Abstract
Discourse around Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education in the United States has long focused on improving the persistence and academic achievement of students. On the surface, such goals are reasonable and well-intentioned. However, the near-exclusive focus on those two outcomes as shorthand for “success” serves hegemonic norms which preclude the equitable success of all students. Although STEM education research has begun to address the inequitable systems within which students and faculty operate, the language of success has largely not changed. While previous work has aimed to recognize and characterize how normative definitions of success harm students and faculty, they fall short of providing readers with strategies for how to sustainably change these systems of injustice. Utilizing the four frames model for systemic change, this Essay 1) deconstructs the operational definitions of student success among key stakeholders involved in STEM higher education: students, faculty, departments, and institutions; 2) determines how extant policies and practices drive misalignments among these definitions and thwart equity; and 3) highlights three key opportunities for change agents to transform how success is measured and defined within STEM higher education.
INTRODUCTION
At almost every level of education, policymakers, researchers, and educators seek to improve students’ academic performance, retention within, and completion of education programs. Indeed, when biology education researchers discuss “student success,” they are most often referring to academic achievement or retention; 92% of papers discussing student success in CBE Life Science Education were measuring one of these two variables (Weatherton and Schussler, 2021). While helping students do well in a class or persist at an institution are reasonable and well-intentioned goals, these goals often do not align with students’ personal definitions of success (O'Shea and Delahunty, 2018; Weatherton and Schussler, 2022). These definitions represent a near-exclusive cultural focus on academic achievement, which has been shown to be a major factor driving students out of Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics (STEM) majors (Seymour et al., 2019). Recent work has highlighted the ways in which these normative definitions of success perpetuate existing hegemonic standards and hinder progress toward equitable education (McGee, 2020; Weatherton and Schussler, 2021; Morton et al., 2023). This Essay seeks to build on that work by not only advocating for more diverse definitions of success in STEM education but also exploring a systems-level perspective on how these changes can be enacted and sustained. By doing so, this essay aims to equip readers with the knowledge and perspective to begin the long process of shifting cultural notions of success toward a more equitable and just future.
Michel Foucault's exploration of the interplay between language, discourse, and power offers insight into why definitions of success are central to issues of equity in STEM higher education. Foucault argues that language is not merely descriptive but is deeply embedded in the exercise of power (Foucault, 1972). In this light, the words and terms chosen to define “student success” in higher education are not neutral or objective; rather, they reflect and reinforce specific power dynamics, norms, and ideologies within the field (Weatherton and Schussler, 2021). For example, consider two biology courses: in one course, 100% of students’ grade is based on their exam scores, while in the other, 60% is based on exam scores, 20% on participation, and 20% on the successful completion of a service-learning project. These two courses convey very different messages about what “success” looks like, which activities are valued in the field, and what future biologists should prioritize. Thus, by defining and measuring student success in specific ways, researchers, instructors, and policymakers hold power over shaping the cultural discourse within STEM higher education.
This process enables inequity when the culturally dominant notions of success do not align with those of minoritized individuals, especially students. This misalignment can affect students’ sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and ultimately, retention (Shukla et al., 2022; Weatherton and Schussler, 2022). For example, previous research has found that students from Black and Latìn communities tend to value collaboration-, equity-, and community-focused goals, rather than the goals of individual competition and academic achievement alone (Garibay, 2015; McGee and Bentley, 2017; Oh and Kim, 2018; Morton et al., 2019). Students with the former goals may enter courses looking to create community with other students and focus on developing their skills to be able to serve equity-focused goals. In doing so, they choose to focus less on memorizing content for the sake of external achievements (e.g., getting an A on an exam). However, though these students may perceive a successful outcome in practicing these skills, their course grades may not reflect “success” due to prevailing norms—both explicitly, through structures like minimum GPA requirements, and implicitly, through normative signaling about “who is a science person” (Perez et al., 2014; Witteveen and Attewell, 2020). These implicit and explicit signals may prompt students to switch majors or leave their institution altogether (a common pattern, as evidenced by Seymour et al., 2019). Thus, students who are passionate about science but whose personal values do not align with the normative ones may feel forced to assimilate or leave the field altogether (Morton and Nkrumah, 2021; Wright and Riley, 2021). Foucault posits that while discourse can create and sustain power structures, it can also be used to expose, undermine, and redefine those same structures (Foucault, 1972; Weedon, 1996). Therefore, by centering student voices and critically examining current power structures in higher education, a more equitable future is possible.
Recent research has outlined a vision for what more equitable definitions of success in STEM higher education may look like. These definitions are diverse and recognize the various ways in which students can demonstrate competencies in STEM disciplines (e.g., Weatherton and Schussler, 2021; Fernández et al., 2023; Madsen et al., 2023; Morton et al., 2023; Wilke et al., 2023). For example, Madsen and colleagues (2023) explored how low socioeconomic status (LSES) individuals (i.e., students from families whose income falls in the bottom 20–50% of yearly earnings) in STEM programs defined success. As opposed to a narrow focus on academic success, LSES students, faculty, and administrators expressed definitions of success that included personal, familial, and theological aspirations. Similar studies have provided critical insights into what success looks like for disabled students (Wilke et al., 2023), for Black students (Morton et al., 2023), and for students across gender identities (Fernández et al., 2023). While this work has begun to reveal a vision for what more equitable definitions of success may look like, restrictive definitions largely remain entrenched within STEM higher education (Bowen and Cooper, 2021; Fiorini et al., 2023).
One reason for this stasis is that institutions of higher education are intricate systems made up of many different stakeholders, and as such, cultural change is complex. Each stakeholder is subject to a different set of incentives and structures that impact their choices. For example, an introductory biology instructor and a university administrator are subject to different types of feedback (e.g., student evaluations versus accreditation standards), and therefore may have very different opinions about how student success should be defined and measured. Furthermore, single stakeholders may be subject to competing or even conflicting pressures, such as the tension between favorable course evaluations and the desire to challenge students in their growth (Stroebe, 2020; Clayson, 2021). Thus, in order to build a more equity-driven vision of student success, one must understand the motivations and pressures driving each stakeholder. Indeed, research on organizational behavior indicates that systems-level approaches to institutional change, which emphasize organizational culture and incentive structures, significantly enhance the likelihood that change will be successful (Bolman and Deal, 2008; Kezar, 2011). These approaches have been quickly gaining traction within STEM education research, and several recent case studies have drawn upon these frameworks to inform change efforts in STEM departments and across intervention programs (e.g., Reinholz et al., 2019; Stavrianeas et al., 2022; Ngai et al., 2023). Despite this growing effort to apply systems-level approaches in higher education, this concept has not yet been applied to understand cultural change regarding student success in STEM higher education.
This Essay seeks to fill this gap by exploring extant definitions of student success in STEM higher education and the systems and structures that maintain them. We use the Four Frames theory for systemic change (Reinholz and Apkarian, 2018) to explore the dynamics across four stakeholder levels: students, faculty, departments, and institutions. Through our analysis, we identify three emergent themes that impede cultural change around definitions of success within STEM higher education. We discuss these themes in light of the four frames and offer empirically-based strategies to address them.
As such, this essay is organized as follows:
Background: We begin by describing the historical underpinnings of student success metrics. We then provide a general overview of the Four Frames, defining and providing examples of each of the dimensions: structure, symbols, power, and people.
Stakeholder analysis: Across each stakeholder level, we discuss 1) how success is implicitly and explicitly defined; and 2) how that definition intersects with the stakeholder's metrics used to elevate and propagate stakeholder success within the higher education system. We then apply the Four Frames theory to each stakeholder to identify mechanisms that maintain inequity.
Discussion: We discuss three barriers to changing definitions of student success that emerged from our stakeholder analysis: incentive structures, inequitable power distribution, and conflicting values in academia. We discuss how these barriers also offer opportunities, so that readers may be more prepared to address inequities around student success at their institutions.
POSITIONALITY STATEMENT
A scholar's positionality (e.g., identity, views of research, experiences) influences the questions they ask, the methods they use, and the ways they communicate the outcomes of their work (Secules et al., 2021). Our analysis and recommendations are written from our roles in academia and our knowledge of the four stakeholders.
