Student Success Innovation Lab

This initiative recognizes that two critical outcomes are essential to improve economic mobility among African-Americans and eliminate racial disparities in the Charlotte area. First, more Black students must persist in college through degree completion. Second, those students must be equipped to align their post-secondary education and experiential learning into meaningful careers. The Student Success and Innovation Lab is an innovative approach that accomplishes both through student ingenuity, creativity and agency. It is being advanced with great interest from partners at Novant Health and Johnson C. Smith University. The concept calls for recruiting Black students from UNC Charlotte and Johnson C. Smith University to work in innovation labs to design strategies to improve retention and graduation rates of Black students. Rising juniors and seniors who are well on their way to graduation would be enlisted. Armed with current and detailed student data, hands-on instruction in quality improvement science, and the expertise of their own lived experiences, these students would work in teams to design strategies. Local university offices, departments and functions would deploy and “test” the strategies using plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles, which are popular in healthcare systems because they allow for a structured experimental approach to develop and test change ideas. Through this approach, promising innovations can be tested through targeted, rapid cycles without significant investment and system disruption at the front end in order to determine whether ideas should be adopted and scaled up, adapted and improved, or abandoned. Several features make this initiative unique and exciting: Students participating in the labs would be paid for their time as interns. Novant Health will provide training and support in quality improvement science, providing student innovators a core competency that can be applied in a number of career paths, giving them a competitive advantage as they enter the workforce. Local universities will “purchase” the rights to test the emerging innovations on their campuses. These nominal payments give the institution the inside track on the innovation and help underwrite the cost of the program. These institutions would have an incentive to expand successful initiatives on their campuses and, perhaps, hire the innovators. Findings would be shared with other institutions that might replicate the strategy. Local corporations will sponsor the various teams giving them the opportunity to mentor students and network with them, build relationships that could eventually lead to employment. Their sponsorship would help underwrite the cost of the program. UNC Charlotte Career Services Office will provide career development support to the students helping them the tools they need to translate the competencies they learn into their career aspirations and prospects for employment upon graduation.