Brandman University

So the topic is student experience and student services, and there are zero institutions in the room that don't put a lot of time, money, and effort into exactly that.

At the same time, when I was at Brandman University serving adult students, we were leading cohort with graduation rates, but that was still in the 65, 70% range.

And we looked at, well, what could we do differently? And it turned out that the number one things that students said is it is just hard to navigate your system.

And that was weird to us because we were proud of our graduation rate.

And some people are doing it and some people are not doing it.

We were not.

By completely reinventing the student services into one-stop, Brandman University went from the 65-70% graduation rate for students with a lot of risk factors—they were working, they had children, they were paying for school themselves—to above 90% over the course of five years.

And so— It's interesting when we put that against a session the other day, like collaboration and how do you reinvent yourself and how do you take something that you're pretty sure you're doing well and make a completely meaningful difference to do it even better.

The financial aid part was to UMass Lowell.

And I said, yeah, and who are you? And she's like, we are UMass Global.

But you applied for the financial aid to UMass Lowell, but to the college that you applied for was UMass Global, and you applied for

psychology.

Oh.

Yeah.

Wow.

So you found yourself with financial aid, but for the UMass Global and a psychology program.