Recently I participated in a national webinar on student success. A survey the presenters had done indicated that 94% of presidents and chancellors (including me) identified student success as part of their institutional missions and personal job descriptions. In this same survey, however, only 34% of campus leaders felt that their institutions had a definition of student success that everyone on their campus knew and agreed on.
You might be surprised by the 60-point gap between those two numbers, but I was not. We may not have a precise definition of success, but we know what it looks like, and it can be different for individual students.
We start, of course, with graduation rates. If a student graduates, they are deemed successful. If a student transfers away from UH Hilo but into a program that suits them better, that, too, is a success for us. Success also includes finding gainful employment after graduation, living a healthy life, and being an engaged citizen. Some of our students find success in all these dimensions, but others may only accomplish one or two, which is why precise definitions of success don’t really work.
What really stood out to me in the webinar, however, was the comment that one of the audience members made later in the discussion: “We can’t deny our students the opportunity to fail.” In the middle of a conversation about success, you might think we should not be talking about failure, but this comment brought to mind a presentation that I made with a colleague several years ago entitled, “We fail our students by not teaching them to fail.”
I was an honors dean at the time, and I found that my academically talented students were simply not prepared to fall short of excellence. A “B”grade was considered failure by some of them, leading to a crisis of confidence, a change of major, or some more serious reaction. We found that our students did not know how to fail and realized that part of our job was to teach them how to do it.
First-generation students sometimes lack confidence, and for them, failure can lead them to question whether they belong in college at all. Those of us at the university need to be ready to help them up when they stumble and let them know that a failure is a learning experience, and that we all fail.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to welcome nearly 150 high school students to our campus, and as I pondered what words of wisdom I could share with them, I decided to tell them the story of the Algebra 2 quiz I took in high school on which I got an F. I not only failed the test, but I did so brilliantly. I missed Every. Single. Question.
I found the whole episode rather amusing at the time, but the moral of the story for the young people I was speaking to is that I dramatically failed that quiz (and certainly some other things in life) and here I was as a university chancellor. We all know stories of someone who overcame failure, and it is important to share those stories along with the stories of success.
How to pick oneself up and keep moving is a skill we can learn and that we have the responsibility to teach young people. As my colleague said, we cannot deny students that opportunity. What we can do, however, is remind them that failure is not an end, but a path toward learning. As our university vision states, “We learn from many sources.” Each time we fail at something, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Do we give up on that path or do we move ahead?
I once had a student who failed a particular course five times. It was clear that particular class was not something he could grasp. Then, my responsibility to him was to find another way through or around this particular obstacle. Is there another class that will fulfill that requirement? Do we need to consider a different major? Sometimes the right choice is to change course, but the answer is never to quit. The student mustn’t give up and neither should we.
Bonnie D. Irwin is chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her column appears monthly in the Tribune-Herald.