Board Responsibility for Equitable Student Success

Board focus on student success for all students is not only a moral imperative but also a fiduciary duty and strategic imperative directly related to institutional sustainability. Demographics have shifted; the student bodies enrolled at today’s colleges and universities have dramatically changed from those of previous decades when most trustees were students. Institutions and the boards that govern them must use an equity lens in all decisions and planning to ensure that students enroll, excel, graduate, and thrive. In many cases, equitable student success will require transformation of board roles, processes, and business models.

A growing number of boards are focusing on and investing resources in addressing issues of race, gender, culture, socioeconomic status, and student success. These boards demonstrate an increasing awareness of the need for strategic transformation in developing equitable student success at their institutions and understand that the tactical accomplishments of their administrations and faculties on this path are incomplete and at risk without the strategic engagement of boards.

Boards and administrations are gradually coming to realize that the trajectory of demographic shifts, the nation’s well-documented need to radically increase the number and subject diversity of earned degrees and certificates, and the need to achieve more inclusive outcomes require significant changes in institutional culture and business models. The permanency of these changes requires boards to focus on mission, strategic decisions, allocation of resources, and policy renewal. To fail to do so is to fail to position the institution, region, and nation for success and to further jeopardize the international economic, strategic, and innovation standing of the United States.

Our effort relative to boards and equitable student success is designed to be supportive of and compatible with the BMGF Equitable Student Success/Equitable Value ecosystem under construction since 2016. Strategic transformation in higher education requires engagement with the transformation of society. Each board and each individual board member is on a nonlinear situational and personal journey in this work.

Our effort is to provide learnings, tools, a playbook, and experiences that enable strategic transformation for boards in their need to understand and lead. What follows will serve as a guide—not the guide. We have built processes that are adaptable to individual institutional and personal circumstances. This guide seeks to enable institutional approaches to plans to achieve greater justice, equity, and inclusion embedded with goals for improved student success.

Strategic transformation will require deeper learning among board members and often uncomfortable conversations as a part of the path to equitable student outcomes. The business model and cultural changes required to achieve a new set of outcomes may often be taxing and particularly challenging. Boards, in collaboration with their institutional teams, can learn together to set transformative goals and build appropriate accountability systems. We have been guided in this work by the work already accomplished and ongoing by the BMGF Frontier Set institutions, including engaged intermediary organizations; AGB’s Principles of Trusteeship; AGB Board of Directors’ Statement on Justice, Equity, and Inclusion; research conducted by our curriculum consultants; and our advisory group.

AGB will continue to add tools, resources, and new thinking to inspire and empower boards, presidents, and campus communities to achieve the goal of equitable student success and to continue this essential work for colleges and universities.