We conducted our analysis across the four stakeholder groups through our own experiences within and with these groups as well as our knowledge of the scholarly literature. Collectively, we have experience as undergraduate and graduate students in the life sciences, engineering, discipline-based education research, and medicine. We have taught and mentored undergraduate and graduate students in our roles as graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, and/or staff. We have served on departmental, college, and university level committees related to faculty, graduate affairs, diversity, equity and inclusion, and teaching and learning. Two of us have been part of program-level accreditation with one contributing on a regular basis to academic program review for both STEM and non-STEM departments in service of institutional accreditation. Our learning, teaching, and working experiences range in institution type from private 4-year colleges, large research-oriented universities, public community colleges, and public state schools. One of us currently works in educational development and consults with faculty from a broad range of disciplines and career stages in their teaching. As scholars we study epistemology in engineering, identity, student success, and student and scientist experiences of failure.
While our collective experiences and knowledge are quite broad within the academic landscape, it is important for us to acknowledge that we do not intend for this Essay to represent a comprehensive analysis across all possible contexts and experiences in higher education. For example, we were unable to speak to the important role that administrative staff have at the department and institution levels and how these individuals can be change agents. We hope this essay is the start of a larger conversation that critically examines extant definitions of student success. At the individual level, we hope readers are both challenged and encouraged to take steps to being change agents within their own contexts.
RELEVANT BACKGROUND
Historical Precedent
The history of student success in the United States has been heavily influenced by contemporary political and social contexts (Russell, 2023). This section will trace the various ways success has been conceptualized and measured over the past century, though we note that success is not often explicitly defined, but implicitly defined via the metrics that researchers and instructors use to measure it (Weatherton and Schussler, 2021). Accordingly, in this section, we largely discuss metrics of success, rather than definitions. We point out the ways that these metrics have been used to advance (often explicitly) racist agendas, as to highlight our broader thesis—that common notions of student success often function to further cultural hegemony.
Some of the earliest research on higher education in the United States dates to the early 20th century, a period where the United States sought to standardize its systems and where the Eugenics movement gained significant support from scientists and nonscientists alike (Boas, 1916; Dikötter, 1998). This social and political background laid the groundwork for education researchers to seek standardized, “neutral” metrics (e.g., personality traits, Garrett, 1929; scores on intelligence exams, MacPhail, 1924) which promised to predict student success, most often conceptualized as high grades and degree completion. One of the most notable measures of success to come out of this period was scores on intelligence tests, like those published by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (commonly referred to as “IQ tests,” Huey, 1910; Boake, 2002). Contemporaries quickly identified that these tests were biased and required extensive knowledge of dominant U.S. cultural ideas; for example, one question asks who authored Robinson Crusoe (Higgins and Sivers, 1958; Russell, 2023). Despite their lack of validity evidence, these metrics were frequently provided as “proof” for racist policies, like school segregation and educational tracking (Derrick, 1920; Schwegler and Winn, 1920). The misuse of these metrics lent a false scientific legitimacy to racist stereotypes, perpetuating social inequalities and embedding racial discrimination in educational and social systems. The popularity of intelligence testing and other “measures of merit” conceived traits and outcomes (i.e., success) as a static, measurable, and innate biological reality, thereby propagating false narratives of racial superiority.
As college enrollment increased postwar in the 1940s and 50s, institutions sought ways to easily quantify student merit and thus, future success. This led to the inception of standardized entrance exams, like the SAT, ACT, and GRE (Weber et al., 1942; Thorndike, 1947). Like IQ tests, these exams were created with the goal of capturing “objective” measures of student intelligence, as a proxy for future success. Using these metrics allowed institutions to claim to be meritocratic—selecting and accepting students based on their ability. However, these exams are biased, often benefiting those whose social capital and cultural knowledge align with the values and knowledge systems of those who designed the tests (Russell, 2023). In other words, much research has shown that IQ tests and standardized college entrance exams are systematically biased against students of color and are not good predictors of future success (Moneta-Koehler et al., 2017; Saygin, 2020). Thus, it is clear that metrics of success during this period continued to center quantifiable outcomes at the expense of valid and reliable ones.
Research in the 1970s and 80s spurred a shift in how the field of education viewed student success; success was no longer viewed as the product of wholly individual traits, but rather the product of connections between individuals and their environments. One of the most notable bodies of work from this period was the suite of theories on student retention that focused on the relationship between students and their institutions, like those published by Panos and Astin (1968), Spady (1970), Tinto (1975), and Bean (1980). However, these theories maintained the field's presiding definition of success as completing one's degree and persisting within an academic environment, even though ideas from sociology and anthropology enhanced researchers’ ability to recognize that institutions shared responsibility for enabling student success. Theories like Tinto's (1975) institutional departure model built on previous work by incorporating students’ background characteristics (e.g., personality traits, precollege schooling, and other previously “predictive” attributes) and examined how those characteristics influenced students’ interactions with university systems and their ultimate success. Notably, these theories often encouraged students to “integrate” into university systems, a notion that is especially harmful to minoritized students, who draw strength from their communities and families (Metz, 2004; Lee et al., 2018).
As the “positive psychology” movement gained momentum in popular culture throughout the late 20th century, the concept of success in higher education once again shifted. Bandura's theory of self-efficacy (1977, 1982), which refers to an individual's belief in their ability to complete a given task or succeed in a given situation, transformed the concept of student success. Bandura posited many ways to increase students’ self-efficacy (e.g., vicarious experiences, mastery experiences, emotional arousal, verbal persuasion) with the claim that increasing students’ self-efficacy could lead to greater achievement and persistence (Bandura, 1982). Thus, success was no longer merely an outcome of students’ innate abilities, their backgrounds, nor their ability to integrate into a university system. Instead, self-efficacy theory and other contemporary theories like social cognitive career theory (Lent et al., 2002) proposed to re-envision success as building from complex interactions of personal characteristics, environmental influences, and developing aspirations. Thus, the concept of success during this period expanded to include goals like increasing science identity (Holmes et al., 2019), self-efficacy (Zajacova et al., 2005), and sense of belonging (Strayhorn, 2018).
As the field of higher education research develops, the concept of student success continues to evolve. Modern theories continue to expand on what “successful” student learning outcomes can look like; in addition to academic and persistence definitions, increases in self-concept, gaining experience, and positive student well-being have all gained traction as definitions of student success in recent decades (Kovich and Simpson, 2019; Fernández et al., 2023). The change in how success is defined over the past century has led to a concurrent shift in how success is measured—from almost exclusively quantitative outcomes toward an incorporation of qualitative measures and the recognition that purely quantitative definitions of success fail to capture the full nuance of the student experience (Weatherton and Schussler, 2021). However, while the picture of student success has become more complex and layered, the frame of the picture remains largely the same. Even though modern theories include self-efficacy expectations, identity formation, impacts of mentorship, and other mediating factors onto their concept of success, modern discussions still follow the past century's legacy, framed around academic outcomes and student retention.
These metrics persist due to the complex system of incentives that exist within institutions of higher education. These incentive structures, like requirements for tenure and promotion or prerequisites for entry into professional careers, inhibit any single individual from creating change within the system. However, change is still possible. Because institutions of higher education are complex systems, leveraging knowledge from organizational change theories like the Four Frames Model for Institutional Change is critical to guiding change efforts. Below, we describe the Four Frames and dive into how aspects of institutional culture affect the way success is measured and conceptualized across our four stakeholder groups.
The Four Frames Model for Institutional Change
This Essay uses the Four Frames model for organizational change originally posited by Bolman and Deal (2008) and adapted for systems of higher education by Reinholz and Apkarian (2018). Broadly, the model emphasizes that lasting organizational change must be facilitated by changing the culture of the organization, and that organizational issues may be viewed through four different lenses: structures, symbols, power, and people (Bolman and Deal, 2008). Bolman and Deal posit that most organizational change efforts only address one of these four frames, leading to a myopic and inflexible approach; instead, addressing multiple frames simultaneously allows for a better understanding of organizational issues to facilitate sustainable change. The four frames can be conceptualized as both product—what must change—and process—how one facilitates that change (Reinholz and Apkarian, 2018). Below, we provide a brief overview of each of the frames.
Structures.
Structures refer to the formal roles, practices, policies, routines, and incentives that are used to guide interactions within an organization. For example, graduation requirements, tenure policies, and institutional accreditation metrics are all structures that guide how individuals make choices within an academic institution. These structures set expectations and thereby can constrain or facilitate certain actions. Therefore, facilitating cultural change must include attending to these structures and altering them as needed to move an institution forward toward equity.
