Initiative 2: Deliver a Distinctive Experience and Advantage for SLU Graduates

Radical student-centeredness requires a culture in which faculty and staff take personal responsibility for student success. It also requires the fundamental redesign of the systems, policies, and practices through which SLU fulfills its promise to students.

Student-Centered by Design

We will redesign the student experience around what students need to persist, thrive, and graduate prepared for lives of meaning and accomplishment. Guided by data and evidence, we will better align advising, academic support, financial assistance, health and well-being services, technology, and efforts to foster belonging. We will reduce unnecessary barriers and fragmentation, strengthen the human relationships that make SLU distinctive, use AI and other technologies wisely to anticipate student needs, and establish clear accountability for outcomes. We will not dilute academic expectations. Instead, we will remove the obstacles that stand between students and the quality education SLU promises.

SLU already possesses a strong ethos of care rooted in our Jesuit values, and the University Core prepares SLU undergraduates to become intellectually flexible, creative, reflective, and critical thinkers in the Jesuit tradition. Our task is to make that care and that formation more consistent across the University: identifying, testing, and expanding the practices that most effectively support student success and whole-person development; recognizing and rewarding faculty and staff who model those practices; and attending more deliberately to the formation and development of graduate students.

We will also learn from effective practices already at work within SLU. Athletics provides one of the University's most intensive models of student support. The Honors Program supplements each student’s primary advising relationship with specialized advising and culminates in a mentored capstone project. The Micah Program sustains a four-year community built around service, small interdisciplinary courses, and guided reflection. The resources and intensity of these programs cannot simply be replicated for every student, but many of their strengths are matters of intentional design: support begins early, expectations are clear, relationships are purposeful, reflection is structured rather than incidental, and someone notices quickly when a student begins to struggle. Our task is to extend these design principles to every student.

The result will be cura personalis made visible in both practice and outcomes: support that students can readily find and use; fewer administrative barriers between students and the help they need; stronger academic, personal, accessibility, international, and graduate services; and clearer responsibility for student success across schools, colleges, programs, and student populations. We will measure progress through improvements in academic performance, well-being, persistence, sense of belonging, graduation rates, and post-graduate success.

We will redesign the student experience around what students need to persist, thrive, and graduate prepared for lives of meaning and accomplishment.

 

Career Readiness Grounded in Personal Formation

Helping students persist to graduation is essential, but not sufficient. The SLU experience must also give graduates a distinctive advantage as they enter the next stage of their lives.

At SLU, personal formation, practical experience and career preparation will reinforce one another from the moment students arrive. Students will begin career exploration early and build relationships with employers, faculty and alumni. They will learn through internships, research, clinical work, entrepreneurship, service, community-based learning and other experiential opportunities. Foundational preparation in AI will be embedded across majors and fields so that every graduate can use emerging technologies capably, critically, ethically and responsibly.

Through these experiences, students will learn to connect what they study with who they are becoming and how they can contribute to the world. Career readiness will never stand apart from personal formation. Every SLU graduate will leave ethically grounded, prepared to engage people across differences in beliefs and experience and confident in using AI and other tools in service of the greater good.

That is the distinctive SLU advantage: competence and character formed together, preparing graduates not only for successful careers but for lives of meaning, accomplishment, service and joy.

Actions

Action 2.1	Re-engineer SLU’s student engagement and support ecosystem across the full student lifecycle — from first contact and recruitment through matriculation, academic progression, career placement, and alumni engagement. Review and adapt the support models developed in Athletics, the Honors Program, learning communities such as the Micah Program, and other areas, so that academic, personal, accessibility, international, and graduate support is easy for every student to find and use. Optimize the underlying systems, processes, and communications, and track results with rigorous data and clear metrics.
Action 2.2	Define a formation-centered framework for AI — a common set of learning outcomes grounding AI fluency in ethical discernment and human judgment — and embed it in every undergraduate and graduate program, reinforced through experiential learning.
Action 2.3	Design and implement a cocurricular formation experience that integrates traditions, campus life, community engagement, and Billiken Athletics — making belonging, joy, and spiritual development visible features of every student’s time at SLU, not incidental byproducts.
Action 2.4	Build the career pathways, preparation and partnerships that launch every student into meaningful work and lifelong connection with SLU, integrating career exploration, personal discernment, professional development, experiential learning, and discipline-specific expertise throughout the student’s curricular and cocurricular journey, and sustaining that connection through a durable employer, alumni, and community partnership network.
Action 2.5	Adopt a faculty talent strategy for SLU’s student-centered R1 model — a clear statement of what SLU expects, supports, and rewards across research, teaching, and student mentorship — and build it into hiring and position authorization, onboarding, faculty development, annual review, and, through faculty governance, promotion and tenure guidelines.