Intersecting Value Proposition and Institutional Mission with Student Onboarding

Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking and reading on higher education value propositions and mission statements. While the two concepts intersect, they are not irreplaceable terms. For instance, in my current position, we are working to enhance the institution’s value proposition by introducing an enhanced honors program. However, this work is mutually exclusive from the institutional mission statement of teaching, research, innovation, and service. I mean, I guess you could argue enhancing teaching and innovation could come from an enhanced honors program, but that feels like a stretch. For an institution to be authentic and sustainable, its value proposition ought to be tightly linked to the mission statement. For an institution to espouse research as part of the value proposition but not include research as part of the mission would be a misalignment.

Tied to this, I have been doing a lot of work and reading into the successful onboarding of students to an institution. Part of the reason for this is I have been tasked with and am enthusiastically building a transitional advising center to successfully onboard new students to the institution. This is an area where the institution has historically not been effective. The prior philosophy had been “it’s all here, students just have to find it” and “the smart ones figure it out” – with a mean entering GPA of 3.8 and SAT of 1400+, it’s safe to say the students are smart.

As I think more about value proposition, institutional mission, and onboarding – each of these concepts intersect. For students to be successfully onboarded or transitioned to an institution, they ought to understand and hopefully have chosen the institution because of their understanding of the authenticity of the institution’s value proposition. Similarly, as part of onboarding, students should also be educated about the institutional mission – what the institution stands for or works to achieve. Students should be onboarded such that they see themselves as contributing to or adding value to the institutional mission. Presumably, if, again, students chose the institution because they saw a match with the institution’s value proposition, they should also be active players in contributing to the institutional mission. If some of this seems like a circular conversation, I would agree – hence the intersection.

This fall, I am going to be teaching a first-year seminar section as part of new student’s onboarding experience. To say I am brimming with both excitement and anxiety about this would be an understatement. I can see myself both soaring and epic failing at this at the same time. Based on some of my research, I am going to weave the concept of the institutional mission into the class – working to help each student see where he/she can play a role in advancing the institutional mission into their experience or personal journey.

While on the topic of onboarding, some of you may have seen some of my writings on the topic of student success – a concept, from my perspective, as near to the holy grail of higher education as you will find. I am passionate about the subject. Getting to student success begins with amazing anti summer melt systems and infrastructure. The next step, sequentially, is successful student onboarding. At the intersection of these experiences is orientation. Someone smarter than me once said, orientation is not an event – it is a process. As part of the transitional advising area I am building, we are linking anti-melt to the onboarding process – again a meaningful intersection exists here. Linking it to the orientation process will be a heavier lift given institutional reporting lines.

One of the valuable lessons I have learned in my higher education experience is that finding areas of commonality allows for relationship building. Stay with me – I have a point to this. A few years ago, to prevent melt – an area where we led our peer group (not an accomplishment) – we created a pre-orientation event (we did not call it that for political reasons) where local students could come to campus and engage in pre-enrollment activities. Partnering with another area where we had common ground resulted in a successful collaboration. Of greater importance, students who attended the event retained at 100%.

So…in trying to tie together these seemingly disparate thoughts, the intersection of an institution’s value proposition and mission are meaningful. Part of what helps intersect these items involves successful student onboarding to affirm institutional value proposition while educating on mission. I will close with a final thought I have shared before. I am a firm believer that part of an institution’s mission ought to include student success. How can not working to support seeing a student achieve his/her dreams of a college degree not be a part of the mission? Institutions who understand this and do deliberate work in this space are those who add real value to the proposition of higher education. 😊