This case study accompanying the brief From Goals to Graduation to Post-Completion Success explores how Tallahassee State College (TSC) reimagined its career exploration and long-term academic planning processes to create a stronger foundation to help its 16,000 students to complete degrees or successfully transfer. Instead of leaving students to chart their own course, the college’s App2Cap onboarding and advising model now helps students identify their purpose and map out an educational pathway that leads to a career of interest.
TSC’s approach is distinctive because it accommodates individualized planning at scale for a large study body. Rather than adding a new planning tool or asking advisors to do more, TSC redesigned the work by dividing responsibilities among specialized staff, streamlining routine tasks and using technology to give students more control over their own progress. Then, the college brought those pieces together into an integrated system– App2Cap– that connects students from application through graduation. The result is a system in which advisors with large caseloads can spend more of their time on the conversations and guidance that students need most.