As UNLV’s associate vice provost for student success, Jeffrey Orgera's extensive list of responsibilities range from working with the university’s academic advising centers to analyzing retention and graduation data to coordinating various facets of the First-Year Experience program.
Some unexpected encouragement from a college instructor pushed him to consider graduate school — something that, as a first-generation college student, he'd never considered until then.
Now, after two graduate degrees and 30 years in higher education, Orgera is passionate about using his position to develop academic opportunities for UNLV students. Through various programs and initiatives, he is empowering students to connect with the advisors, faculty, resources, and support networks they can use to pave their own path toward student success.
As associate vice provost for student success, what do you see as your role’s most vital responsibilities?
The primary goal that drives me each day is to enhance opportunities for our students to connect with all of the people and resources in the UNLV community so they become integrated academically and socially into the fabric of UNLV. One of the primary elements of my role is working with our 11 academic advising centers to develop standard practices that focus on student access and success.
I’m also part of a large team that works on Top Tier student achievement metrics, including first-year retention, continuing student retention, and four- and six-year graduation rates. In that space, we’re focused on reducing and eliminating the gaps in retention and graduation rates between various populations of the students on campus.
Because student success outcomes are closely connected to introductory courses, I work with faculty and staff on corequisite math and English courses and programs. I’m helping the campus implement NSHE policy on corequisite math and English that will require all incoming students to begin their English and math requirements in their first year and to do that without having to take any developmental or remedial courses. The policy is intended to promote progress without additional courses and was accomplished by creating support for students who may not have been as prepared for college-level math and writing.
My team and I are also responsible for UNLV’s First-Year Experience program. It welcomes new students into the community and offers a series of integrated and individualized first-year experiences across campus to get them connected with key people and departments. I also work with the advisors assigned to first-year students, as well as a campuswide peer mentoring program that helps connect seasoned Rebels with incoming students through the First-Year Seminar. Also, I’m responsible for concurrent enrollment programs with local high schools that enable students in Clark County to earn college credit through UNLV courses while still in high school.
You helped launch programs that supported students from historically underserved groups at previous institutions where you've worked. What are some similar initiatives you’ve been able to take on at UNLV?
I think the next thing for UNLV is building more explicit learning communities for our students. Learning communities is a model that has a lot of success in higher education. It’s really just the idea of taking a group of students that might share some interests or characteristics and getting them into similar courses so they’re completing courses together. Within those communities, you connect them to faculty members, peer mentors, and other resources across the campus.
This year, we’re starting to put the building blocks in place for those types of experiences related to our corequisite courses. So, these are students that maybe need a little more support and a little bit different pace in how they’re learning college-level writing and math. That’s something I’d really like to do, and we’re starting to make strides there; it’s just going to take a little more time.
Where does your passion for helping underserved students come from?
I think my passion for this work comes partly from my own story. Neither of my parents went to college, and I’ve always had to figure stuff out along the way. If you’d told me in high school or college that I'd one day become an administrator at a large university like UNLV, I would’ve said, “Not a chance,” or, “You’re crazy.”
I was not an exceptional student, but when I met certain faculty and people along the way, it gave me a spark and confidence to work harder. Their belief and guidance and mentoring made all the difference. But…I've always felt a little out of place in higher education. So, I do this work because I can relate to many of our students — that college is not a place that is always familiar in a lot of ways. I stumbled quite a bit, fell down a few times. Luckily, I had people there to pick me up and put me back on track. That's where my passion and background connect.
Also, where we are as a society. I feel higher education is the best investment you can make in yourself. And we know that completing a college degree increases your social and economic mobility, so it takes individuals and changes them. I feel providing students access to UNLV and the education we offer in addition to providing resources that help connect students to the campus — there is no more important work. It’s an amazing vehicle for us to not just develop the student’s skills, but to their families, neighborhoods, and that larger community those students are part of.
What ultimately led you to UNLV?
I grew up in Connecticut and went to college in New Hampshire. Luckily, I had a faculty member in an anthropology course — although I studied psychology — and she was the first person to say I should consider graduate school. And for a first-generation student who was a late bloomer academically, I couldn't believe she suggested it, but she planted that seed.
I looked at graduate programs and again without a lot of experience or knowledge, I applied to programs that were out of reach for my modest academic record. But, the University of Arizona took a shot on me and admitted me to the educational psychology master’s degree program, and I went for it. In Arizona, I built my career for 30 years through increasingly responsible roles. I finished up the master’s and Ph.D., and then a former mentor from the University of California, San Diego, recruited me.
Then the associate vice provost position at UNLV opened up and gave me an opportunity to work in student success through the lens of academic affairs rather than student affairs. I felt like this opportunity would give me a whole new outlook, and it has.
What type of data and technology platforms do you use to implement student success strategies? What are you able to do with that data?
