanda from housing is calling. Do you have a chance to talk?” They respond to that.
Anecdotally, the students don't care who is calling; they see everyone as part of the university. Sometimes they're embarrassed, and they don't want to talk to their advisor about an issue. So the advisor trains us on what the student should do if they really want to withdraw, and then housing will call them. At the same time, the student may tell their advisor about the toilet in their hall that won’t flush, and the advisor will know how to trigger a work request. For whatever reason, the student feels like they have found their person, and it's not always in the same category as what they would think. Our advisors help find students who haven’t completed their housing contract for the following year, and housing will find the first-semester first-year students who haven’t enrolled for spring yet.
With training, the connection with students comes down to communication, listening, and relatability. The topic shouldn't matter; when we do our weeks of training, we interweave many different elements throughout. There might be a session on academic interventions, but I'm including bias and conduct in there. There might be a behavioral section, and I'm going to throw an academic door knock into that one. By the end of the time, what they're hearing is, here's how I talk to a person, and here's how I learn what they need.
Virag: This year, our residential curriculum has changed pretty drastically. We have told our RAs that their job is to get to know their people. We have incorporated some workshops into training sessions where campus partners come and distribute all their information. After getting to know residents on their floors and in their communities, they are better able to help students who don't know where to go for this or that, and can then name the university staff with whom they have already interacted, so that the interaction serves as a connection between the RA and student.
If you're able to refer to a specific person – “Dan from the advising center” or “Audrey from financial aid would be a great person to talk to” – then students are more likely to respond to that personal connection and take the referral seriously.
Rosner: I would totally agree with being able to point to direct referrals. I think it’s huge if I can tell a student I know so-and-so in counseling, and they're a great counselor. That really goes a long way.
I manage our central housing office, so we typically are doing billing, assignments, contracts, and applications. That means we run a lot of call campaigns, and sometimes there's some frustration up front when we have to call another list of students. But when we call students to remind them about something, they often have questions about other university functions that they need help with, like financial aid or admissions. They may be too embarrassed or scared to ask for help, or maybe they don't know where to start.
I also think it’s important to make transfers a little warmer when we call. That means talking with the office that we're going to transfer the student to and giving them some background so the student does not have to spend another 15 minutes reiterating what's going on. I’ll ask, “Hey, this student has some specific questions about these things, can you help them? Do you have time, or is there a place I can direct them to schedule an appointment?” I'm happy to loop back with them to help manage that piece of it, just so they can get that quality service and quality time with the staff member who is best equipped to work with them.
Elworth: It's reassuring to hear that we are doing a lot of the same things people are considering. We've asked our RAs and all our paraprofessional staff, as we did some retraining and recentering around it, to consider extending some invitations to campus partners to come into the space, rather than just making a bulletin board about resources. Coming out of the pandemic, we lost a lot of knowledge that our staff held. Because they hadn't been getting outside of their own workspaces and were conducting digital programming for so long, one of our focuses this year is to reintegrate by getting out and seeing where our campus partners are, connecting with people.
We held a resource fair where our RAs talked to staff in other departments and asked what kinds of things they could offer our students, what kinds of programming they could do in the hall, and how we could partner and collaborate. I can email Central Michigan advising and feel like I'm not connecting with someone, but if I meet someone and they say they are interested, then I’m going to start it off a little bit stronger.
Going back to the survey, between 2017 and 2023, there was just a small change in the percentage of campuses that used residence life staff in early alert efforts. If I remember correctly, it went from 41% to 42%. I was surprised that there wasn't a larger increase, and maybe I was also a bit surprised by the numbers in general. So, anecdotally, do you see more housing departments getting involved with the early alert process? If not, what may be the hurdle preventing that from happening?
Elworth: We have been trying to better equip our student affairs staff with the skills to recognize these early intervention pieces that are not on the academic side. For example, last year we all went through mental health first aid training. Most of us in residence life felt that we’ve got these helping skills down. But it has been really impactful to see colleagues who may not have gotten that information before now play larger roles in those spaces. That has been fantastic, because we want to support our students; we want to be excellent referral agents.
