University of West Georgia Campus Plan 2025: Appendix IV
Reflecting on your Momentum Work, 2024-2025
The responses below reflect the assessment of the 2025 campus planning team.
- What was your overall experience with respect to student success over the past year? What
work did you accomplish? Who were the key players in this work?
It was a significant year for UWG with the successful completion of SACSCOC accreditation and the approval of UWG’s Quality Enhancement Plan (From Classrooms to Careers: Career Readiness through Experiential Learning). To support this work, UWG aligned its 2024 Momentum Plan with the implementation stages of the QEP. The QEP directors and QEP faculty champions have been essential to this success, along with Career Services and the Institute for Faculty Excellence. Connecting the QEP to Momentum was important since many elements of the QEP align with USG Momentum, especially around academic mindset and career exploration.
1.2. How do you feel about the status and progress of your student success work this year? How did
you feel about your work at the beginning of this period?
Positive, overall. 2024 was challenging with all the work that was done on SACSCOC accreditation and QEP development. However, both were successful, and that generated optimism and confidence associated with our student success work overall. Faculty have been very positive about the QEP and its focus on experiential learning.
1.3. What went well and did not go well in your work this year?
What Went Well:
- Quality Enhancement Plan—successful QEP proposal was approved in December 2024. Campus implementation in Spring 2025 and off to a strong start.
- Majors Fair—second year was successful with strong engagement from academic programs and faculty and stronger connections to career services and focus on students in focus areas.
- USG Mindset Survey—our highest student response rate ever, thanks to the work of Momentum Council and other student support staff.
Going well, but improvement still needed:
- Communication—students, faculty, and staff—about our major student success initiatives (Momentum, QEP, NISS, ASPIRE) and how these are aligned.
- Organization of campus work on these major student success initiatives. How does each keep focused on its major priorities with committee(s) support, while also creating connections / communications between them, especially when they are working on similar tasks.
- UWG now has a structure for data gathering and analysis (external reporting and internal assessment). This is one of the positive outcomes of NISS. Helping academic programs more actively utilize the data (how to use the dashboards and what questions to ask) is the next step in this important work to support student success.
1.4. Why did things go well (when they did well)? Why did they not go so well (when they didn’t)?
Most UWG student success actions were completed and were successful:
1) Lots of engagement by faculty and staff who understand and are deeply committed to student success.
2) Strong collaboration between student success units (student affairs, enrollment management, advising, academic success, career services) and academic programs (faculty and academic program leaders).
One challenge identified in 1.3 above is the alignment and coordination of UWG’s student success work that focuses on USG Momentum, NISS, QEP, ASPIRE.
1) Specifically, communication so that faculty, staff, and students understand what these major areas of our student success work are and how they are related.
2) How to coordinate and align work so that faculty and staff are participating in appropriate meetings and involved in the needed workflow.
1.5. What are your lessons learned from the past year? What do you need to have in place to be
successful? Are the Momentum strategies you are working on aligned with your priorities and goals
Yes, UWG has focused over the past two years on Momentum alignment with other student success priorities and goals. In 2024, UWG aligned Momentum and the QEP, and in 2025 UWG will align Momentum and NISS. One lesson is how to align these important student success initiatives, understanding how they are connected, what organizational structures we need to have in place to connect and support them, and how to communicate these important connections to campus partners.
1.6. In addition to the next steps on your Success Inventory items, what changes (if any) do you
want to make in the year ahead? What are your priority areas for continued improvement? Why?
UWG is confident that it has a strategic student success plan in place that aligns our major institutional priorities. UWG’s interim president has encouraged and facilitated campus dialogue around how to improve campus presence and the campus experience for students, as well as for faculty and staff. Campus presence has been a focus of the president’s conversations with Faculty Senate and with other faculty and staff groups over the past year. One of our priority areas will be to consider how each of our student success actions align with this strategic goal.
1.7. Reflecting on your top-level goals from your 2024 Momentum Plan, what of these do you think
you want to adjust and why?
UWG was very successful with its top-level Momentum goals that focused on the QEP and development of Common Course Components. We also included a goal that would work on alignment of Core IMPACTS Career Competencies with the QEP, since it also includes career-readiness competencies that are connected to the NACE competencies. UWG did not make as much progress on this goal. The Career Den modules that were developed over the past year by the Institute for Faculty Excellence and Career Services will help with the next stages of this work. Our goal is to encourage faculty to focus more on the career-competencies in Core IMPACTS courses and to help students understand the professional value of these competencies and how they are connected to specific courses.
