Like many in higher education, Melissa Young was a student who went to college and then never left. Young completed her associate, bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Hawai’i at Chaminade University of Honolulu while her husband was stationed in the area, working for the institution full-time as well.
Melissa Young, assistant vice president for student success
Columbus State University
“Higher ed kind of happened to me,” Young says.
Since July 1, Young has served as the assistant vice president for student success at Columbus State University in Columbus, Ga., leading academic advising, career development, the first-year experience, tutoring and the university’s quality enhancement project.
Young spoke with Inside Higher Ed about her work, how Columbus State is reimagining the student experience and her future ambitions for the campus.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inside Higher Ed: What is your new role? How does it contribute to institutional goals for student success?
Young: We’re laser focused at this institution on student success. We want to make sure that those students that we admit are able to have the opportunity to progress to their degree in a timely manner, enjoy their time here at CSU and ultimately complete their degree here at CSU. And maybe go to grad school here, or go to grad school [elsewhere] or get out into the workforce in our community.
Everything we’re doing right now is focused on what we need to do to improve our student outcomes. We hope to move from a retention rate of around 70 percent to 85 percent. That’s a big, audacious goal, but we’re doing everything we can to move the needle in that direction.
Inside Higher Ed: Since you’ve been in this role, what’s been the focus of your work?
Young: We’re focused on improving our student experience, particularly in the first year, but we will be expanding that out all across the student life span.
We are looking into financial literacy and financial wellness for our students … There is a scholarship for students who graduate high school in Georgia and our Georgia residents that affords them quite a significant opportunity to help contribute to their tuition and fees. And we know that if students lose the HOPE Scholarship or the Zell [Miller] Scholarship—depending on their academic outcomes for high school—if they lose those scholarship opportunities, it’s really hard for them to be able to complete their degrees. So we’re trying to mitigate those losses of HOPE.
We’re also working on improving our career services area, connecting career to the classroom so that students can understand what they’re learning in their classes contributes to what happens after college. And trying to also help students understand a little bit about how the degree is not necessarily the career. What you do in college sets you on a path, and then you have many choices that you make thereafter that lead you ultimately on your journey.
We also are focusing on advising and improving that experience, connecting students to advisers in a more intentional way. We hope to train all of our advisers to be success coaches, life coaches, so that there is a more holistic approach and less transactional processes when we’re working with our students. We’re going to try to bring down caseloads too, and keep the students with the same adviser all the way through. And these are just some things we’re trying to do and hope to have in place by fall 2025. It’s a process.
Inside Higher Ed: That’s a speedy timeline, too.
Young: It is.
Inside Higher Ed: Prior to this role you worked in advising. What does quality advising look like to you?
Young: I think being more transformational and less transactional is critical.
A lot of our students are first generation. A lot of our students are from a different socioeconomic status, and we really want to make sure that we give them all of the resources that they need. [We have a] very diverse student body … that we’re working with to make sure that they all feel like they belong and they have a space here.
Advising can be a huge impact. There’s nobody, aside from faculty, that students meet with that regularly, and we have a pulse on what’s going on in their lives. And I think we, more than anyone, have an opportunity to advocate for the students and to help them reach their goals, help them identify those goals as they move forward.
Inside Higher Ed: Students are at the heart of your work—it’s in your title. How do you try and keep a pulse on campus and student life?
Young: One thing that I am hoping to do in the spring semester is sit down with students on a regular cadence to kind of talk to them about the things that they’re seeing. We have a student government association. I would like to attend their forums.
This is the first semester [in my role], and we’re kind of building a plane while we’re flying it. That is a priority for me moving into the second semester of 2024–25 to have a chance to sit down with the student leaders. Not just the leaders, also those students that kind of blend into the background, and we’re not entirely sure where they’re engaging or if they’re engaging on campus, and how we could better engage.
Inside Higher Ed: Faculty members are also key players in student success work. How do you engage with the academic side of the house?
Young: We make sure that they all have a seat at the table. A lot of our work has been driven by our engagement with the National Institute of Student Success, and as we engaged with that entity, we worked with faculty, we worked with staff, we worked with students to understand the picture of what was going on our campus with our students.
We need to communicate with our faculty, keep them engaged. We have a momentum council, so we have representative from each of the colleges as well as many pockets of campus to include enrollment management, et cetera, so that everybody is hearing the same information and hopefully taking it back to their units.
We have a really strong relationship with the deans and the chairs of the academic department, so that they are in the loop and can also share out with the faculty about what is going on.
Inside Higher Ed: How do you define student success?
Young: Certainly, we want them to be academically successful. But I also would like for them to enjoy their time here at CSU and have a meaningful experience and be able to connect back as they’re adults and moving out into the world that how their experiences here have shaped them and led to the positive outcomes that they’ll expect in their future.
It’s much more holistic than just being retained and graduating. We want them to be well physically, socially, mentally and also financially when they leave.
Inside Higher Ed: Since starting in this role, what has been the biggest learning area for you or an area where you’ve been challenged?
Young: There’s so many things that we’re trying to accomplish, [so], pacing ourselves. We’re trying to do everything at once, and it’s great, and we want to be able to continue that momentum and have that impact on students right away. But we also have to be careful that we’re not burning out and wearing out the individuals who are the doers on our campus, trying to move the needle forward so quickly.
I think from a campus perspective, we’re trying to really lean into improving the culture on our campus and understanding the workload for each area. Looking at, what should we continue to do? What should we stop doing so that we have the bandwidth to really move the needle on student success?
Inside Higher Ed: What are your long-term goals in this role?
Young: We have a goal, again, to move our student outcomes in a huge way by 2030. It’s part of our strategic plan.
Long-term, I hope that we’re able to move the needle in those directions and actually achieve those goals, because they’re pretty audacious. I hope to be able to sustain the momentum that we have now and be innovative in the space. We have a lot of work to do, and we want Columbus State to be a place where students thrive, and they’re able to really create the foundations here that will set them up for success in their future.
There’s a lot to do, and it’s hard to think about beyond the five-year mark, assessing each year where we are in our vision and how much we’ve how much more work we have to do.
We are really also focused on connecting with our community and making sure that our students have an opportunity to meet our industry leaders in the area [and] work with them through internships, mentorships, experiential learning opportunities. We want to connect our faculty, so we’re really hoping that all of this work will help Columbus State, the Columbus area and our students in the future.
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