Student Success

A Commitment to Student Success

Indiana University has prioritized keeping its degrees affordable. As of 2019, it had the second lowest net price (the expenses of obtaining a degree less grant and scholarship aid) among its peer flagship institutions from across the country. The moderate tuition changes at IU have been well below the increases in the higher education price index (which tracks the costs of providing college education nationwide), and IU distributes over $1 billion per year in student aid. IU’s nationally recognized MoneySmarts program has continued to help students make prudent decisions regarding financing their education, and has led to significant reductions in student debt.

IU’s Office of Completion and Student Success has been active in seeking and implementing best practices in student advising and faculty development to increase student success, especially for those students who are first-generation and from underrepresented minorities. These efforts have borne fruit. From 2015 to 2018, the percentage of IU students who complete their undergraduate degree in at least six years has grown from 64% to 69% and, at the regional campuses, which have traditionally had lower graduation rates owing to their students’ educational background and socio-economic status, it has risen from 34% to 43%, a remarkable improvement. For underrepresented minorities, there has also been steady improvement in graduation rates, with the six-year completion rate rising from 48% to 54% over this brief time period, across all campuses.

The proportion of IU students from underrepresented minorities, a priority of the Bicentennial Strategic Plan, has steadily risen, from 22.1% in 2015 to 26.5% in 2019. The total number of minority students at IU has doubled over the past decade. IU’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs program in Community and School Partnerships interacts with over one thousand students per year to ensure middle and high school students from underserved communities are informed about the resources available to them as they seek a college degree. One such program is the Summer Experience in Sustainability and Environment, a camp-like experience on environmental and sustainability issues and careers, where 90 percent of the students are of historically underserved backgrounds.

Over the course of the past five years Indiana University has created a multitude of new degrees, some at single campuses and some collaboratively between campuses, mixing on-campus, online, and hybrid delivery systems to expand the opportunities for students in terms of degree paths and means of completing their degrees. This was often achieved through leveraging the faculty and capital already in place on IU campuses, expanding the range of possibilities. Highlights include new degrees in Architecture, Intelligent Systems Engineering, and Cybersecurity Risk Management on the Bloomington campus; new degrees in Applied Data Science and Information Science, Nutrition and Dietetics, and Exercise Science at IUPUI; and 15 new collaborative online degree and certificate programs through IU’s Regional Campuses (with another 11 in the approval process at the Higher Learning Commission). The new online programs include Applied Health Science, Informatics, History, Sociology, Criminal Justice and Public Safety, and the Chancellors’ Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, among others.

The rapid development of online options at IU has served the dual purpose of more effective use of faculty resources in allowing collaboration by campuses, and enabling students to more easily find ways to schedule courses towards their degree completion. As of fall 2019, over one third of all IU students were enrolled in at least one online course, demonstrating the popularity of this option, typically taken in concert with other, on-campus courses. Faculty use the Quality Matters rubric and professional development workshops offered through IU’s Office of Online Education to ensure course content and assessment are well designed for the online medium.

The quality of Indiana University’s faculty and academic programs, a priority of the Bicentennial Strategic Plan, has continued apace. IU now boasts 120 faculty members who have been elected as fellows to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with nine being recognized in 2019 alone. The O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs reached, and has maintained, its place as having the number one ranked Master of Public Affairs Program in the country, as well as being top-ranked in the subfields of nonprofit management, environmental policy and management, and public finance and budgeting, by U.S. News & World Report. The Kelley School of Business Online MBA is also the number one ranked program by U.S. News.