Symbols.
Symbols encapsulate the language, beliefs, values, norms, and cultural artifacts that underlie the ways of sensemaking within an organization. In other words, symbols are the shared understanding held by individuals within an organization; as such, symbols give meaning to structures. For example, while many academic departments hold faculty meetings (a structure), each department is likely to have different norms around faculty attendance, discussion, and overall organization of the meeting; these are the symbols unique to each department (Reinholz and Apkarian, 2018). Importantly, Reinholz and Apkarian (2018) note that a change in structure without a concurrent change in symbols is likely to fail, and vice versa. For example, while graduate programs may aim to broaden their cultural norms about success (e.g., nonacademic careers are equally as valuable as tenure-track roles), without concurrent changes to structures (e.g., adding workshops, bringing in nonacademic speakers, restructuring graduation requirements) it is unlikely that such cultural change will succeed.
People.
Organizations are formed from a collection of individuals with different identities, experiences, goals, beliefs, and attitudes toward change. Organizational culture is not a monolith, since individual members have different views; because of this, change agents must attend to how changes to other frames (e.g., symbols, structures) may be experienced differently by each individual within the organization. Lasting change efforts must start with a shared vision of change that attends to the differing objectives of individuals within the organization. Furthermore, individuals within an organization must feel a high sense of agency for change to be upheld and sustained (Reinholz and Apkarian, 2018).
Power.
Interactions between individuals are mediated by power; in academic institutions, power differentials can be seen as differences in role (e.g., students vs. faculty versus administrators), status, or sociodemographic factors. Power structures are critical in facilitating or stymieing change. For example, little can be changed in a department without the consent of departmental leadership. Change agents must not only leverage existing power structures, but also recognize and center those who do not hold power within an organization. Because institutions of higher education have historically functioned to marginalize the voices of non-White, disabled, and queer individuals, among others, change agents must be attentive to both explicit and implicit power structures (McGee, 2020). Even when individuals with marginalized identities are represented, they may lack real or perceived authority due to unconscious bias or outright discrimination (Bourabain, 2021; Muhammad and Lopez, 2022).
The Four Frames Model serves as an apt framework for this Essay, given its focus on cultural change and the inherently cultural nature of defining success in academia. As noted by Reinholz and Apkarian (2018), culture is not static, nor does it exist in a vacuum. Indeed, definitions of success are constantly changing, and they are inherently influenced by prevailing institutional and national ideals (Russell, 2023). Accordingly, definitions of success in STEM higher education will continue to evolve, and we believe that academic change agents can steer that evolution toward equity and justice. Below, we discuss the varied incentives and constraints on stakeholder action, and how each stakeholder may leverage their power to define student success more equitably.
STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS
We analyze four stakeholder levels in this Essay: students, faculty, departments, and institutions. In each section, we provide a rationale for the inclusion of that stakeholder, a brief overview of how success is defined for that stakeholder group, and how that group influences student definitions of success. Subsequently, we use the Four Frames Model to explore aspects that may be obstructing changes to how student success is defined within each stakeholder group.
Students
Our definition of students includes undergraduates pursuing bachelor's or associate's degrees and graduate students engaged in master's, doctoral, or professional degrees. Because students are the primary beneficiaries and participants in higher education, we consider students as essential stakeholders in the discussion of student success.
How Success is Defined for and by Students.
In this section, we focus on student experiences with success metrics and how student success definitions expand beyond these metrics. Students are at the core of the educational process and find themselves continually evaluated for “success,” a concept that is not only vaguely defined but also frequently defined without their input (McGee and Bentley, 2017; Weatherton and Schussler, 2021). Thus, success is typically dictated by external entities like faculty, departments, and institutions, each shaping their definitions based on their subjective interpretation and cultural norms (i.e., symbols). For example, students are subjected to structures that reinforce success as solely defined by academic achievement, and this definition is often measured via grades. However, grades are not always a meaningful measure of students’ learning or competency, as they are influenced by grading policies (e.g., grading on a curve, Bowen and Cooper, 2022), prior educational opportunities (Salehi et al., 2020), implicit or explicit bias in the classroom (Eaton et al., 2020), and institutional culture (e.g., grade deflation to maintain a sense of rigor, Tomkin and West, 2022). This expectation is pernicious, as academic success often builds upon itself: performance in individual courses affects overall GPA, which in turn influences opportunities like acceptance into professional programs and future career prospects (Allen-Ramdial and Campbell, 2014; Ketenci et al., 2020).
Yet, there exists a notable disconnect: the definitions of success imposed on students often do not align with their personal definitions of success (Weatherton and Schussler, 2022; Morton et al., 2023). For example, queer students considered the degree to which they can express their full identities as a component of their success (Nguyen, 2018), and Native American students reported that their success as students is indivisible from their ability to maintain connections with their indigenous identities (Oosahwe, 2008; Waterman, 2012). Misalignments between students’ definitions of success and those by which they are evaluated negatively impact students, contributing to heightened anxiety and depression, and decreasing motivation and intentions to persist in their programs (O'Shea and Delahunty, 2018; Weatherton and Schussler, 2022). Furthermore, these misalignments and their negative impacts are especially pronounced among students from historically minoritized groups, thereby widening inequities within STEM higher education (McGee and Bentley, 2017; Fisher et al., 2019). It is therefore imperative that definitions of success better represent the broad and diverse ideas of a growing student population.
Critical Stakeholder Analysis
Symbols and Structures.
The disconnect between definitions of success derived from students and imposed upon them presents a daily challenge for students who must navigate these ingrained biases and barriers in their pursuit of education and personal growth. When allowed to define success themselves, students embrace nuanced symbols that lie outside of the hegemonic value system seen in STEM fields; student-derived notions of success center the full, individual humanity of each student to encompass health, individual expression, and social needs.
Students constantly use their personal values and goals (i.e., symbols) to determine how they define success in higher education (Weatherton and Schussler, 2021), and many recent studies have sought to explore how different groups of students define it (Weatherton and Schussler, 2022; Madsen et al., 2023; Morton et al., 2023; Wilke et al., 2023). These studies reveal that students’ definitions of success are nuanced and multi-faceted as they often include aspects of “normative” definitions, like academic achievement and research success, while also including aspects like sustaining strong family and community ties, obtaining financial security, and maintaining their well-being (Waterman, 2012; Blaich and Wise, 2021). Additionally, students’ definitions of success are uniquely influenced by their identities and life histories, and students from historically minoritized groups bring a unique perspective to their definitions, informed by their adaptive strengths (Carter-Francique et al., 2013; O'Shea and Delahunty, 2018). For example, Wilke and colleagues (2023) revealed that disabled students’ definitions of success centered their disability, explicitly prioritizing their health and building community. Wilke and colleagues highlight that by expanding notions of success, institutions of higher education will be better suited to both support disabled students’ learning and development and broadly understand learning in a deeper and more meaningful way (Wilke et al., 2023). These insights underscore that more equitable and holistic approaches to success must incorporate and value the definitions created by students themselves.
Student-centered structures are primed to expand notions of student success within higher education. To this end, one critical body is student government, which has been a hallmark of the western higher education system since its conception. Student governments provide services for the collective student body and work collaboratively with institutional leadership to remedy student concerns (Cuyjet, 1994). Consequently, student governments are important vehicles to improve how student success is defined within higher education. For example, students can work with faculty and administration to integrate broader definitions of success into curricular and extracurricular programming (Patrick, 2023). Such an approach would ensure that all students feel like their personal and professional growth is valued and supported within a community of learners at their respective institution (Luescher-Mamashela, 2012).
People and Power.
Students represent the most diverse group of stakeholders in higher education, reflecting both the evolving demographics of the United States and persistent inequities within hiring and retention at higher levels of academia (Maries et al., 2022; National Science Board, 2022). As student populations are becoming increasingly diverse, higher education must accordingly attend to increasingly diverse conceptions of success. Yet, it should not be assumed that all members of a specific identity group converge on identical success definitions. For example, gender nonconforming students have unique experiences in STEM programs compared with cisgender students, including cisgender members of the queer community; this suggests that, even within a community of queer students, definitions of success may be wide-ranging and diverse, based on students’ previous experiences and specific realities (Maloy et al., 2022).
