In the month of September, Saint Xavier University had posted that the school was awarded the Title V Grant, which gave the university $3 million, from the Department of Education. The school plans to implement a five-year plan in order to give students a better experience at the university.
According to the Provost, James MacLaren, “The Title V Grant is a program run by the Department of Education, which provides funding opportunities for universities that are considered minority funding institutions. This grant is specifically geared to Hispanic serving institutions.”
“I had arrived in August of 2018, and almost immediately we built a working group together in order to try and obtain the award,” MacLaren continued.
“We began to survey students in the fall in order to get some benchmark data and we looked at what the priorities of the funding were. Although the details of the proposal did not come out until the spring, we were working ahead and was making assumptions on what had happened in the past,” MacLaren added.
Saint Xavier had done a lot of research in order to meet the requirements of the grant.
“We sent out a survey to students to see what students’ needs were and to ask the students about their experience to see if there were any gaps. We had a lot of ideas and collected a lot of data so that when we started writing, we had most of our ideas in place, and we just tailored it to what the actual grant was,” MacLaren continues.
There were two categories in the grant that the school could have focused on. The first one is improving student’s financial literacy, and the second one was improving the number of Hispanic students going into graduate programs.
“We chose to focus on improving financial literacy because we have good colleagues in the Graham School of Management who can help us develop a curriculum program. We believe that we could make a bigger impact,” says MacLaren.
Saint Xavier had done yearlong research in order to create a five-year plan.
“The program is based around people. We would add additional academic and career advisers. Hire a financial literacy coach that would work with the Graham School to teach students how to manage loans, credit cards, money for the future, and more. The goal is to enhance existing capacities, not necessarily make new programs.”
For the grant, there was a rubric that needed to be followed, and Saint Xavier had scored a perfect score in all sections except one.
According to Saint Xavier University News, the school is going to use the grant in order to reduce any gaps in student achievement.
MacLaren says that in order to reduce these gaps they want to improve on, “An increase of progression from year one to year two, which is also called the first-year retention rate, an increase of four year graduation rate, decreasing how many students go on probation, and looking at the amount of credits students have graduated with.”
“Other goals are to decrease the number of students the number of students who are unable to progress because of financial hold, to improve the retention rate of students who are undeclared, and work with reducing the number of credit hours that students graduate with so that it is closer to 120,” continues MacLaren.