Now facing a fourth consecutive academic semester of declining enrollment, many in the CSU community are asking what the institution is doing to course correct. Some indication of steps being taken was provided by CSU President Stuart Rayfield at the August 2026 CSU Faculty Senate meeting. There she encouraged faculty and staff to reflect on bandwidth and the impact of what they do, suggesting that they consider taking things off their plates in order to be more effective at key things. She also relayed a story of a student who earned a C instead of an A in a summer course due to a misunderstanding of assignment requirements listed in third-party software and the failure to read an e-mail from the professor alerting the student to the missing assignment. In this case, a student who arrived at CSU with the Zell Miller Scholarship left the institution with only the HOPE Scholarship. To combat situations like these, Rayfield stressed the need to issue Early Alerts so that CSU's academic coaches can intervene before grades are finalized. She expounded on this in her e-mail to faculty and staff earlier this week, stating that CSU is now actively engaged in an Enrollment After-Action Review, which is an in-depth study of new approaches to analyzing the data CSU already possesses. Such a study will help the institution discover and better understand why undergraduate and graduate students stay at, or leave, CSU. This Review will also help to identify systems and strategies CSU can implement to retain students and support their progress through graduation. According to Rayfield, the analysis will use both quantitative and qualitative evidence from the past eight years to examine these questions at three levels: institutionally, at the college and program level, and at the department and functional area. That is, CSU officials are doing a deep dive into enrollment, retention, progression, curriculum, advising, scheduling and process patterns to identify where opportunities for student loss or gain are concentrated and where targeted interventions and early triggers can have the greatest impact. Surveys and focus groups of faculty and students have already started. Rayfield will be updating the CSU community on this process next month, as she has asked for this work to be completed by Sept. 30.
CSU Provost Dustin Anderson also spoke to CSU Faculty Senators last month, noting the importance of first impressions for retention and progression, and also adding that students in the current generation are far less likely to ask for help than those from previous generations. Anderson discussed course size constraints, explaining that CSU cannot keep students from progressing in their degrees by limiting class sizes as there is a significant opportunity cost for students to continue in school. In other words, when students run out of money, they stop attending. He also explained that the CSU community needs to rethink modalities, settings, etc., to meet the needs of the students, including how courses are taught in light of these. In terms of specifics, he noted that the utilization of larger classes will assist with progression going forward. Like Rayfield, Anderson emphasized the use of Early Alerts, noting faculty concerns about them. Currently, a new system is onboarding, so faculty will need to still use the old reporting form for now. Lastly, he explained that part-time faculty are cheaper than full-time faculty in a way, but not cheaper than full-time faculty when there is a high attrition rate. Anderson closed by indicating that students do not need to be taught by faculty they will never see again and instead should have interactions with full-time faculty throughout their academic careers.
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