Students generally possess the least institutional power within higher education. Students are often subjected to predefined notions of success with minimal ability to reshape these definitions to align with their perspectives; this fundamentally establishes a power imbalance. Notably, even among students, an uneven distribution of power exists, where graduate students are often more involved in departmental decision-making than undergraduate students. Furthermore, students’ sociodemographic characteristics further complicate power distribution; as with other stakeholders, students from historically minoritized groups (e.g., gender nonconforming students, students of color, LSES students) may experience diminished influence and representation, due to implicit biases that permeate institutional practices (Grady et al., 2014).
Faculty
Faculty members aim to teach, mentor, and advise students, disseminate knowledge, conduct research, and contribute to their academic field. Here we define faculty broadly to include traditional categories of tenure-track professors, non–tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, lecturers, and research faculty. Faculty members are the educators and/or researchers within institutions of higher education with responsibilities that are typically composed of three categories of labor: teaching, service, and research. Depending on their specific role and institution, the proportion differs. Faculty members exist at the nexus between many stakeholder groups; they have the most direct contact with students and also hold the power to shape departmental and institutional structures. Therefore, we believe that faculty members are a key stakeholder in institutionalizing more equitable definitions of student success.
Metrics of Success for Faculty.
The success of individual faculty is most directly evidenced through promotion and/or tenure, a common academic system that provides employment security, standing, and resources. Expectations for promotion/tenure come from departmental and institutional structures, though there may be implicit rules within these structures that become known through socialization in the department (Lisnic et al., 2022). Faculty are often directed to certain target metrics for their tenure/promotion files, such as teaching evaluations, teaching portfolios, number and prestige of publications, students mentored and graduated within their lab, and peer reviews (Eddy and Gaston-Gayles, 2013). In this way, faculty have an incentive to prioritize specific measures of “student success” to facilitate their own advancement in the university system.
How Faculty Influence Definitions of Student Success.
Faculty are often the immediate assessors of student success within higher education. As course instructors, they evaluate and recognize student performance through grades, honors, and letters of recommendation. As research mentors, they define and enforce expectations for dissertations and theses, deciding on when students are able to progress to major milestones, and which outcomes are considered successful. The attitudes and choices of individual faculty have important implications on student outcomes, influencing how merit is recognized and what opportunities are consequently available for students. Moreover, through both tangible and intangible influences, faculty affect student perceptions of their own abilities, courses, departments, and STEM fields (Parker and Trolian, 2020; Dickinson and Kreitmair, 2021; Trolian et al., 2021).
Critical Stakeholder Analysis.
Structures and Symbols.
The values, beliefs, and norms (i.e., symbols) held by faculty members determine their definition of student success, and these symbols have a cascading effect on many student outcomes. For example, STEM faculty who endorse a fixed mindset (i.e., the belief that one's abilities and intelligence are innate and unchangeable) have larger racial achievement gaps in course grade (Canning et al., 2019; Park et al., 2024). Furthermore, faculty symbols have been shown to impact students’ subjective experiences, like their motivation and affect within the classroom (Canning et al., 2019). Faculty members’ values and beliefs also impact the culture of their lab groups and thus, the outcomes and experiences of postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate lab members (Resnik et al., 2023; Tuma et al., 2021; Weatherton and Schussler, 2022). Weatherton and Schussler (2022) found that life science graduate students were more likely to express that they lacked a sense of belonging if they felt like their definition of success was misaligned with that of their faculty mentor; these findings highlight the impact that faculty members’ symbols can have on students’ definitions of success and their outcomes.
The most notable way that faculty symbols affect student outcomes is through the structures that faculty have control over. These structures include classroom grading procedures (Gorichanaz, 2024), pedagogical choices (Russo-Tait, 2022), mentoring expectations (Tuma et al., 2021), and requirements for graduate student work (Liera et al., 2023; Basir and Burkholder, 2024). For example, instructors exercise a great deal of latitude in terms of how grading is conducted within their courses. Based on their internal symbol of success and merit, each instructor might value different student qualities (e.g., talent, learning, effort) and then codify their symbol of success through their own structures as grading policies in their courses. An instructor may choose to employ relative curved grading, criterion-referenced grading, or even take an approach like ungrading, the practice of eschewing traditional point-based assessment in favor of providing frequent, detailed feedback to students to foster skill development (Blum and Kohn, 2020; Johanesen et al., 2023). These choices impact student outcomes as well as students’ perceptions of their own success; grading on a curve (i.e., norm-referenced grading) mirrors historical beliefs around the measurement and distribution of intelligence (Feldman, 2023), and negatively impacts student beliefs around the value of collaboration (Bowen and Cooper, 2022). On the other hand, less traditional grading structures, like balancing grading for accuracy with grading for effort, incorporating peer evaluation, or moving toward ungrading have shown to improve a myriad of student outcomes compared with traditional norm-referenced grading and symbolize different ways for students to achieve success beyond exam scores, thereby broadening notions of student success (Freeman and Parks, 2010; Swinton, 2010; Schinske and Tanner, 2014; Gorichanaz, 2024). Regardless of the classroom policies that faculty select, these structures impart the underlying symbols onto students, and ultimately function to enculturate students into the values and broader symbols of success within STEM fields.
It is important to note that while faculty often have the freedom to design structures in their courses and labs, they are also subject to and constrained by institutional structures. Faculty members’ choices are often confined by considerations of time management, training, and career advancement (O'Meara et al., 2021). For example, in interviews with graduated students who had negative mentoring experiences, Tuma and colleagues (2021) identified a lack of incentive structures as one contributing factor: “mentors were focused on advancing their own careers (e.g., achieving promotion and tenure) and that providing quality or effective mentorship would not help them achieve these goals.” Furthermore, previous work has identified that faculty members are reticent to implement active learning structures in their courses due to concerns around lack of time (Patrick et al., 2016) and the effect these changes may have on student evaluations of teaching (and thus, career advancement) (Apkarian et al., 2021). Thus, while faculty members may theoretically have the ability to reimagine more equitable structures in their classrooms and labs, their practical ability to create these changes depends on their power within their organization.
People and Power.
Despite the clear influence and power that faculty wield over students, power itself is not distributed equally among faculty. Faculty may experience differences in privilege and status as a result of their particular job role, prestige, social identities, and so on, which may impact their ability to enact change.
A major determinant of faculty power is rank. Faculty positions are divided between tenure track and non–tenure track resulting in at least three distinct ranks: tenured faculty, tenure-eligible faculty, and tenure-ineligible faculty. Insights on the relative power dynamics between these ranks is neatly laid out from the lens of “academic capitalism” which centers a faculty member's ability to bring money to a department via research funding (Slaughter and Leslie, 2001; Hanley, 2005). In this conception of research-intensive institutions, tenured faculty have more power than other ranks, given that funding is a criterion in tenure review (O'Meara, 2011). While tenure-ineligible faculty typically bring in less research funding, they serve a necessary role in supplementing instructional expertise, often taking on substantially larger loads of teaching, including large-enrollment courses. Despite their critical role, these faculty often have no power at the departmental level, evident through the lack of security in their roles, physical space in departmental buildings, and voting power, even in decisions relevant to the future of their courses (Kezar et al., 2018). Crucially, this dynamic minimizes the power of faculty who regularly interact with students through heavier teaching and service loads.
Moreover, faculty do not experience the same power as their colleagues depending on their personal identities. While tenured and tenure-eligible faculty tend to reflect mostly majority identities, faculty holding minoritized identities typically execute the majority of justice-oriented service work within their departments (Jimenez et al., 2019; Thomas, 2019). This distribution of labor around faculty identity exacerbates the precarious balance for minoritized faculty between the advancement of one's own career and the work required to build an equitable academia (Padilla, 1994; Bird et al. 2004; Saldaña et al., 2013). In fact, interviews with 24 racially minoritized faculty document common struggles to leverage power, make impactful change, and conform to hegemonic norms of academic merit (Wright-Mair and Museus, 2023). Furthermore, minoritized faculty are often subjected to hostile work environments. For example, Black women faculty report widespread racist and sexist harassment (Frazier, 2011; Thomas, 2019). Similar workplace hostilities are reported by queer and disabled scientists (Cech and Pham, 2017; Price, 2021). Taken together, juggling career work, departmental reform, and workplace harassment contribute to lower rates of tenure achievement for minoritized faculty members (e.g., women, queer faculty, and faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups), resulting in the dominant value system in higher education maintaining white, patriarchal hegemony (Winkler, 2004; Frazier, 2011). These dynamics reveal the interplay between the frames of power and people that maintains the status quo in STEM higher education.
