This volume Student Support Services: Exploring impact on student engagement, experience and learning, covers a wide and diverse range of higher education contexts to explore the current state and the future of student support services. The central focus for all the chapters is about what, why and how to achieve student success within an intricate and complex web of learning ecologies, often invisible to the naked eye but interconnected within and between each other. This has profound impacts on students, often characterised by an ongoing tension between students as learners and students as consumers. With over 40 chapters, the book is divided into two sections. Part 1 is a conceptual section, which explores a multitude of worldviews about the ways in which student support services have impacted and may impact on student engagement, experience and learning. This includes discussions about the tensions and opportunities that arise from the curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular conceptualisations of students support services. The discussions come from the vantage point of different ecologies within and between universities and student support services’ impacts, both intentional and accidental, on the development of students, their transformation as learners and as contributing members of the workforce. For example, this covers disruptive technologies and online approaches, university mission and purpose, worldviews and paradigms held by student support and services units, motivation, student retention, and sense of belonging. Part 2 is a practice-based section with reflections and case studies, again from a wide variety of different higher education contexts. This section dives into the how – approaches, solutions, processes – deployed by universities to respond to their identified and often contextualised student support and services challenges. This section provides a rich library of possible ideas that readers can reimagine to manage and/or solve their student support and services challenges and problems. In the context of widening participation agendas and an increasingly demand-driven higher education sector, combined with ever-tighter public funding streams and turbulent socio-political environments, the higher education sector has had to step up its game in attracting students and diversify its approaches and strategies. As part of recruitment strategies and marketing campaigns, it has become common to approach potential students as ‘customers’. Transaction as a form of two-way (beneficial) engagement has given way to transaction as an exchange for a service or a good focused on order, structure and risk aversion. This book explores whether this is a productive way of approaching it. At the same time, the impact of COVID-19 has drawn further attention to the challenges of creating a sense of community, sense of belonging, personal identity and engagement within the university environment, especially for those not habitually and constantly on-campus. The difficulty of commuter students more fully engaging with university curricular and co-curricular programs remains, especially as students have to spend more of their time working to meet direct and indirect costs of partaking in university studies. Thus, student identity, in terms of being (or becoming) an integral member of the university community, and co-and extra-curricular engagement that enhances the learning of online students are increasingly important areas for universities to pay attention to, and this book shows different pathways – both worldviews and practices - in that respect. In an increasingly complex higher education environment, student support services find themselves in an interesting, yet often contradictory, position of having to provide a ‘customer service’ while also 'developing students’ throughout their learning journeys within the university, and their future readiness beyond the university, which is increasingly pertinent in a supercomplex world of diversity, contradictions and uncertainties. This volume explores this complexity in a holistic manner, and we are confident that the resulting discussions, implications and suggestions will provide fertile ground for conversations, reflections and explorations of student support services into the future.

The Student Support Services Program provides academic support to eligible students and is designed to improve the retention and graduation rate of low-income, first generation and disabled college students.

A variety of programs exist that provide assistance to under-prepared and at-risk students at 2-year and 4-year institutions of higher education. One of these programs is Student Support Services (SSS), a federal program funded by the U. S. Department of Education. The SSS program provides opportunities for academic development, assists students with basic college requirements, and serves to motivate students toward the successful completion of their postsecondary education. The goal of SSS is to increase the college retention and graduation rates of its participants and help students make the transition from one level of higher education to the next. SSS may also provide assistance to students receiving Federal Pell Grants (84.063). Those eligible to participate in SSS programs include students from low-income families, those who are first-generation college enrollees and students with disabilities evidencing academic need. The program includes tutoring; academic counseling, personal counseling, career advising; study skills enhancement and personal development workshops. Assistance is also given to students to apply for various forms of financial aid, including state and federal grant programs and local scholarships. Most programs also provide cultural enrichment activities. This study investigates the impact of the SSS program on the retention of students at SKCTC. Participants in this study were 125 students in the SSS program and 125 non-SSS students who entered SKCTC in the fall of 2003 and ended in 2007. The study compares the demographic profile of these groups.

Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto’s pathbreaking book Leaving College has been recognized as the definitive resource on student retention in higher education. Now, with Completing College, Tinto offers administrators a coherent framework with which to develop and implement programs to promote completion. Deftly distilling an enormous amount of research, Tinto identifies the essential conditions enabling students to succeed and continue on within institutions. Especially during the early years, he shows that students thrive in settings that pair high expectations for success with structured academic, social, and financial support, provide frequent feedback and assessments of their performance, and promote their active involvement with other students and faculty. And while these conditions may be worked on and met at different institutional levels, Tinto points to the classroom as the center of student education and life, and therefore the primary target for institutional action. Improving retention rates continues to be among the most widely studied fields in higher education, and Completing College carefully synthesizes the latest research and, most importantly, translates it into practical steps that administrators can take to enhance student success.