A Conversation on Student Success at MSU with Associate Provost and Dean Mark Largent

<p>“You can tell two things from the length of my title,“ says <a href="https://twitter.com/marklargent">Largent</a>. “The associate provost and dean of undergraduate education's responsibility is to coordinate the undergraduate experience, especially in and around the classroom, across the 169 majors in our 17 different degree granting colleges. My job is, from the central unit, like the federal government, to help coordinate all the activities that go on across the college campus related to undergraduate education and to create a more coherent and seamless experience for our students because 70 percent of them change their majors from the time they start to the time they finish. About half of them change them more than once.</p><p>“That's not really a problem unless they're doing it into their third and fourth years. And in fact, as soon as they change their majors in their first and second years, they tend to have really good outcomes. They tend to persist and graduate as they're exploring and finding their way and discovering their purposes and passions. And then we coordinate with all the other things that happen that are different from going to class versus going to college. Going to college consists of a lot more than going to class. Students only spend about 15 percent of their time in class. The other 85 percent of their waking hours are spent in college.</p><p>“All of the co-curricular and extracurricular things and everything that happens in the residence halls and everything that's part of the overall student experience falls to my office to help coordinate, make sense of, and ensure that our students are given the best opportunity to learn, thrive, and graduate.”</p><p>Beekman asks Largent how MSU defines student success.</p><p>“That 15 percent does understate the academic and curricular investments that students have to make in their time. For every hour that a student spends in class, the expectation is that they spend two to three hours preparing for class or working on assignments and pr