Hi.
My name is Amber Williams and I am the vice provost for student success at the University
of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Positions like mine are popping up all over the country as campuses grapple with how to
support students through college graduation.
Let me give you just a little bit of context.
More than 17 million Americans are enrolled in college courses.
People with college degrees are more likely to be employed, more likely to have health
insurance, and more likely give through charitable donations.
They earn about 1.2 million dollars more over the course of their lifetime than those with
a high school degree.
Their children are more likely to go to college, creating generational wealth for their families.
Yet four out of every 10 students who enroll in college do not graduate.
Why?
There are clear incentives for earning a college degree.
The very fact that these students enroll suggests they want a college degree.
So why aren’t they graduating?
I see three things that may be holding them back:
The first is many feel they don’t feel like they belong on our college campuses.
Maybe they are the first in their families to go to college.
Maybe they come from low-income households.
Maybe they look around the campus and they don’t see a community that reflects them.
The second reason could be that some students are beginning to question the value of higher
education especially when they see others—like their friends on Instagram or TikTok—appearing
to succeed without a college degree.
The third reason could be financial barriers or other hardships that keep them from completing
their degree.
And then—on top of all these challenges—they are met with a higher education system that
in some cases doesn’t understand them and was never built to include them.
Every fall, I see first-year students arrive with their families at the University of Tennessee—just
like they do at college campuses all over the world.
They come with their room décor, their minifridges, their textbooks.
They are ready to rock the world.
They are full of hope and have a vision for their future.
That’s why it is so heartbreaking to talk about these statistics.
Because for those who don’t graduate, many leave in debt—having invested both their
money and their time with no degree to show for it.
What if we could change that?
What if we created a campus where we believed in every student’s potential?
Rather than asking what went wrong—what if we started by asking what went right?
A campus where we assumed good intentions and gave people the benefit of the doubt?
What would it take for universities and colleges across America to become a place where grace
is given, instead of earned?
What would we have to do to build that place?
I have been at the University of Tennessee for two and a half years.
It is a beautiful, urban campus in the heart of Knoxville, Tennessee, at the base of the
Great Smoky Mountains.
That’s what I said…mountains.
We have almost 32,000 students—25,000 of them are undergraduates—and they come from
all over the country to be Tennessee Volunteers.
Let me tell you just a bit about them.
More than a quarter come from out of state and roughly a fifth are first-generation college
students.
They are racially diverse and inclusive.
They are the most tech-savvy, connected, compassionate group of students that I’ve ever met.
They know what they want—they are both aspirational and practical at the exact same time.
This is a generation of college students that has grown up in a time of economic recession,
terrorism and war, climate change, social injustice, and now a global pandemic.
This has informed how they see the world and their place within it.
In fall 2020, we began asking first-year students to take the Clifton Strengths assessment.
We are now two years in, and more than 11,000 UT student now know their strengths.
Among our students, the top five Clifton Strengths are:
Restorative Achiever
Competition Adaptability
and Empathy What does this say about UT students?
I would say they are problem solvers.
For many of our students, their empathy allows them to see the challenges in our society—whether
they are directly impacted by them or not.
They value authenticity and collaboration.
They are driven.
They are motivated.
They want to do well.
Above all, they want to change the world—not just change with it.
The more we learn about our students, the more we understand them.
And when we understand them, we can create the experiences that they want, provide the
resources that they need and deserve, and build the community that they want to be part
of.
Where do we begin to build THAT place?
To build this community, we must be authentic.
It must be part of the ethos of who we are.
Every August, just before the start of the fall semester, our first-year students gather
for a torch night ceremony.
This tradition of passing the torch from upperclassmen to incoming students dates back to 1925.
Our incoming students recite this pledge: I accept this torch
and pledge to represent my university, my fellow Volunteers
With honesty, compassion, and courage.
I commit to stepping forward in moments big and small,
To serve, to lead And to light the way for others.
I think about this pledge a lot—how it reflects who we are as Volunteers, the values we share,
and the commitment we make to one another.
Being a Volunteer is rooted in courage, compassion, and service.
It’s about lifting one another up and contributing to something bigger than yourself.