Departments
We define departments as the fundamental academic unit or program dedicated to a specific discipline or field of study within an institution. Departments operate as semi-independent entities with faculty participating in organizational roles and structures to manage shared affairs, such as designing and managing degree programs, hiring faculty, determining research foci, and departmental budgeting. Democratic practices (e.g., elected leadership, majority vote) are required to craft new policies or make incremental shifts to existing policies. Departments also house services for students, including degree programs, professional societies, student groups, and advising. They also include administrative staff who manage everyday operations for undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and/or research personnel. We include departments as a stakeholder as they provide a local microcosm for the work of faculty and students and are often the level at which institutional change begins (Reinholtz and Apikarian, 2018). We articulate departments as a level distinct from faculty given that a department is comprised of people in broader roles and can act separately from any faculty member's interest.
Metrics of Success for Departments.
Departmental success is measured by the success of their members; this “collective success” may be measured through rates of student graduates from departmental programs, student retention, faculty retention, faculty promotions, research expenditures, and publications within the department (Baker, 2020). Many of these metrics translate into budget impacts for each department. For example, the number of students enrolled in departmental course offerings and research expenditures (i.e., money spent on grants) often translate directly into the departments’ income.
How Departments Influence Definitions of Student Success.
Departments are one important agent in students’ academic socialization, a process by which students learn the norms, values, and practices of their chosen field. Departments thus influence student definitions of success and perceptions of their field via the requirements for degree, the opportunities available within the department, and the knowledge, skills, experiences they expect students to acquire. Previous work has highlighted both the positive and negative aspects of academic socialization. Socialization into departmental and scientific culture can increase students’ sense of belonging (Winkle-Wagner et al., 2010) and strengthen their identities as scientists (Thoman et al., 2017; Le et al., 2019). Conversely, the process of socialization can be detrimental when students feel forced to assimilate into a dominant culture that does not accept the students’ own identity (McGee, 2020). The process of socialization is important to consider because it has been identified as a driver of student attrition (Lovitts, 2002; Maher et al., 2020; Seymour et al., 2019). This previous work underlines the important role that departments play in structuring students’ process through their degree programs and defining the norms, expectations, and values of students’ chosen field.
Critical Stakeholder Analysis
Structures and Symbols. Departments provide the most local structures that guide and sustain conceptions of success for both faculty and students. These policies, roles, and responsibilities implicitly represent the values of the department. For example, faculty mentoring committees and graduate student thesis committees play a similar role in guiding and evaluating the success of early career faculty and graduate students, respectively. While these structures are often conserved across academic departments, the ways in which they influence faculty and students’ socialization, progress, and outcomes will vary, based on an individual department's values and definitions of success (i.e., symbols). Symbols manifest in departments through the design and implementation of policies, as the department's values become evident in the ways that institutional policies and faculty roles are enacted. These are the departmental “norms” that students and faculty within the department are enculturated into. In some cases, these “norms” may create and sustain inequitable standards, despite institutional policies designed to prevent inequities.
A key structure that departments are responsible for is the student degree program. These structures allow departments to steer the student academic experience. Faculty committees have immense influence over curriculum design, which skills and experiences students will attain, and how those skills will be measured. These choices reflect faculty values around the knowledge within the field (i.e., what the discipline of “biology” consists of), the nature of the profession (i.e., what it means to “be a biologist”), and the career options (i.e., what should be done with a biology degree). In this way, faculty members can be important agents of change in defining and measuring student success equitably. Moreover, disciplinary bias may lead to certain skills, concepts, and epistemologies being disfavored (Settles et al., 2021). For example, departments are far less likely to discuss student learning outcomes related to ethics, society, and professional values, while favoring outcomes based on cognitive ability, such as technical skills and conceptual understandings typical of their discipline (Clark and Hsu, 2023). Like many aspects of departmental culture, these choices and their underlying rationale may not align with students’ values (Marbach-Ad et al., 2019).
Notably, the actions of departments and the people within them are not simply driven by values, symbols, and other aspects of culture. Instead, departmental choices are often driven by institutional incentive structures like budget models, allocation of teaching assistant lines, and preferred reporting metrics. Thus, departmental structures can be aligned with equity insofar as they are incentivized. For example, there have been many calls to increase the persistence of minority students in STEM degree programs (AAAS, 2009; PCAST, 2012), and departments may respond by attending to student retention and enrollment metrics. However, without a concurrent shift in departmental symbols, these efforts may fall short of their objectives and cause unintended consequences (Reinholz and Apkarian, 2018); without supporting the cultural norms that contribute to student persistence, faculty that identify with minority groups take on an increased responsibility toward minoritized student communities for success (Settles et al., 2021; McGee et al., 2022). As these tasks are not often incentivized or rewarded by departmental structures, minoritized faculty and students engage in extra work for little benefit, perpetuating inequitable expectations and contributing to burnout (Baez, 2000; Pope-Ruark, 2022).
People and Power.
Departments are often composed of a diverse group of people, including faculty, staff, and students. However, departmental organization often concentrates power at the highest levels of the department, which are often the least diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, gender identity, and other demographic factors (Stallings et al., 2018; Montgomery, 2020). Departmental power influences decision making, and ultimately the structures and symbols that the department enacts. In this way, although departments may represent diverse staff and student populations, the decisions, structures, and symbols of the department are not made equitably and may not represent the thoughts of the broader department population (Rosch and Reich, 1996; Kezar, 2011). While departments have attempted to address these inequities by increasing the diversity of those who hold power (i.e., faculty, department chairs), without attending to concurrent changes in symbols and structures, this often results in furthering inequities by tokenizing and burdening minoritized faculty and students (Barrow and Grant, 2019; Settles et al., 2021; Wanti et al., 2022).
Institutions
We define academic institutions as bodies that provide an explicit structure that brings together faculty, staff, and students across disciplines to engage in teaching, learning, and research. The institution serves as a centralized financial and policy-oriented body, in addition to offering a sense of identity and mission to its membership. We include the institution as a stakeholder given their broad influence on the student learning experience either directly or indirectly through their effects on institutional policy, student-facing offices, academic departments, and individual faculty.
Metrics of Success for Institutions.
In this section, we focus on the interactions between institutions and their accrediting bodies, and the impact this interplay has on the ways that student success is conceived, measured, communicated, and interpreted. For academic institutions, “success” is often reflected by their status in the eyes of accrediting bodies. Accreditors are intended to act on behalf of students, the American government, and the public at large in holding institutions accountable for meeting their benchmarks of success.
Accreditation as a process gives us a window to see how an institution conceptualizes their own success, who they view as key stakeholders, and how they exhibit success. As part of the accreditation process, institutions usually generate a self-study of their own strengths and weaknesses as compared with their stated mission, which is then subject to peer review before an accrediting decision is made. Accrediting bodies coordinate the review process roughly every 5 to 10 years for each institution (depending on standing), including a visit of external evaluators recruited from other academic institutions. While accreditation status or lack thereof can be a stark sign of the success of the institution, the discussions and reflections that institutions engage in during (re)accreditation cycles make visible how institutions define success for their students, and how those definitions relate to broader institutional success.
Why focus on institutional accreditation as opposed to how institutions grapple with other external influences? The success of institutions is often defined and articulated during the accreditation process. While other stakeholders like alumni, donors, local governments, employers, and graduate schools contribute to institutional decision-making and how institutions define success, the way that institutions make their case for accreditation generally reflects all of these factors as is relevant to their specific context. As such, we choose to discuss institution's relationship to accreditation as a near-universally shared experience, whereas different institutions may find other external stakeholders to be less relevant; for example, employers may be less relevant for liberal arts-oriented institutions, graduate schools may be less relevant for community colleges, and local governments may be less relevant for private or online-only institutions. Accreditation, even with its stated accreditation standards or criteria, allows institutions to make a case for their own success given their bespoke circumstances, thereby providing a critical platform for redefining student success. By leveraging the accreditation process, institutional change agents can advocate for more inclusive and holistic measures of success that align with the diverse values and experiences of their student populations.
