By SHANNON O. WELLS

A federally funded project at Pitt to improve success and completion rates for rural students is getting results through innovative recruitment and retention efforts, increasing availability of programs and resources, and bolstering technical infrastructure.

April Belback, associate vice provost for student success and advising, provided an overview of Pitt’s Partners for Rural Student Success Impact & Mobility (PRSSIM) project at the May 8 meeting of the Student Administration, Aid and Affairs committee.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Rural Postsecondary & Economic Development Program, PRSSIM seeks to improve completion and persistence rates through a three-point approach focused on increasing retention rates, student success and bolstering technical infrastructure. Tools include recruitment and pre-college programming, career and major exploration, academic workshops, financial literacy, tutoring and mentoring.

“Student success at Pitt involves intentionally coordinating programming and interventions for all students at Pitt, but (also) thinking about where the gaps are, and then providing interventions for what we call At-Promise student populations,” Belback explained. “We identified that rural students … were one of those At-Promise student populations.”

In 2022, Belback’s team wrote a grant based on this and the need to partner better and more deeply with Pitt’s regional campus students.

According to the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, 26% of Pennsylvania residents live in rural locales. When the grant was pursued, rural students comprised 18% of Pitt’s overall undergraduate student population, Belback said, noting that Pitt’s Bradford and Johnstown campuses are situated in those designated rural counties.

“One of the first things we did when we were got the grant in 2022 was work with admissions and (Kellie Kane’s) team to better think about how we are recruiting students with a concentrated effort in these counties,” she said, referring to the interim vice provost for enrollment. “We identified … most specifically the high schools that are located in these rural locales across Pennsylvania.”

To better balance the load of rural student recruiter Daryl Burleigh, who covered all of Pennsylvania, “we jumped at the chance to think about expanding those efforts” by hiring Danielle Kochka as admissions counselor. “We doubled our efforts in recruiting across Pennsylvania, and now we’re able to split it east and west.

“They’re able to kind of think about how to do that in a broader effort,” Belback noted. “So, that’s exciting.”

Some objectives of the grant include:

• Increasing the number of students served. “We wanted to think about, ‘How can we provide programming (and) resources once they’re here?” she said.

• Increasing the number of students on Pitt’s campuses, retention of them once they’re here, and graduation rates.

• Increasing internship attainment.

Noting that it takes a “lag of a year to get attainment and goals objectified,” Belback said in the first year, “we did an amazing job. Our admissions team over-exceeded our target with programming and resources. We thought, ‘Well, we’re going to try to hit 250,’ while they did over 3,000 rural applications. And that’s fantastic.

“We’re hitting the mark again this year — we over-exceeded as well,” she said.

In other promising results, rural student enrollment increased slightly. “And even more exciting is rural-student retention went up over 3%,” Belback noted. The four-year graduation rate remained steady, “but the six-year graduation rate, which makes sense for rural students, went up 3% as well.”

What’s become evident at the regional campuses is that, “if we can keep them after that first year, they graduate at that campus. It might take them just a little bit longer, but we’re finding ways to help them through that … to help them think about ways to graduate faster.”

Internships increasing

“It took us a little while to think about what the internship process should look like, but we figured it out,” she said. “This past year … we were able to pay students or provide stipends for 11 students. This year, we’re up to almost 20 students that will be paid in the coming year for internships that otherwise would not have been paid.”

With the Experiential Learning Academy, student interns are coupled with an academic coach to make sure they understand what the experience means. “We work with them on resumes and matching them with an internship that matches their major, and work with their faculty member on the regional campus to make sure it’s something that would be aligned if it is something for credit.”

In other projects, the Degree Finder exploratory tool for students that started with the Oakland campus now encompasses Greensburg and Bradford and will soon serve the Pitt-Johnstown campus.

“Quite often our prospective students use it, but also (Pitt students) if they’re exploratory or thinking about adding on a credential,” Belback noted.

Similarly, the me3 career inventory tool, which helps students map their interests to careers and Pitt majors, is being expanding to the regional campuses.

Johnstown faculty noticed that students struggled to pay for the ALEKS Math Placement Assessment and weren’t enrolling in their campuses, especially rural students. “We’re helping them with a stipend to make sure that they can fulfill that requirement (as a) pilot that we’re running this year, too,” she said.

A Professional Development Day based on rural student success will take place in October, featuring Ty McNamee of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges as the main speaker. “He’ll be providing activities for folks throughout the day,” she said. “We’re more than happy to have (more) folks there. It’s free.”

Academic coaching also is available for rural students, “especially those … that might not otherwise have academic coaching available,” Belback noted. “That’s on top of their academic advising.”

A rural resource library was recently launched on the PRSSIM website that includes references and student stories. “If you want to know about our amazing students, there’s many … on our website. Please take a look at them, because, of course, they’re amazing.”

Shannon Wells is a University Times reporter. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

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