Coordination Without Control: How the University of Cincinnati Built a Student Success System That Scales

Most student success models assume you’re building from a central hub. A single office with visibility across the institution. The University of Cincinnati (UC) never had that — and never wanted it.

With 53,000+ students, 14 colleges across three campuses, and 18 embedded advising and student success units, UC was designed for decentralization. But it created a problem that no dashboard or early alert tool had been able to solve: how do you coordinate action across dozens of offices, hundreds of advisors and success staff, and tens of thousands of students — all without collapsing everything into a single chain of command?

“The mantra of many people in my role,” says Tara Warden, Assistant Vice Provost at UC, “is that you sometimes have all the responsibility without all of the authority.”

For Tara and the UC team, the answer wasn’t centralization. It was strategic coordination.

How the Bearcat Promise Set UC’s Student Success Goals

In 2017, UC President Neville Pinto announced Next Lives Here — a strategic direction that formalized what UC had been working toward for years. At its center were two student success commitments: the Bearcat Promise, which set a concrete graduation rate goal and pledged that every student would have the people, tools, and processes to reach it, and CPS Strong, UC’s commitment to Cincinnati Public Schools students and its urban community.

“We were making a promise to all of our students that we would provide the people, the tools, and the processes to ensure that they can get to graduation,” Tara explains. “That was a pretty hefty promise.”

UC had already been building toward this for two decades. What changed in 2017 was the explicit accountability. For the first time, the institution had set a graduation rate goal — and publicly committed to achieving it.

The Bearcat Promise also put specific populations at the center of the work: students who had historically been underserved. UC was actively growing its enrollment of Cincinnati Public Schools students, first-generation students, and Pell-eligible students. 

“We have tried to make sure that we are improving and increasing the numbers of students in Cincinnati who are going to college,” Tara says. “And that accountability also means that as we’re scaling more access students, they have every opportunity to complete a college degree.”

Can a Decentralized University Achieve the Same Outcomes as a Centralized One?

Higher ed has well-documented success stories in student outcomes improvement. Georgia State is the reference most institutions cite — a 21-percentage-point gain in graduation rates, built on a model of centralized advising and proactive intervention.

UC matched that same 21-point gain. But it did so on a fundamentally different model.

“Our decentralization is somewhat part of our DNA at the university,” Tara explains. “Having 18 different advising and student success centers that are spread across our 14 colleges and university offices has been an important part of that.”

Centralizing would have required restructuring something that worked. The colleges and units had relationships with their students. Faculty governance was embedded in how the institution made decisions. Advising was close to the academic programs it served.

What UC needed wasn’t a different organizational structure. It needed a way to coordinate what already existed — to bring the right people to the right tables, surface the right information at the right time, and route action without creating a new bottleneck.

That insight became the operating principle behind everything UC built.

How UC Coordinates Student Success Across 18 Advising Units Without Centralizing

Tara’s model started not with technology, but with alignment. Specifically, with what she calls shared leadership tables.

The first one — ADAM, which brings together advising administrators and directors from across UC’s colleges — began informally. Tara was an assistant dean in a single college at the time.

“We looked around and realized we were not coming together to advocate for the students of the university, to share our best practices and lessons learned and our tools and our solutions with one another,” she recalls. “So we very informally started convening once a month.”

What started as a listserv became a monthly meeting, then a team site, then an advisory body that influenced university policy, resource allocation, and student support strategy. Over time, UC expanded the model. Today, those shared leadership tables include advising administrators, student affairs leaders, IR staff, enrollment management directors, academic leaders, and frontline staff from across the institution.

This year, UC convened its first-ever Provost Retention Workshop — bringing 133 vice presidents, deans, directors, and senior leaders together to address student retention, persistence, and graduation in a single room.

The logic behind the tables is simple: UC already had the right people. The problem was that they weren’t working together. Bringing them together didn’t require a reorganization. It required strategizing as a team.

“Building shared leadership tables is incredibly easy, and almost anyone can do it,” Tara says. “It’s really about setting a time, reserving a place or a digital space, and then inviting the right people to the table. That’s not only about leadership coming together–it’s also about sharing perspectives, insights, and priorities.”

How the Student Impact Platform Made Coordination at Scale Possible

Shared tables create the human infrastructure for coordination. But coordination at scale — across 53,000 students and 18 advising and student success units — requires something more.

That’s where Civitas Learning’s Student Impact Platform became central to UC’s model. Under the name My Bearcat Network, the platform became the data layer that gave the student success community something to work with.

Three things, specifically, made the difference.

Institutional Success Outcomes — Six Years In

Two years ago, UC surpassed its Bearcat Promise graduation rate goal of 75%. The institution has since raised the bar to 80%.

For Cincinnati Public Schools students — the population at the center of the CPS Strong commitment — graduation rates jumped 7 percentage points in a single cohort. First-generation, Pell-eligible, and CPS students are not just being enrolled at higher rates. They’re graduating at higher rates.

Course-level outcomes improved as well. In courses where students and faculty were using early alerts, the rate of D and F grades declined. Tara is careful to note that this didn’t mechanically reduce the overall DFW rate — some students withdrew instead — but it did improve GPA and academic progression for students who stayed engaged.

Advising satisfaction, measured through the National Survey of Student Engagement, reached a record high of 5.81. Quality of instruction and advising are the two highest-rated priorities in UC’s NSSE results every year. Both continue to improve.

Enrollment keeps growing too — UC is preparing for approximately 1,000 additional first-year students this fall, beyond what was initially projected.

“We’ve accomplished the same outcomes as Georgia State,” Tara says, “without centralizing everything, and without hiring 200 advisors all at once.”

How to Build a Coordinated Student Success Model at a Decentralized Institution

UC’s story is not a template. The decentralized model is specific to UC’s history, governance structure, and urban mission. But the principles behind it travel.

The University of Cincinnati is a large public R1 research institution serving 53,000+ students across 14 colleges and three campuses in Cincinnati, Ohio. It is consistently ranked among the nation’s top urban research universities.