What does it mean to be a student-ready university?
The term “student-ready” may be unfamiliar to some at UFV, though it’s already an integral part of the work we do and the future direction of the university. At its core, it’s about something simple: making sure every student feels supported, understood, and set up to succeed.
Becoming a student-ready university means enabling student success by meeting students where they are and removing institutionally created barriers (without removing expectations or diluting student responsibility). In practice, it often shows up in small, everyday moments — when a student understands what’s expected of them, finds the support they need, or feels like they belong here.
The student-ready framework consists of four pillars:
- Student Engagement and Voice: Students engage in multiple roles in all aspects of the institution as participants, planners, creators, programmers, assessors, and more. Student voices and experiences are respected and heard.
- Inclusivity: Every part of the institution is inclusive of students with varying backgrounds, experiences, and identities. We actively work to identify and remove barriers to the success of all students and to create a welcoming and inclusive environment.
- Supportive and Developmental: Everyone supports and encourages students, emphasizes their strengths, and ensures what we do is relevant to students and focused on their success.
- Usable and User-Friendly: We ensure our language, content, services, purpose, policies, and procedures are clear, accurate, accessible, engaging, relevant, and understandable for students.
This framework has been championed at UFV by Dr. Alisa Webb, Vice President, Students and Dr. Kyle Baillie, Associate Vice President, Students. Taking inspiration from the book Becoming a Student-Ready College by Tia Brown McNair et al, the duo was struck by how closely it aligns with UFV’s mission, vision, and values.
For Kyle, it made perfect sense to incorporate a strategy that improves student retention, supports student well-being and the Fraser Valley at large.
“It benefits students because when we are more student-ready, flexible, and responsive, we see students are more successful. When students have a good experience, it helps to increase our brand in the community,” he explains.
“Clearing out the obstacles that aren’t educationally necessary and supporting students in holistic ways benefits the students, but also supports the entire community. Providing students with a good experience and a good educational outcome is positive for the Fraser Valley, the employees, the university, everyone.”
It’s been rewarding and fulfilling for Kyle to share what really gets him excited about the work. Kyle’s favourite part of educating people on this topic has been helping others understand how their work positively impacts the student experience.
“There’s a number of groups on campus who might think, ‘well, I do X and it doesn’t actually impact student experience,’ but their work is critical to supporting other units that are directly student-facing, or providing opportunities for students, or even, at the bare minimum, just being people in the building who support the vision, mission, and values and create a better and safer place for students to have that experience. That’s also important.”
These concepts are already at work in our university. They are reflected in our program reviews process, where faculty incorporate feedback from student advisory committees to make sure curriculum is diverse, inclusive and relevant, that prerequisite courses are offered frequently enough, and there are opportunities for experiential learning. Student-ready concepts are at work in the new Lá:léms Ye EverGreen on-campus living space, where student voices and Indigenous teachings about the Four Winds shape programming for students’ mental, spiritual, physical, and community health. With student-ready recruitment and orientation, supportive staff and faculty, classroom accommodations for every type of learner, and a vibrant community of alumni, being student-ready starts before students even apply and extends far beyond graduation.
“We already believe in these ideals; it’s really just about identifying, embedding and actioning them, and continuing to support each other as we move forward in delivering this framework at UFV,” says Kyle.
Essentially, a student-ready approach shifts the focus from expecting students to adapt to the institution, to asking how the institution can better support student success.
“The students will feel it before they can identify it. The students will experience it before they can name it, and I worry less about them naming it and more about wanting them just to experience it. The best marketing and branding that we can ever engage in is having our students walk out of this place being happy, healthy, successful, achieving our institutional learning outcomes and giving back to their communities. We measure our success by the success of our graduates, and I couldn’t think of a better thing, right? Students who are happy, healthy and successful when they leave here are the best advertising that we could ever hope for.”
To learn more about the student-ready framework and the future of UFV, read UFV’s Integrated Strategic Plan.
