Racing-Inspired Ways to Accelerate Student Success

• Both auto racing and higher education require strong coordination, communication, and close attention to the wide-ranging circumstances that contribute to the most successful outcomes.
• In higher education, the presence of early alert systems can ensure that student success teams know when to act on a student’s behalf—the equivalent of calling for a “pit stop.”
• Every member of a student success team should be empowered to propose and pilot new ideas, make others aware of gaps in the system, and raise concerns if new methods aren’t working as planned.

 
In auto racing, it is the drivers who often hold celebrity status and receive the most media attention. But true fans of the sport know that behind every driver is a hard-working team to help that driver succeed. It takes the highly coordinated actions of numerous people to make victory possible.

It might seem surprising, but the worlds of auto racing and higher education have much in common—particularly with respect to helping both drivers and students perform at their best. Both endeavors require teams of capable people, all using their interpersonal and communication skills to achieve the most successful outcomes.

Technology also plays an increasingly prominent role in both endeavors. In professional auto racing, teams use the latest engineering technology to make cars sleeker and faster and turn to advanced telemetry to measure, collect, and analyze data and then translate it into actionable insights.

Likewise, in higher education, student success teams are relying more heavily on technology, due both to the switch to online education during the pandemic and growth in the education technology industry. We now are using new technological tools to address issues that range from the dramatic decline in student enrollments to the ongoing crisis in student mental health.

But in either activity, it is not technology that ultimately leads to success, but human skill. As the former associate dean of student success at the University of San Diego’s Knauss School of Business, I always tried to keep this in mind. Moreover, I believe that educators can take to heart several principles that are common in the sport of auto racing, as we strive to design and implement initiatives that lead to the best outcomes for our students.

The ‘Pit Crew Mentality’

In my role, I sometimes talked about the “pit crew mentality” of student success. By this, I mean that we must approach the work of student success as if students are race car drivers and the members of the student success team are the racing crew. As mentioned above, despite drivers’ celebrity status, racing is a team sport—and so is achieving student success. 

Moreover, although the pit crew is the most visible part of a driver’s support system, the complete team is actually much larger and multidimensional. It includes managers, the crew chief, engineering team members, mechanics, medical personnel, and various support staff—as many as 100 or more individuals. Likewise, the people who support student success in higher education include administrators, faculty, and staff across different departments and centers. These are the individuals who regularly interact with students and who must work together in a coordinated way.

At the Knauss School of Business, multidimensional teamwork is a foundational principle that also guides our work. While our student success team serves as the central hub of student success efforts, its work must be part of a broader web of support.

We are fortunate to have our own internal student success facility, the Knauss Student Success Center, which operates independently from the university’s general student success services. Our center allows us to advocate directly for our students by working with the academic departments and advising team, as well as with the school’s financial aid office and centers dedicated to professional development, tutoring, counseling, and wellness. Within this network, we can support each student’s unique needs using every resource available.

A Holistic Approach to Student Support

The mutual interdependence and cooperation between different teams supports another foundational principle of our approach: We strive to serve the needs of the student as a whole person.

In racing, good drivers need not only great driving skills, but also physical, mental, and emotional fitness. Consider drivers such as Danica Patrick, who practices yoga to help her be mindful during competition, and Josh Bilicki, who performs breathing exercises to stay calm and focused even on the most grueling racetracks.

While it is not the student success team’s role to single-handedly solve challenges for students, the team should help as much as reasonably possible using the resources at its disposal.

Helping students succeed also involves addressing multiple dimensions—social, physical, mental, and spiritual, as well as academic. Yes, academic progress is among the key metrics that we use to determine the support that students need. However, we also want to know if they are facing food or housing insecurity, chronic illness, mental health challenges, racial trauma, or any of the many other challenges that can overlap with and exacerbate these issues.

If left unaddressed, any of these factors can impact a student’s performance. As we saw so vividly during the pandemic, students who face these difficulties might not make studying a priority—and rightfully so. While it is not the student success team’s role to single-handedly solve these challenges, the team can and should help as much as reasonably possible using the resources at its disposal.

This support might include connecting students with our on-campus pantry, 24-hour mental health services, wellness center, or emergency financial resources. In one instance, we provided students experiencing food scarcity with certificates for online meal ordering. Our team members are trained to recognize signs that students may be experiencing these challenges, which enables us to intervene at the school and university levels.

The Need for Pit Stops

In a sport where fractions of seconds make all the difference, the best drivers and crew chiefs stress the importance of good communication among crew members, as well as between crew members and drivers. This is particularly true when it comes to deciding when it is necessary for drivers to make pit stops during the race, so that the pit crew can leap into action to quickly address any problems. For the team to make the right calls, they must have designed a good system of communication.

