Creating Students of Promise: A Q&A with SUNY's Cheryl Hamilton

SUNY's Associate Vice Chancellor for University Life, Opportunity Programs, and Student Advocate, Cheryl Hamilton, recently participated in an exclusive panel interview with Kaplan. She offers a compelling look at how the system is adapting to meet the changing needs of today’s students. She shares her insights on providing holistic support, fostering career readiness, and leveraging key partnerships to empower students and prepare them for life after graduation. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.

Briefly describe your organization and share how you uniquely support students.

Cheryl Hamilton: I'm Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Life, Opportunity Programs, and Student Advocate for the SUNY System Administration. I have the privilege of working closely with our student affairs professionals across our 64 SUNY campuses, and I also lead the Arthur O. Eve Educational Opportunity Program, known as EOP. The Educational Opportunity Program is a program for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds enrolled in our SUNY system who demonstrate the potential to succeed. I describe them as students of promise, who demonstrate the potential but may fall short of the criteria for general admission to our institutions, largely because of socioeconomic factors.

We meet the students where they are and we provide a wide range of support throughout their time at the university so that our students can thrive. We prepare them to successfully enter graduate school or their careers. We serve nearly 9,000 students across 55 campuses in SUNY, both state operated campuses and community colleges. And we've had the honor over the past few years to work very closely with Kaplan, particularly with our pre-med opportunity program, preparing our EOP students for careers in medicine and most recently with our EOP All Access License® test prep offering with Kaplan.

How do you define “student success” and how do you translate that to meet the evolving needs of students today?

Cheryl Hamilton: We still look at the very traditional definitions for student success, such as academic performance, graduation, retention, and persistence. But we also are paying closer attention to student engagement and sense of belonging in terms of the needs of students. One of the things we're seeing both in EOP and in the student affairs community, is more of our students coming in aware of the need to take advantage of mental health support. We have more students coming in looking for support to address food insecurity, housing insecurity, and basic needs.

Students have learned how to succeed as online students, so we have to ensure that we are providing the support that they need online. In SUNY, we're seeing an increase in the number of adult learners and students with children. We’re really looking at how we can provide the wrap-around support system wide, meeting the students where they are and providing the support that they need so that they can prepare successfully for their careers.

We're also seeing that students are coming in a lot more career focused. Students are not necessarily coming in to just pursue the traditional college degree. They want to see a return on investment. They want to know that the programs that they are entering as undergraduate students are going to prepare them to successfully enter careers. Those are certainly some of the things we're seeing with this new cohort of students coming in.

Our students bring such strengths to our universities and colleges. Our students come in with such resilience. I call our students “students of promise,” and while people talk about our students being, by definition, economically disadvantaged, they bring in so many strengths that they're able to capitalize on.

Aaron, fellow panelist and HEOPPO president, mentioned the importance of the pre-freshman summer program. I view that really as one of the unique and strongest aspects of our New York State Opportunity Programs. Our students all come in through pre-freshman summer programs to prepare them to hit the ground running once the fall semester begins. So much happens during those summer programs to prepare the students for success, to get them acclimated to college and university. The programs very much mirror what the students will experience during the academic year. And it is an opportunity to build the social capital, referenced by Renaldo Alba, fellow panelist and President of the APACS.

One of my favorite things during our pre-freshman summer program is that we bring back our alumni, and often for our students it is the first time that they meet individuals in the careers to which they aspire who come from backgrounds similar to them. They can ask those questions and engage in informal mentoring relationships through this time. And it's so incredibly powerful. It's also important when the campus president has the opportunity to come and welcome this group of incoming freshmen before they even start their freshman year. I can't say enough about the role that the pre-freshman summer program has in preparing our students for success.

» Related News: SUNY Chancellor King Announces Support for EOP Students to Prepare for Graduate School Admissions

Increasingly, students are coming to college more focused on careers. What effective programming are you seeing to address this? How are schools working closer with faculty to embed career education into academic curriculums?

Cheryl Hamilton: One thing we're looking at a lot more closely in SUNY is student participation in high impact practices, whether that's undergraduate research, internships, or service learning. We are promoting that more and partnering with faculty, ensuring that students have the opportunity to take advantage of these rich opportunities.

Not to highlight any particular campus, but I will say that Binghamton University's Career Center works very closely with faculty members to integrate career education into the curriculum. There's great work happening in both curricular and co-curricular activities to promote career education there.

How are you building the capacity to have longer term relationships with students?

Cheryl Hamilton: It's really baked into our model. We establish these trust relationships with the students before they even start their freshman year, so that once the academic year begins, the intentional advising makes sense. By then, they've experienced this already. They know who their navigator is. Our advisors become everything for our students. The model is very holistic in that the advisors are providing academic advising, career development, personal counseling, assisting with financial literacy, and really helping the students to navigate the campus. And these relationships last well beyond graduation.

» Related News: Fast Company Names Kaplan’s All Access License as a Winner in its 2024 World Changing Ideas Awards

In looking forward to five years from now, what do you think is higher education's biggest opportunity?

Cheryl Hamilton: I would start with leveraging technology. Between AI and data analytics, there's so much more that we can do and that we have access to in terms of supporting our students. Also, think about collaboration. Aaron, fellow panelist and HEOPPO president, and I have been in conversations about how our institutions can work together more collaboratively. Those two concepts of leveraging technology and stronger collaboration are higher education’s biggest opportunities.

Opening Doors to Student Success

One example of how SUNY is creating new opportunities for student success is by offering their learners in the Arthur O. Eve Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) free access to industry-leading test prep resources for graduate admissions and licensure exams. Through partnership with Kaplan’s All Access License, resources include those for the GRE®, GMAT™, LSAT®, MCAT®, DAT, OAT, NCLEX-RN®, and the CPA. This program will help students further their education, remove a financial burden, and give them the support they need to successfully take the next step toward their future career.

Set your students on the path to success with Kaplan’s All Access License.