Student Success

As one of the most dynamic public universities in the world's eighth largest economy, the University of North Texas has a responsibility to prepare career-ready graduates who will flourish in an ever-changing workforce. This requires strategic and coordinated support for every student — not just while they are enrolled at UNT, but long before they arrive and well after they cross the stage at commencement.

In Fall 2024, President Keller charged the a team of faculty and staff with assessing the progress of UNT’s current student success efforts to identify key challenges, potential quick wins, and recommendations for transformational improvement. This work culminated in a high-level summary of observations and recommendations to inform President Keller’s plan for a coordinated approach to improving UNT’s student success efforts.

In Spring 2025, the university held a series of design charrettes to build a broad and informed approach to teaching and learning at UNT. Facilitated by Dr. Heidi Elmendorf and Dr. Randy Bass of Georgetown University, these sessions brought together faculty and staff to help co-create a new framework for student success focused on learning and innovation.

The emerging framework, A New Learning Ecosystem: Centering Learning and Innovation in the Student Success Mission, proposes three focus areas:

The Learning Initiative: Focusing on human learning
The Teaching Hub: Supporting course and pedagogy design
The Curriculum Connector: Aligning curriculum with student experience and workforce needs

Read more about the design process, which spanned the 2024-2025 academic year.

Building a framework for student success

This initiative is organized around four strategic approaches to student success: academic design, career-connected learning, proactive and holistic care, and data and technology enablement.

Academic Design
Academic design focuses on efficient, student-centric curricular pathways regardless of a student’s entry point to the university. This strategy also includes enrollment processes that enable students’ timely progression and the design and delivery of learner-centric course offerings and postsecondary credentials.

Career-Connected Learning
The majority of UNT students are working learners who are highly motivated to pursue postsecondary education to increase their employment opportunities. Therefore, student success is achieved not only by increasing persistence and graduation rates but also by enhancing the value of a UNT education and expanding career opportunities through deeper connections between students’ work experiences, learning experiences, and career aspirations.

Proactive and Holistic Care
Proactive care is an approach that leverages early alert data and analytic insights to identify students who are at risk of stopping out and providing the support they need before it is too late. Holistic care is an intentional institutional approach to meet the unique needs of each member of UNT’s diverse student body in ways that best serve them.

Data and Technology Enablement
The committee’s quick assessment is particularly interested in the organization and operationalization of data and technologies as an enabler to the three prior strategies, so UNT students, faculty, and staff will have appropriate, timely, and actionable information to support informed decision-making and drive improvement.

Student Success Committee

Team Lead: Dr. Lee Hughes, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, College of Science
Project Manager: Chelsea Bradshaw, Director of Student Success
Project Owner: Dr. Lisa McIntyre, Vice Provost for Student Success
Dr. Brenda Kihl, Senior Associate Vice President for Enrollment Partnerships
Dr. Melissa McGuire, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs
Dr. Joseph Oppong, Academic Associate Dean, Toulouse Graduate School
Jennifer Palcich, Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Elizabeth Vogt, Assistant Vice Provost for Accreditation and Institutional Effectiveness