Scaling Student Success from Enrollment to Career: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Strategy

Chantelle Thompson, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Strategic Operations and Chief Communications Officer at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, shared her perspectives on leveraging student success initiatives to drive Gen Z enrollment during an exclusive panel webinar with Kaplan. Key takeaways center on elevating support services into recruitment messaging, delivering on the promises to students, and empowering them with the tools required to make their career dreams a reality. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.

Share with us a high-level overview of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign along with one quick thing you’re most excited about in the higher education field right now.

Chantelle Thompson: I am the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Strategic Operations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We are the flagship institution of a three campus system where we serve more than 56,000 students every year. Right now, I'm excited about how we are aligning student success initiatives around strategic communications. We are telling the story of impact while scaling services to meet students exactly where they are.

How are you positioning student support services as primary enrollment differentiators?

Chantelle Thompson: At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, we made a very intentional shift from positioning services as just support to part of the student experience from day one. We are elevating priorities such as career readiness, wellness, advising, and basic needs support, directly into recruitment and marketing messaging.

A big part of this is grounded in what we call a CARES framework. The C stands for Communication and Collaboration: Ensuring internal departments and external partners communicate transparently so no student falls through the cracks.

The A stands for Accessibility and Accountability: Providing friction-free access to resources while holding both the institution and the student accountable for driving positive outcomes.

The R stands for Relationships and Responsibility: Cultivating deep human connections that empower students to take charge of their own destinies.

It’s also important to make sure we hold ourselves responsible for delivering exactly what we said we were going to do in our marketing messaging. We are telling our students this is the experience they will get when they come to our institution. And then in turn, students have a responsibility for taking charge of their own destiny. We are giving them the skills to do what they need to do.

The E in our CARES framework stands for Excellence and Eminence: Striving to help students and staff become the absolute best versions of themselves.

Finally the S stands for Staff and Students: Care for one another—students and staff—and if you or someone you know needs help, visit wellness.illinois.edu."

This framework underpins everything we are doing to create community, which helps us move from a more reactive to proactive approach. This model ensures that the student experience is coordinated and visible.

To elevate visibility, we are telling more intentional stories of impact around how students are engaging with services right from the start, not just when they have a moment of challenge or opportunity.

We want to make sure that they understand that student success is not a secondary benefit to what they are doing. It is the defining part of their Illinois experience while they are with us, and it is a differentiator of why students choose to enroll with our institution.

One of the differentiated support services the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign offers is access to free test prep. Tell us about the impact this program has on your students.

For context, all students receive access to free, industry-leading test preparation resources through partnership with Kaplan’s All Access License®. With zero out of pocket costs to students, this solution removes cost barriers and unlocks new opportunities as they take high stakes exams such as for the MCAT®, LSAT®, or GMAT™ or career readiness programs such as Critical Thinking or Confident New Hire, among others.

Chantelle Thompson: Our institution has been partners with Kaplan for a long time; we love our friendship and partnership. One important aspect to making sure that students are successful is centered on the concept of access. A lack of access is often a primary barrier.

Our students are very driven. They are wonderful and talented with so much power that just needs to be unlocked. Their potential should not be restricted due to an absence of resources that makes them feel as though they cannot take the next step. Access should not be the limiting factor.

At the University of Illinois, with support from our state, we have access to Kaplan’s All Access License partnership that allows us to remove that barrier at scale, which is amazing. There are 40+ courses available to our students for free, including exam prep courses in a multitude of areas covering career readiness and critical thinking.

We are very fortunate and grateful for the fact that our level of support comes from the state, and they have prioritized it at scale. This clear signal says we are investing in all avenues and giving all students opportunities—including those who otherwise simply could not afford to pursue their career goals.

The state is investing in our students and their futures, which is very powerful. It gives us the opportunity to provide them with even more services to augment what we’re doing in our Career Services Center.

We have embedded advising in different areas of academic interest. We are coaching our students along their journey and mentoring them in ways that lead them down the road to their success. Oftentimes, that will include the need for these prep exams. Specifically for us, this program has been really great in providing students with access.

We are not just encouraging students to have aspirations; we are giving them the tools to actually make it happen, which is really powerful. It feels great as an administrator knowing that we are providing students something that is so meaningful. And it is a differentiator for prospective students and families because they know we are committed not to just getting them here and in the classroom. We are here to make sure that they are successful long after they arrive.

Looking ahead, in the next five years what are the top opportunities for student success?

Chantelle Thompson: The working world is changing tremendously and as a land-grant R1 institution that has been around over 150 years, there are things that we will need to therefore think about possibly shifting in the future in order to adapt.

One consideration is to start thinking about what credentialing really looks like as we move forward. As we prioritize workforce readiness and upskilling, our challenge is to preserve the high-impact research and residential experiences that produce breakthroughs like advanced AI tools. We need to continue with these important activities. But we also need to make sure that we are meeting students and families where they are while investing in the future. Not only from the standpoint of our knowledge as a community and as a world, but also the economic impact and other drivers that happen as a result of the wonderful education the people receive at our institutions. It is my view that higher education will need to consider adapting as the professional world shifts, in order to remain relevant and effective.

Empower your students with the tools they need to achieve their aspirations through Kaplan’s All Access License.