How Institutions Influence Definitions of Student Success.
To address accreditation standards, the self-study prompts institutions to share on “student success,” but this term may be understood in different ways by different institutions. Moreover, each institution will decide on what constitutes valid evidence of said success. Institutions are deeply invested in certain definitions of student success to satisfy both intangible and tangible needs. They often tout student success as a shared mission and value for its members; barriers to success must be addressed to satisfy students, staff, and faculty alike. Simultaneously, institutions grapple with issues of student success to effectively recruit students, attract and retain potential donors and grant funding, or answer to government entities. Institutional conceptions of student success give rise to high-level curricular decisions, such as general education coursework requirements, and guide resource allocation that advances certain efforts over others. As a centralized policy as well as a funding decision-maker, institutions thus have immense sway over all its constituents via student success initiatives or mandates.
Critical Stakeholder Analysis
Structures and Symbols.
Some of the structures that drive institutional decision making come from the policies of accrediting bodies, as accreditors set precise standards and criteria by which academic institutions are evaluated. Here, we assume that institutions aim to comply with the letter of accreditation policies even if their exact interpretation varies.
The structure that accrediting bodies establish (i.e., the standards and criteria of evaluation) is translated to institution-specific implementations, and these implementations are influenced by the symbols held by each institution. For example, accreditation broadly prompts institutions to demonstrate achievement of “quality” education for their students. However, the definition of “quality” is subjective, guided by faculty values, beliefs, and the institutions’ mission. The hallmarks of a “quality education” may differ significantly at a vocational-focused 2-year college compared with a large research-focused university. This individualized realization of the standards is explicitly mentioned within accreditation policy, such that colleges and universities have a great deal of agency to apply their own symbols to the rough structures laid out by accrediting bodies. The opportunity for interpretation is salient within measures of student success, as institutional symbols dominate when language is vague.
Broadly, all accrediting bodies expect institutions to document student success. However, in highlighting certain metrics of success and omitting others, accreditors imply that not all ways of documenting success are equally important. A policy document that specifies certain measurements as “required” or “default” gives power to those measurements even if other elements are “encouraged” (Foucault, 1972). To provide the reader with a sense of how accrediting bodies define success implicitly versus explicitly, we have summarized the relevant standards where “student success” or its synonyms (e.g., “achievement” or “outcomes”) appear within policies laid out by the regional accrediting bodies in the United States (see Supplemental Appendix D). Student success is a critical piece of evidence to be exhibited in the institutional self-study. Through explicit wording, accrediting policies prioritize, and thus privilege, certain ways of capturing student success, with a particular preference for broad and quantitative measures already reflected in many STEM research fields (Lo et al., 2019; Pearson et al., 2022). Through repeated mentions of metrics like recruitment, retention, or graduation in a timely manner, a successful institution is implicitly one that quickly and efficiently produces student graduates, feeding into the engine of furthering higher education or the economy. Prioritizing such measures reinforces a “factory model” of higher education wherein nuanced and individualized experiences may not be captured and considered (Pawley, 2013; Tsai et al., 2017). This emphasis on quantity over quality can be particularly harmful for students from minoritized backgrounds, where “productive” institutions are recognized for recruiting and awarding degrees to these students even if they experience reduced sense of belonging and increased hostilities on campus (Whitcomb and Singh, 2021; Grieco and Deitz, 2023).
Even if members of institutions want to prioritize other data sources or facets of the student educational experience within their accreditation case, actually doing so may be daunting. Considering that accreditation status is tied to an institution's ability to receive federal financial aid, this strong monetary pressure may drive conservative institutional action (i.e., an adherence to what is perceived as less risky). Therefore, institutions that either take the accrediting policies as a mandate out of ignorance or fear of going against a perceived norm will continue to perpetuate this bias to report on broader, more diverse student performance measures.
People and Power.
People are critical to the accreditation process, as policy may not identify precisely who contributes to the work and decision-making of accreditation. Because of the differences in how the accreditation process is carried out at each institution, there are myriad ways that power can be used to reinforce restrictive definitions of success, or alternatively to broaden these definitions. For example, one may consider: Who at an institution decides what to include or exclude in their self-study; whose experiences are captured and presented in the self-study and whose are left out; and who reviews and evaluates the accreditation case at a specific institution?
First, accreditation often references “the institution” on the whole, but in areas related to student learning and success, faculty are explicitly mentioned most often as the subject of the standard (see Supplemental Appendix D, data not shown). Students reappear frequently within the accreditation process as the object under study for accreditation inquiry rather than as authors. While some institutions may choose to engage students in developing their self-study, more often than not students are not invited to contribute, nor is their participation explicitly dictated by accrediting bodies. Consequently, faculty possess the power to define student success even within the context of institutional accreditation processes. Staff and administrators have less of an explicit responsibility or power over this definition, given their limited mention (i.e., often vaguely implied through reference to “the institution”).
In terms of whose experiences are captured, accreditation clearly prompts institutions to present the student experience, but the extent to which a diversity of student experiences is represented in this process is unclear. Many of the aforementioned measures are presented in aggregate, in particular measures of student retention and graduation rates. In average measures, the majority influence will obscure smaller populations even if they have noticeably different experiences. When institutions are prompted to share disaggregated data, definition of the subpopulations is often left up to the institution itself, who may focus on certain ways of partitioning the student body (e.g., gender identity, transfer student status) over others (e.g., racial/ethnic identity). Finally, where richer and arguably more meaningful measures of learning are shared, institutions often highlight outstanding examples of assessment work. However, the choice in what to present is itself an opportunity to selectively choose student data that avoids revealing “achievement gaps.” As such, institutions hold power over the stories they present on the part of their constituents (e.g., faculty, students, departments) and the perception of student success on their campus.
In terms of people who review accreditation cases, one might default to the belief that accrediting bodies exclusively influence the decision to (re)accredit a given institution, but the dynamics and political implications of peer review process have important implications (see example WSCUC, 2023). Peer review is a common structure in accreditation across all regional accrediting bodies in the United States, a facet shared with many academic systems like publication and tenure/promotion. Typical peer evaluators are staff or faculty employed with a similarly accredited academic institution, who might bring their own biases to the process. Accreditation processes have previously come under fire for perceived inefficiencies, if not outright corruption. Critiques range from prioritizing financial strength over student success, to “backscratching” in which peer reviewers offer a favorable evaluation in exchange for receiving the same at their own institution (Heyneman 2004; Hallak and Poisson, 2007; Kelchen, 2017).
Beyond eroding public trust, the accreditation process as enacted by policymakers and peer reviewers may also be inherently inequitable for institutions that serve already marginalized student populations. That is, accreditation can be a vehicle where existing societal power inequities are reproduced time and again. While estimates are variable and perhaps unreliable, numerous sources suggest that the cost burden of engaging in accreditation (or reaccreditation) may pose increased challenges for small and under-resourced campuses such as newly founded Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) (Wheelan and Elgart, 2015; Hall and West, 2021). Moreover, organizations and scholars have scrutinized possible race-based sources of biases that may disproportionately affect minority-serving institutions such as TCUs and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Negative accreditation outcomes may result when peer evaluators, especially those from primarily white institutions, hold these institutions to unrealistic, if not unfair, standards given their unique histories and student populations they serve (Higher Learning Commission, 2013; UNCF, 2019; Adedoyin, 2022). In this manner, people coming from a place of power are able to wield the accreditation process to disenfranchise those who have been historically excluded and underserved by higher education.
The aforementioned flaws in measurements and their weighting suggest that institutions can prioritize certain measures of “student success” and are not held accountable for falling short on these measures, particularly for historically minoritized students. Thus, a process intended to look out for students’ best interests may neglect and disenfranchise these same students by design.
DISCUSSION: BARRIERS TO CHANGE AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR TRANSFORMING SUCCESS
The goal for this Essay is to provide change agents with a better understanding of the motivations and pressures that affect the decision-making of students, faculty, departments, and institutions. While the author team advocates for changing how student success is defined and discussed in STEM higher education, we recognize that each reader will be situated in a unique institutional environment: one not only shaped by disciplinary values and norms, but also entangled in a complex network of interpersonal relationships and power dynamics. Thus, there is no universal solution for adopting a more inclusive and equitable definition of student success; nor is there one universal way that student success can be more equitably defined. Instead, individuals must make changes fitting of their own contexts, while creating and sharing decision-making power with students themselves.