For so long, residence life was the solution to everything. And now we're in this place where we can look across our division and help other staff get connected to early intervention tactics. Housing is still involved, and we're excited about being part of those processes and referring and connecting students, whether it comes in through the formal process or if it's something homegrown on the residence life side.
Stephens: There are two things I would say, building off that. There's a formal process, and then there's an informal process. USC has a formal piece; if a student lives on campus, they get a class absence alert, and if they don't talk to their advisor, that goes to housing, and the housing staff definitely then reach out if they haven't been looped in. There’s also the informal piece: The academic advisor knows the hall director, and so they've already connected.
The informal piece may not get tracked and documented. Looking at the survey data, the respondents are primarily high-level administrators, directors of first-year programs, or vice presidents of student affairs or academic affairs. So there are some pieces of the data that I always look at and wonder if this is totally accurate. It's not that this isn't happening or hasn't grown, but maybe this has grown more than we're aware of, and it’s a case of those higher-level administrators not always hearing the full, robust story of all the work we're doing. Maybe that work doesn't get recorded anywhere, but I'm still making that connection and supporting that student, involving these staff members from other parts of campus.
Krier-Jenkins: Part of it that I've seen personally (and heard about from colleagues across the country) is that there's a great misunderstanding of FERPA. On the academic side of the fence (especially and stereotypically), there's a more conservative definition of FERPA and what can be shared. They feel housing doesn't need to know something or vice versa. They think, “That's too personal, I shouldn't know that. I teach them biology.” But a lot of campuses are re-evaluating how FERPA is interpreted. I don’t have a theory on the 41% to 42%, but my theory on why it's only in the forties is that it has a lot to do with the interpretation of what can be shared and to whom. That's a barrier that I wish more campuses would push through.
Rosner: I would absolutely echo that. We moved to StarRez a few years ago, and I can't tell you how many meetings we had to have to get academic data pulled in. The ironic part was that I had reports from our student information system that I could export and pull in, and I could log in and look up individual students. But there was something about having aggregate data with such a fear around FERPA.
And to swing back to one of the earlier questions about how to assess when an early alert is warranted, we've looked at lower-level flags like low engagement. That can mean a lot of things and is incredibly subjective, depending on the faculty member. That looks very different than a lone flag signaling that maybe the student was having an off week when the assessment was done and now they've self-corrected. Again, we get hundreds of flags, so we're trying to prioritize where that goes.
When we look at housing’s value-add to students, what many market heavily in terms of quantitative data is higher grade point averages for students living on campus. But we leave out the story about connections being forged and responses we've received. We’ve addressed how many flags are raised for residential students, and we know we respond in so many days. I mean, we report that with work orders. But there's a gap, and we are considering how to share our story about how quickly we respond. That's an important thing as we market not just for students, but also for families and campus partners.
Virag: Part of my position is sitting down every morning with our student care and advocacy team, who receive all care referrals, some written by academic advisors and others by faculty. One of the storytelling pieces we've been working on (which still has room to grow) is that students who are flagged because of academic behaviors are also concerning to faculty, so there's also a story to tell in how they're behaving within our residence halls. Having that seat at the table to evaluate and say what I know from a housing and residence life standpoint highlights how much information we really do have. It moves away from the idea of separating what students are doing in the residence halls from what they do in the classrooms. We might have some really great insight into why that student hasn't responded to emails in a certain amount of time.
Stephens: For me, the data and the story behind it go hand in hand, because we do that with our alerts when we get in contact with our students. We have the numbers, but why is that true? It's because of what we've talked about. It's because of the people and that connection and this network behind it all. Sometimes we miss the human piece, but that's my favorite part of it. Yes, the number went up, but it's because of the people behind it.
You all touched on this earlier, but moving one step beyond the alert, what are some of the ways you think housing is best suited to respond to those alerts and to help students in need of some sort of intervention?
