Academics, Office of the President, University News
For the next few weeks, I’ll share some of the specific goals and objectives within our diversity plan to unpack what it looks like in real, tangible ways as we serve our learners. Our first goal is centered around persistence to graduation of our diverse student population.
CSP celebrates that, in our traditional undergraduate population, we are a majority-minority institution. This means that no one ethnic group makes up a majority of the student body. What a gift it is for our community to live and learn together as we prepare them to lead and serve in their various vocations.
Each student that comes to us brings their own unique experiences, needs, and circumstances that shape and influence their journey at CSP. It is incumbent upon us—leaders of the university— to respond to each student to help them persist on this journey and receive a diploma.
Two objectives nested within this goal are:
- Increase the persistence to graduation rate by 10 percent for students from diverse populations.
- Monitor and assess persistence strategies for underrepresented students.
To accomplish these objectives, we must pay careful attention to the factors that lead to students not persisting toward graduation. One of these factors is finances.
Despite CSP’s affordability amongst private universities, some students come to us with high financial needs. Thanks to generous benefactors, we provide financial aid that helps meet some of these needs.
But, we must do more to help our learners afford, access, and achieve their educational goals. Internal research tells us that, for our learners with the highest financial needs, an additional $4,000 per year in financial aid would increase their persistence by more than 10 points.
As a university, our faculty and staff strive to make it possible for our learners, despite any challenges or barriers, to persist in their studies so that they can proudly walk across the stage at commencement, knowing that they’ve received a transformative, Christ-centered education.