Clients and Case Studies

“The CSI helps us match students early on with the services and interventions they need.”

“For more than a decade, the Flint campus has utilized the CSI. Over time, evidence has confirmed the value of the CSI to the overall retention efforts of our institution.”

“I am excited to use the CSI data and to see how it is helping us direct our efforts in student success strategies. I want to emphasize how pleased I am with [Ruffalo Noel Levitz] and the service I receive every time I call with a question or concern. Your company is a joy to work with.”

“At Texas State Technical College West Texas, the online CSI Form B is administered to identify individual student strengths and concerns, to connect them with the appropriate person or department for assistance. Additionally, summary information supports programming according to needs of the incoming class and distribution of resources according to needs. Intensified interventions resulted in increased term-to-term persistence, increased student satisfaction levels, and provided a tool to improve the communication level between the students and the college.”

“Academic Advisors use the CSI as a retention tool to talk with students and share how they can be successful in college. I explain some things they didn’t know about themselves, such as the need for study habits. We work together with a plan, using the CSI as a tool to help them be successful. I also explain the students’ role, that we can’t help them if they don’t help themselves.”

“I like the College Student Inventory (CSI) because it’s a good starting point with students, helping us to identify what we may not otherwise realize they need, so that we can go in that direction with the conversation. The CSI is helpful for understanding students and the services they may need”

“As an administrator, I use the summary results from the surveys to help service areas be more responsive and to demonstrate support for budget requests. The CSI has extremely high validity and is easily completed with profiles immediately available to advisors, counselor, mentors, and administrators. It is a powerful tool to help us connect with students before they begin to experience academic, social, or financial difficulties.”

“The College Student Inventory is an exquisite instrument. A meticulous study of five years of our data solidly showed that the CSI predicts academic performance through the eighth semester. Dropout Proneness score was very predictive for each semester one through five and the combination of semesters six, seven, and eight.”

“The College Discovery Program at La Guardia Community College/City University of New York serves a population of students who are economically and academically at risk. In counseling and advising meetings, the CSI serves as a catalyst in making a difference in the students’ academic achievements and personal development.”

“All incoming students, unless they already have an associate or bachelor’s degree, complete the online CSI Form B as part of their involvement in the CTEX Seminars. We have developed seminars related to each area of the recommendations, be they academic, personal, social, career-oriented, or financial. The student’s top three recommendations for action from their CSI results (as found on the student report) match them to the appropriate seminar, which is put right into their course schedule. They must attend the seminar for credit in the freshman seminar course. We’re looking to supplement this with end of term information through the Mid-Year Student Assessment, to demonstrate growth and current needs for services.”

“We have increased first-to-second-year retention 9 percentage points since using the CSI and MYSA as part of our comprehensive retention efforts.”

“The Mid-Year Student Assessment has helped us to better assess and monitor both the use and quality of student success activities by various student populations.”

“The data obtained from these assessments are in the students’ own words; what they have said! That is how and why we use the CSI and MYSA as an integral aspect of our first year programming. These instruments help us to see students in a holistic way, to meet the challenges they are facing.”

“The Second-Year Student Assessment allows us to efficiently and systematically assess our students’ needs and to create individualized action plans for their continued success. We’ve learned that by year two, our second-year students as a whole overwhelmingly want a written academic plan, they want to understand how their grades will impact their future, and they are twice as likely to want tutorial help.”

“We were so excited this year to discover that [Ruffalo Noel Levitz] had an instrument that we could use with our Second-Year Students! We have used the College Student Inventory for many years with each new freshmen class. The CSI is a great instrument to introduce our students to the services that we offer in the Center for Student Success, and the Second-Year Student Assessment helps us to stay in touch with them…”

“Continuing a high level of communication with academic advisors and ensuring that each student has a written academic plan are some areas we’ll be focusing on, along with helping students to deal with shifts in their relationships, especially in residence halls. We also want to help students think more about their career, internship experiences, and service learning in our Vocational Discernment Seminar. Most importantly, the data from this assessment are helping to inform our core curriculum revision for the university.”

“Incorporating the Student Retention Predictor into our Success Continuum initiatives has helped us improve our retention rate to 82 percent as well as realize the highest 4, 5, and 6 year graduation rates in our recent history. We are also seeing improvement in time-to-degree. In just one year, we’ve seen students increase their hours completed by 1.5 credits.”

“A lot of us felt like we knew what was working and not working, but a lot of the decision making was not based on hard data. This was an objective way of looking at what we were doing and what we needed to do. It was an eye-opener to us to look at some of the key risk factors. This approach has positioned us to make decisions based on data, and truthfully, if we retain two to three additional students per year, it pays for itself.”

“The predictive model’s values and the CSI recommendations together became the basis for Fall 2014 intervention strategies… At the end of the term, results for the most at-risk students in the below-average model score range showed that as the number of visits to CASA increased, the proportion of students who ended the term in good standing increased. These results are very exciting for our campus.”

“The retention committee notes that in our three semesters of working with the RMS Plus, we have only truly explored the Student Retention Predictor (SRP), as it allows us to synthesize and put to effective use data we have collected from students but never acted on. The SRP has given our campus an effective way to evaluate our students and strategize retention interventions. The committee also acknowledges that the College Student Inventory (CSI) provides a wealth of additional data that has yet to be used to its fullest potential at Rockhurst. It is our hope to continue to develop creative strategies with existing resources to better utilize these tools.”