Krier-Jenkins: We need to remember that we're educators and that there's not a much better way of creating a holistic view of a student than living with them. Our staff has conversations with students while in their pajamas, right? It doesn't get much more real than that. If we take that information and couple it with the fact that we are professional educators, we can do anything that anybody on the academic side can do, because we're all here for the academic purpose.
Tagging onto that is the lost art of personal connection and face-to-face communication. Students are inundated with emails, alerts, apps, and notifications. Sometimes what they need to understand is simply that someone cares about them. And though this may come through to them in an email or a direct message, it is better if it comes from a face-to-face conversation. Asking them how they're doing is often more powerful than all the emails and other communication forms they might be receiving.
Rosner: I totally agree with that. One of the things I talk about often, especially with our first-year students, is that I hear from partners that they emailed the student and hadn’t heard anything back. I'm willing to bet that they may not even have email set up on their phones. The power of simply knocking on a door is endless.
Our House Calls program is one of my favorites; it involves campus partners walking the halls and handing out candy (usually the fourth weekend of the semester), basically checking in with students. This is usually the time of their first exams. This past fall, I was on our health professionals wing; they were all in biology and chemistry and had their exams that week. We were able to discuss with them which learning and time management strategies worked well for them. You wouldn't be able to do that via email. Honestly, I think that students are happy that we check in on them. They may not always outwardly display it, but I do think the vast majority of them appreciate it.
Elworth: Something I think about a lot is storytelling: not just internally, but also externally. We've seen some shifts in the engagement and involvement of parents, so we now have an official parent page where they can submit questions, and sometimes that's how early intervention happens. “My student needs X, Y, and Z,” and we can respond, “Here's how to get them the resources.”
Every year, we make strides in this, but it's essentially a matter of telling the story that we care about your student and making sure that the parents know and feel it when they come to campus. It’s a reassurance that we are here and we are spending time with them. Those are things that they may not know, because so much of that is behind-the-scenes work. Even to say you supported a student who is going through a loss in the family doesn’t capture what we all know could be hours sitting with someone in a hallway, in your PJs, or having multiple conversations when checking in and making sure they have everything squared away. If you've worked in residence life, you've lived on campus, and you understand the depth at which you can impact student experiences. It's uplifting.
Finally, Alyssa, we had you start with a definition, so we'll let you wrap this up. What excited me about this conversation is bringing in someone who has done this research with all these numbers and matching them up with people who end up having conversations with students in their PJs. What is the one takeaway that housing departments can most appreciate from the survey and the results?
Stephens: Ooh, that's such a good question. I agree with you. It is a lot of charts and numbers. And I am not a charts and numbers person. I'm a human connection person, like we've been talking about, so I appreciate this conversation. Taking the data, it's great to have this sense of what is being done with early alert, what this looks like, and who's involved. That's a good starting point. But what I like to talk to people about is really getting into the nitty-gritty of what it looks like on your campus.
I am co-signing everything that everyone said about the connections that residence life staff have; that is the biggest benefit of their involvement. They are excellent campus points of connection to students. They invite resources into the halls. They are directing students to the advising center, counseling, finance, and all the pieces of this huge network that students get lost in. As academic advisors, I emphasize to my staff the value of being a good connection point, but housing staff are really seeing students a lot more frequently.
What I would emphasize in this conversation is the importance of connections that you can make, whether that's in the formal process – I want to be involved in a formal alerts process, I want to sit with the care team, I want to receive alerts – but also knowing that even if you are not involved in a formal process on your campus, you're still a piece of that alert. You're still seeing those students and doing what you can to support them. Even if that's not raising specific flags or your work doesn't feel like a piece of that, it very much is, and it very much can be.
I appreciate the human side and the human connection that goes into the numbers and all of that with intervention. It's why I like this work and enjoy working with my housing professionals. We are all just people who really care about students. And that's what has the most impact on me at the end of the day.
James A. Baumann is editor of Talking Stick and the ACUHO-I publications director.