The Knauss School’s student success team communicates via monthly huddles and twice-a-year retreats. At these gatherings, we bring together our academic advising and professional development teams, both housed within our student success center, to go over new agenda items and compare notes. We discuss what’s working and what isn’t, and we form concrete action plans.

Beyond our frequent in-person meetings, we also use a combination of old-fashioned communication methods such as email, faculty intranet posts, and Google Docs. We complement these methods with various digital platforms. For instance, we use Salesforce to track data related to demographics, academics, and financial aid, and we rely on Handshake for data pertaining to students’ career development. 

Moreover, we find that a key feature of any good communication system is the early alert or faculty alert outreach (FAO) system—our equivalent of calling for a pit stop. When faculty members identify concerns that remain unresolved after initial contact with students, they can report the issues under their class list via our intranet website.

Within this system, faculty serve as active members of the pit crew. The FAO system ensures early intervention, reinforcing our commitment to creating a supportive and proactive educational environment.

Once a faculty alert has been activated, the student success team takes action through automated resource notifications to the student and direct, personalized outreach from our advisors or assistant dean of student success. Advisors will reach out to students through a combination of email, phone, and SMS messages—or whatever method is most likely to encourage students to respond. The goal is to get them to talk to us and share as much as they are willing to reveal, so that we can understand what’s going on.

Of course, not all students are forthcoming about what they are going through. When this happens, we must take a more personal approach—for instance, we might take students out to lunch if we suspect they are experiencing food insecurity. Such a response might not be part of our official protocols, but it demonstrates our commitment to each student as a whole person. This can be just the thing to encourage students to open up to us.

Once we understand what’s going on, we can systematically work through each issue one by one. We can figure out which people to contact and which resources to recommend. All the while, we reassure students that, if they decide that they must take an “incomplete” in a course or a leave of absence from their studies, we will stand by them and be here for them over the long haul.

It is our role to provide students with appropriate support and resources, as well as advise them to speed up, slow down, or be more careful on any sharp turns. But we always try to help them understand that they are the ones behind the wheel. They are in control, and they are the ones who must decide when to step on the gas and when to brake.

Empowering the Team, Piloting Solutions

Alan Gustafson, the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion crew chief for Hendrick Motorsports, has been said to lead his team in a way that empowers his crew and keeps them nimble and adaptable. Gustafson works to give his team members the autonomy to bring their ideas to the table; propose and try new ways of doing things; and, if necessary, make mistakes that will help them learn and grow.

Empowerment is a core component of the Knauss Student Success Center’s philosophy as well. We like to say that we use an approach that resembles crowdsourcing, where it isn’t just leadership looking at problems and trying to solve them. It is everyone on the team trying to solve problems together.

As part of this crowdsourcing approach, we want others on the team to make us aware of any gaps that we otherwise miss—for example, we want to be informed if a certain student demographic is suddenly falling behind. More important, we are always open to new ideas and solutions that team members propose. Each time someone recommends a new idea, we go over all the available data with the team, make sure the financial resources are available, and then decide whether to pilot a new initiative.

It is our role to advise students to speed up, slow down, or be more careful on any sharp turns. But they are the ones who must decide when to step on the gas and when to brake.

Once we complete our pilot of a new strategy, we then collect feedback and have honest team debriefings about whether it’s working. If it isn’t working, we collectively discuss and decide whether the new idea needs to revised and retried or scrapped altogether.

We know that, if a team isn’t careful, initiating a new pilot can result in undesired ripple effects. This is why, when proposing and discussing new solutions, we always have someone in the room who can act as a filter—someone who is a veteran in the organization, sees the big picture, and can predict that if we push the “X” button it might cause the “Y” component to break.

It’s important to balance being open to new solutions with being honest and critical enough to discard ideas that don’t hold up to scrutiny or that did not work in the pilot stage. This balance is a critical part of cultivating nimbleness within a student success team.

Rely on People, Not Tech

A 2021 study showed that the communication and teamwork between the driver and his or her team play a bigger role in successful race outcomes than either the driver’s skill or the team’s technology. In other words, even the most advanced tech can’t win races if communication is poor, crew members feel disempowered, or the pit crew and driver are out of sync.

And even the most advanced edtech cannot guarantee success if student support teams do not pay attention to the many interpersonal factors that affect students’ academic performance. In fact, an overreliance on tech could actually be detrimental.

But that means that student success teams do not need the most advanced technology to serve their students well—if they adopt the human-centric strategies described above. By embracing frequent communication, tightly coordinating their teamwork, being open to testing new ideas, and taking a holistic view of every student, we all can help our students cross the finish line.