Given this reality, instead of recommending universal solutions, we have chosen to discuss three themes identified through our critical analysis that have the potential to impede progress toward change: extant incentive structures, inequitable power distribution, and conflicting values in academia. While not universal, many aspects of these themes are ubiquitous across institutional contexts. These themes bring together the Four Frames Model and thus allow us to examine how motivations and pressures interact across stakeholder levels. Within each theme, we discuss possible approaches based on empirical research. Discussing these barriers and potential approaches will allow readers to proactively anticipate and strategically address these issues within their own institutions.
Incentive Structures
Incentive structures are deeply embedded within academic institutions and significantly influence stakeholder behavior. Ideally, these structures would encourage the adoption of equitable notions of student success, but the current systems of higher education do not. For faculty, incentives fall into two main categories: financial and recognition. Financial incentives, like promotions, internal grants, and merit raises, often depend on productivity and profitability metrics (Cardenas and Cheslock, 2022). Recognition incentives, such as awards for teaching, mentorship, and service, rarely provide long-term benefits. This creates a misalignment where equity-focused innovations in teaching and mentorship, which require significant time investments, are not commensurately rewarded. Departments face similar pressures, as their funding is often tied to student enrollment and research success, with little consideration for qualitative aspects like departmental culture or member experience. In other words, institutions prioritize financial profit over educational outcomes (McPherson et al., 1993). Consequently, faculty are pressured to minimize their efforts in equity-oriented activities (e.g., spending time on service work, introducing equity-oriented teaching practices, redesigning departmental or institutional goals) (Sabagh and Saroyan, 2014; Barrow and Grant, 2019). However, stakeholders can work to reorient these incentives to foster a culture that prioritizes equity in student success. Here, we discuss opportunities to realign incentive structures to support more inclusive definitions of success.
Due to their proximity to all stakeholder levels, faculty are in a critical position to enact equity-oriented changes by shifting incentive structures. As individuals, faculty can change expectations and practices in their own spheres of influence (e.g., courses, research groups, advising). For example, faculty could shift student incentive structures in the classroom through ungrading; this change can shift symbols around student assessment, resulting in an altered student incentive structure and improving equity in student outcomes (Rapchak et al., 2023; Gorichanaz, 2024; Hasinoff et al., 2024). Indeed, research suggests that ungrading enhances students’ intrinsic motivation (Schinske and Tanner, 2014; Spurlock, 2023) and mental well-being (Rapchak et al., 2023; Hasinoff et al., 2024), and fosters equity in outcomes among demographic groups (DiSalvo and Ross, 2022; Carillo, 2023). Furthermore, faculty can shift incentive structures toward equity within their research groups. For example, faculty may begin discussions with students about their personal definitions of success and how these definitions can be aligned with their evaluation metrics (Weatherton and Schussler, 2022; 2021).
As a collective, faculty members can work to shift incentive structures on a departmental level. As previously mentioned, incentives for equity-focused work are often not equivalent to incentives for other types of work (Armani et al., 2021). One potential way to remediate this inequity is by instituting departmental credit systems, which create standardized policies and norms to reward faculty members for engaging in extra effort for their department (O'Meara et al., 2021). The utility of these systems has been empirically tested (O'Meara et al., 2019; 2020; 2021; Culpepper et al., 2021). Notably, the types of rewards often used by these systems go beyond mere recognition, including course releases or service sabbaticals (Culpepper et al., 2021; O'Meara et al., 2021). For more information about how departments can address inequity in faculty load, see Supplemental Appendix A. In addition to creating new structures, faculty can work collectively to address extant, biased incentive structures, like student teaching evaluations. A myriad of research has shown that teaching evaluations can have an outsized negative impact on women and faculty of color (Heffernan, 2022). Recent work has outlined ways to contextualize student teaching evaluations and how to equitably reform them at the departmental level (Kreitzer and Sweet-Cushman, 2022; Lakeman et al., 2023).
Finally, collective action among students can similarly create more equitable incentive structures. For example, student governments could create awards or recognition programs that honor achievements in areas like community service, leadership, and personal resilience, alongside traditional academic accolades (Durham and Marshall, 2012). Furthermore, student organizations can work collaboratively with faculty and administration to advocate for policies that generate new structures to recognize and validate nontraditional achievements, paving the way for a more inclusive educational environment (Patrick, 2023). This shift incentivizes a more balanced view of success, community building among students, and a culture of acknowledging the diverse challenges and aspirations of its members. Taken together, these suggested initiatives would alter the incentive landscape in higher education to promote and value work that enhances equitable definitions of student success.
Inequitable Power Distribution
The landscape of higher education is characterized by an unequal distribution of power. Power in academia is predominantly held by a select few people at the top levels of departments and institutions (Gibson et al., 2014; Johnston, 2019). Consequently, the ideologies, values, and norms of decision-makers significantly shape the institutional structures and systems that perpetuate these power dynamics (e.g., tenure policies, hiring practices, metrics for student outcomes). Often, these top-down principles and ideologies conflict with the perspectives and needs of the broader community within the institution (Johnston, 2019). Individuals, especially students, often do not have enough power to combat these forces because of the prevailing symbols and structures of academia, where dissenting views may be discouraged (Schweinsberg et al., 2021; Bennett et al., 2023). This hierarchical structure inherently limits the avenues where dissent can be voiced (Aiston and Fo, 2021). Moreover, the lack of collective action mechanisms within many academic institutions means that even when individuals share common grievances or goals, mobilizing a coordinated response is challenging. Without the structure or support for collective action, efforts to address inequities or propose reforms can become fragmented, diminishing their impact and visibility (Choudry, 2019; Bell et al., 2021). Despite these challenges, collective endeavors among individuals can remake the landscape of power, and significant efforts, such as those listed below, have been made to identify strategies to address these power disparities.
Participatory decision-making processes can play a crucial role in redistributing power more equitably within higher education institutions, thus advancing more equitable discourse around student success. By involving a diverse array of stakeholders in governance, from students and junior faculty to staff and community members, universities can ensure that a wider range of perspectives and experiences inform policy and practice. This approach can help to break down the traditional hierarchies that often silo decision-making among senior administrators and established academics. For example, creating committees or task forces dedicated to specific issues that include representation from across the academic community can democratize the decision-making process and ensure that policies reflect the needs and values of the entire institution. An example of this process in action is highlighted by the Departmental Action Team (DAT) model, outlined by Corbo and colleagues ( https://dat-project.org/; Ngai et al., 2020). The DAT model follows an action research paradigm and facilitates working groups of departmental stakeholders to create sustainable change around key issues; notably, these stakeholders include those often excluded from decision-making processes, like non–tenure-track faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and staff. Departments across the country have experienced success using the DAT model, and DAT scholars provide many resources for starting a DAT at one's own institution (Reinholz et al., 2021; Ngai et al., 2023).
Within the classroom, frameworks such as “pedagogical partnerships” outline how instructors and students can share power and responsibility around course outcomes and curriculum (Cook-Sather et al., 2019; Ronayne Sohr et al., 2020; de Bie et al., 2023). Pedagogical partnerships involve students and faculty working together to design curricula, develop teaching materials, coteach courses, assess learning, and engage in research on teaching and learning, and these practices have shown to increase students’ engagement and agency (Colón García, 2017; Cook-Sather, 2018). Faculty members who share their power in such a way provide avenues for students to express their agency and include their personal symbols and norms into STEM curricula. For more resources on pedagogical partnerships, see Supplemental Appendix A.
Creating new structures that facilitate more equitable power sharing must happen concurrently with changes to departmental or institutional symbols (i.e., norms, definitions, culture). Fostering a culture that values diversity, equity, and inclusion not just in theory but also in practice—by rewarding behaviors that support these principles—can begin to dismantle the hegemonic structures that currently dominate the landscape of higher education (see the Incentive Structures section). For this reason, long-lasting and equitable change also requires resolving the extant tensions among competing value systems within higher education.
