A Strategic Approach
Georgia State’s commitment to student success goes beyond grades and classrooms.
The university has earned national acclaim for helping students from every background stay on track for graduation, and now, Georgia State is creating even more tools to help students succeed after graduation as they move on to careers and graduate programs.
Georgia State’s new Quality Enhancement Plan, College to Career, is a campus-wide effort to get students to recognize the career competencies that they are acquiring through their curricular and co-curricular activities; to document these competencies in a robust fashion thorough archiving textual, video and audio evidence in faculty and peer-reviewed e-portfolios; and to articulate the competencies through resumes, cover letters and oral discourse.
How It Works
All undergraduates are now on-boarded on career-pathway-based learning communities in their first semester. New technologies have been implemented to share real-time job data for metro Atlanta with students, starting before they arrive on campus. Faculty and departmental grants are awarded to encourage instructors to integrate assignments highlighting career competencies into both lower-level and capstone courses. All students are provided with e-portfolios upon matriculation at Georgia State.
Last year, Georgia State students posted more than 700,000 artifacts (evidence of their career competencies) to their e-portfolios. All students complete a first resume as part of their first-semester orientation courses. Visits by first and second-year students to University Career Services have increased by more than 100% since 2015.
In 2018, Georgia State became the first university nationally to partner with Road Trip Nation to create a searchable video archive of the careers of Georgia State alumni.
The Brookings Institution 2017 Rankings of Social Mobility ranked Georgia State first in Georgia and 25th in the nation for social mobility (defined as moving students from the bottom quintile of Americans by annual household income at matriculation to the top half of Americans by annual household income fifteen year later).