University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville (UACCB), a rural campus in north-central Arkansas with more than 1,200 students, transformed the student experience with individualized educational planning by ensuring that every new student who enrolls builds an educational plan and receives ongoing career and academic support from a navigator who specializes in the student’s program.
In this case study accompanying the brief From Goals to Graduation to Post-Completion Success, UACCB demonstrates how a unified approach to transforming educational planning—where leadership, staff, and faculty share a common mission and improving retention and degree completion is everyone’s job—helps students start and stick with their end goals. Because UACCB is a small college with a little over 100 employees, staff often do many jobs at once, so cooperation and collaboration are key. The transformation to become student-centered took years of adjustment and decisive action. Organizational and staff restructuring, along with new operating procedures in student services and scheduling, made it possible to scale educational planning.