Conflicting Values in Academia
Given that the definition of student success arises from both explicit structures and shared symbolic notions, the culture of academia at large must be critically examined to enable sustainable and lasting change. While such culture is not static, it draws on deep historical roots that have given rise to both the practical and rhetorical elements experienced in higher education today. The development of higher education in the United States has led to institutions that are theoretically and symbolically collectivist, but in practice Euro-centric individualism flourishes. This context complicates progressive changes toward more nuanced definitions of student success (Bagilhole and Goode, 2001; Gill and Donaghue, 2016). Changing beliefs and processes requires awareness and navigation of these conflicting cultural standards. For example, recognizing that the greater emphasis on individualism when it comes to success in a collegiate environment can create tension for individuals, particularly students, who come from collectivistic cultures.
One reason why tensions may arise is that academia is built on a foundation of democratic processes, and yet many decisions of consequence are oriented around the individual (Bagihole and Goode, 2001). Democracy clearly manifests in the design of the university itself with the relatively flat hierarchical structure common to academic institutions (AAUP, 2014). Tenure-track faculty generally function as peers, with individuals taking turns in positions of power (e.g., department heads). Leadership rarely, if ever, can make unilateral decisions, with majority vote being the common procedure for policy change. However, much like American culture, this focus on democracy (i.e., individual vote and say) also presents an emphasis on individualism. Individual freedoms are prized in academia; “academic freedom” is a common principle that grants leniency in scholarship and teaching approaches within an institution (AAUP, 2006; Gill, 2018). Individuals are encouraged to pursue their own self-fulfillment and achievement, and are rarely held responsible for a collective notion of success. The democratic, but individualistic nature of academia holds sharp contrast with collectivistic culture; individuals are rarely incentivized to act on behalf of the collective (i.e., the department, the university) as opposed to their own self-interests (for differentiation between individualism and collectivism, see Fatehi et al., 2020).
Not only is this democratic-yet-individualistic philosophy baked into academic structures, but it also perpetuates through symbols espoused by those in power (e.g., leadership, faculty). Those joining the institution, especially students (or other individuals with less power), must adopt these norms to be successful. On one hand, this can be seen as the standard process of socialization into academia's culture, a process historically viewed as essential for academic success (Weidman, 1989; Weidman et al., 2001). On the other hand, it forces a culturally diverse student body to conform to the norms of a hegemonic and oppressive culture (Yosso, 2005). Given academia's roots as a predominantly white, western institution, its culture reflects western values, notably those of the United States. For students and faculty with different backgrounds, the academic culture will be unfamiliar, challenging to navigate, and even intolerant of their differences (McGee, 2020; Winkle-Wagner et al., 2020; for more information about white supremacy culture, see Supplemental Appendix B). To not be ostracized, students with underrepresented minority identities are pressured to socialize efficiently, which requires them to integrate into majority-white cultural institutions (Winkle-Wagner et al., 2020). Thus, manifestations of the tension between different cultural philosophies can be major barriers to more equitable definitions of student success.
As such, the first step in moving toward equitable definitions of student success requires grassroots cultural change, which will necessarily involve people as groups and individuals. This long-term process of consensus-building for lasting change cannot be circumvented and must be approached with intentionality. While academia's democratic system grants each individual faculty member power within the organization, shared governance (e.g., Academic Senate, departments) prompts these individuals to arrive at shared decisions and consequences. This process can surface conflicts between individual interests and values. Reaching a clear consensus within a diverse team of stakeholders takes time to navigate discomfort and conflict (summarized in Rock et al., 2016). Skilled leadership and facilitation are needed to move decisions forward in light of sharp divisions. In a culture where productivity is highly valued, the time to navigate conflicting beliefs and reach a compromise may not be considered effective (Spence, 1985; Gavin and Mason, 2004). Yet, time and energy are necessities to build trust and secure buy-in across all stakeholders. In the name of efficiency, certain decisions may be delegated to individuals or subcommittees, reducing the ability for all stakeholders to genuinely weigh in on each decision. Examples of successful collective or team-oriented interventions include the aforementioned DAT model (Quan et al. 2019; Ngai et al. 2020). Commitment to relationship-building and listening is critical to reconciling with and meaningfully including those who have been marginalized across the history of higher education. As Ngai et al. note, getting to meaningful collaboration is a composite of behaviors such as “…putting processes into place during meetings to ensure equity for decision making, engaging in reflective practices about how the team is functioning…” These steps are especially important when making room for divergent opinions, particularly from those who have been historically silenced or excluded from shared governance.
In addition to simply increasing our capacity for equitable collective decision making and action, how effort is valued must be reoriented to recognize those that enable this collective work. Given the status quo that emphasizes individual success, as measured by grades for students and course evaluations or publications for faculty, individuals will not be rewarded for being a team contributor in the same way that they are rewarded for being a stand-out leader or pioneer in their field (see also: Incentive Structures). So long as labor in support of broad student success initiatives like curricular redesign goes unrecognized, there will be little improvement. One way to address this is to rethink common institutional awards to focus on teams of contributors or entire departments rather than individual contributors. An example of existing institutional incentives is the teaching award, often granted to single faculty members by units dedicated to teaching and learning. These awards may be decided through processes that entail nominations, student feedback, course materials, or observations all emphasizing the individual's teaching practice. Instead, institutions may consider organizing team or departmental awards in teaching and learning, demonstrated through evidence of effective and equitable student learning at the program level. Albeit uncommon, such awards do exist and signal institutional commitment to engaging in the challenging work of cocreating and continuously improving a curriculum together (see examples from Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Georgia, and University of North Carolina at Charlotte). This recognition would be one step toward a shift described by scholars as “a turn away from a ‘my classes’ mentality to an ‘our curriculum’ view” (Jankowski and Marshall, 2017). Realizing this shift beyond rhetoric requires praxis wherein positive and negative consequences rest on the work of the collective, not just that of an individual.
Lastly, conflicts for students pressured into adopting an individualistic academic culture can be mitigated if academic institutions avoid promoting a single dominant norm (e.g., in terms of students’ career goals, their pathways to “success,” and in terms of how success is defined). While the process of socialization into academic culture is clearly a barrier to the success of students from minoritized groups, change agents can co-opt this process to make academia more inclusive and equitable. This idea is best exemplified by the process of two-way socialization, a dynamic process where not only are students socialized into the norms, values, and practices of their academic discipline and institution (traditional socialization), but the institution and its members also adapt and change in response to the diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and needs of the students (McCoy, 2007; McCoy and Winkle-Wagner, 2015; Winkle-Wagner et al., 2020). This concept expands traditional theories of socialization to emphasize students’ adaptive strengths and to highlight the mutual learning that occurs between students and their academic environments. Bidirectional socialization can be facilitated through summer bridge programs and culturally-responsive mentoring practices, among others (for more information, see Winkle-Wagner et al., 2020). Students who engage in two-way socialization can make space for their personal backgrounds and ideas, as well as those of the institution; in this way, these scholars bring in new ways of thinking and being into their disciplines, ultimately reshaping disciplinary norms toward more equitable outcomes (Winkle-Wagner and McCoy, 2016a).
CONCLUSION
This Essay utilizes the Four Frames Model for institutional change to dissect mechanisms in STEM higher education that reinforce inequities related to the concept of student success, including how it is defined, measured, and rewarded. Our analysis focuses on the perspectives of students, faculty, departments, and institutions as stakeholders with respect to the structures, symbols, people, and power underpinning STEM education. In doing so, we have identified many aspects of institutional culture that maintain inequities and stasis around broadening the concept of student success. These include structures like tenure and promotion, degree requirements, and accreditation processes; differences in symbols between institutions, faculty, and students; and an inequitable distribution of power that encumbers collective action and stymies conversations around these topics.
We have also highlighted several lines of research that have sought to understand how to effectively change institutional structures. Additional resources on organizational change theory and actions that address barriers to redefining student success are collated in the Supplemental Material. Future research that evaluates the long-term outcomes of change initiatives, provides case studies of successful transformations, and offers qualitative insights into the perspectives of minoritized individuals within these processes will be particularly valuable for change agents.
Ultimately, we hope this Essay galvanizes readers to embrace their roles as architects of a more equitable future. Concerted, long-term collaborative efforts are required to dismantle the hegemonic structures that define success narrowly and inequitably, and we encourage change agents to leverage their positions and collective power in order to foster an educational environment where every student has the opportunity to define and achieve success on their own terms. Together, we can reconstruct the landscape of STEM higher education into one that celebrates diversity, equity, and the multifaceted nature of success.
Supplementary Material
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