This identity and shared value system is one of the greatest assets we have as a university.
Our faculty, staff, students, alumni, people across the state of Tennessee and beyond—all
see themselves as Volunteers.
This same spirit is what inspired us to start asking what our students need to thrive.
They told us they needed more support, more help finding the resources that already existed
on our campus.
Volunteers help one another.
We lift each other up.
So that is exactly what we did.
Because at Tennessee, we are building THAT place.
In fall 2020, we assigned every incoming student an academic advisor, an academic coach, and
a financial counselor.
We call them “Vol Success Teams.”
This is an initiative we put in motion almost immediately after I arrived at UT in January
2020—two months before we sent our students home and pivoted to an online learning environment.
If I’m being honest, implementing a large-scale student success program in the middle of a
pandemic seemed overwhelming.
So I asked my team: Should we press pause this plan?
Are we doing too much too fast?
Their response was resounding “Absolutely Not.”
Our scholars need us now more than ever.
That fall—still early in the pandemic—we launched Vol Success Teams and every student
was assigned a support network.
Together, this team creates a holistic infrastructure that supports every aspect of students’
experiences.
Their advisor helped them plan out their academic career to help them reach their goals.
Their financial counselor helped them navigate the very complicated world of deadlines, federal
paperwork, and enrollment requirements.
And their academic coach helped them access resources and leverage their Clifton Strengths
to build confidence and strategies for success.
After the first year, we surveyed students and found that students who engaged with their
Vol Success Teams had higher GPAs and reported a greater sense of belonging than those who
did not.
At a time when the national retention rate dropped almost 2 percentage points, ours went
up.
That means more first-year students returned for their second year than before the pandemic.
When others stepped back, when others took a pause, Tennessee Volunteers stepped up.
We hit the gas.
That first cohort of students are now heading into their third year.
They continue to persist toward a degree at a higher rate than the classes that came before
them.
At UT, when you look at our student body, Black and Latino men have lower retention
and graduation rates than their peers—a full 8 percentage points.
This is NOT because they’re not talented or prepared to succeed at UT.
These young men arrive on campus just as academically prepared as their peers—with test scores
and GPAs on par with their classmates.
So we asked them about their experiences at UT.
They told us they needed a community where they belonged and the confidence to succeed.
In fall 2021, we launched the UT Success Academy—an innovative four-year program that brings together
students with similar backgrounds and needs.
Year one of the program focuses on helping students understand their strengths through
peer coaching and a course that helps them acclimate to campus and find their own community.
During year two, students build on their strengths by exploring academic and career options.
And in years three and four, students stretch their strengths and personalize their experience
by finding their own pathway to success and graduation.
For some, this may be an internship or it could be becoming a peer coach to support
the new class of UT Success Academy scholars.
Last month, the first cohort completed their first year.
These students are persisting at rates we haven't seen before.
We are inspired by their success.
These students are thriving in the way that we all knew they could.
The UT Success Academy has been so monumental for these students that we are launching similar
academies for other demographic groups, including military veterans.
What’s most exciting is that Vol Success Teams and the UT Success Academy are just
the beginning—it’s what I like to call phase one.
We are developing what we call the Volunteer Experience, a comprehensive, immersive, integrated
program for every student.
We are building THAT place—the place where future nurses, teachers, executives, engineers,
and social workers discover their strengths and develop their confidence.
We are building THAT place—where we believe in every student’s potential, so they can
find their passion and define their future.
From the moment they take their pledge at Torch Night to when they walk across the commencement
stage and beyond, we want our students to know they are supported and they are valued.
We are integrating a strengths-based approach in the classroom and helping our students
align their strengths with their career goals.
Through all of this work, we are developing resilient, capable students who will thrive
not only on campus and in the classroom, but in the workplace and in communities.
The University of Tennessee is THAT place—where future leaders find their voice, reveal their
courage—where young people learn how to step up in moments big and small.
Our graduates will one day work at your organization or your company, and I promise you, they will
thrive there too.
All because they know how to leverage their strengths—
they are ready to build consensus— and they are willing to step forward in service
and leadership.
Thank you so much for your time today.