I'm responsible for the Campus Connect platform. That’s where our advisors enter notes and details about undergrad students when they meet with them. It also pulls information like a student’s major or grades. It can run analytical reports that indicate which students might be in a position to benefit from outreach and support. Through it, our faculty can submit alerts, and we’ll receive a message that, for example, maybe they’re struggling academically. We can then direct that student to contact the Academic Success Center or other unit to get academic support resources. We can use that type of data to develop outreach campaigns, emails, or text messages. We also have a group of students who make phone calls to first-year students to see how they’re doing or if they need any help. Those students we reach out to are typically first-generation students and don’t have as much college experience as other students, so we try to guide them along the way. Let them know that registration is coming up so see your adviser, or that there’s an unpaid balance, so go to the cashier's office.
We use all the data from various systems to track how many students have registered for the spring semester and find out that they haven’t because of, say, outstanding holds on their account. Our teams offer small awards or retention grants that help to clear unpaid balances so that the student is able to register and return. We use data in so many ways, whether it’s grades or balances or general progress. We try our best to act on that data and make decisions based upon what it tells us about student progress..
Soon, we’ll be leaving Campus Connect and going to a new platform offered by Salesforce. We already have some units using that, so we’re hoping to increase our use of data to drive our programs and outreach to students so that they aren’t falling through the cracks.
The UNLV Minority-Serving Institution Student Success Summit takes place on March 3. How does this event fit into UNLV’s student success efforts?
It directly aligns with our Top Tier student achievement priorities in terms of creating a campus that is truly serving its students. That’s why our theme for this year is “Evolving to Serve.”
Lots of institutions in the country have an HSI, MSI, or AANAPISI designation because that’s based on a set percentage of your population that falls into these categories. Knowing that UNLV is very diverse, we hit these easily. This event is really about, I think, walking the talk. We’re showing our students, our faculty, our leadership that we are proud of the designation but we really want to evolve to move toward truly serving our students. A lot of the work in Student Success, especially for the students coming to campus today, it’s really about the idea of what do institutions need to do differently to better serve the students rather than what students should do to better fit into our university.
This event is the symbolism of that. But it’s also an opportunity to hear the voices of our students. There will be student performances, music, exhibits. We really want to have students participate as co-leaders of this event, introducing the speakers and leading table talk sessions. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to raise awareness across campus, all units, and disciplines — that we’re proud of this designation, but we also have work to do. It’s going to require us to think differently about what we do. Similar to what President Whitfield said in the State of the University Address — we have to continue evolving to meet the needs of our students and live up to the promises we make to them.
In your 30 years of working in higher education, what correlations have you observed between students feeling a sense of belonging and retention rates?
There’s a very strong connection between sense of belonging, academic progression — like course completion and unit completion — with retention and, ultimately, graduation.
In my mind, retention is an outcome of both the input characteristics of our students — who they are and what their goals are — and the environment they come into in the institution. It’s about how they mesh. They don’t mesh well with all students, but our goal is to continue to adapt to what our students are seeking. That also speaks to UNLV’s growth into online spaces and other opportunities for returning adult learners.
Retention is an outcome of students being socially and academically integrated into our community. They feel comfortable in their classes, supported by faculty, willing to take risks and make mistakes and know that it’s not going to be the end of the world. They feel that they have their community — whether it’s clubs and organizations or Greek life or other things they’re involved in — and that they have that support network.
The more we can facilitate connection and rich relationships with peers, faculty, and staff and their discipline — the outcome is going to be retention and completion. I think for our students who are unfamiliar with higher education, we just need to be explicit and tell them these things and build the structure so they have many access points with which they can enter.
Not everybody lives on campus, so we have to develop our programming with a wide net to bring everyone in. Throughout my career, I worked with student-athletes and students with learning disabilities and ADHD, and low-income, first-generation students. What I learned is that, on paper, those students might have a modest academic record, but if given the appropriate support and network and programs around them, they can achieve equal success to other students with higher GPAs and even surpass them.
And, that goes back to my passion for building these opportunities. When a student hooks into these things, the sky’s the limit. It doesn’t matter if they were a 2.0 GPA in high school — they can graduate and be successful.
When you leave work, how do you unwind and relax?
It’s a challenge. It really is. Throughout my career I've been better at self-care than other times. I don’t know if it was the pandemic or the things going on in the world. The past few years have been especially taxing and stressful. So, I’ve had to start doing some different things. I definitely enjoy spending time with my family and friends. My sons are away at college so I take my dog Lily for a lot more walks, and we work on training. I’ve been trying to increase my time of reading and journaling. I also enjoy practicing yoga, meditation, and golf. I am finding my self-care routine is as comprehensive as my work day, and it fills my weekends with all kinds of projects and activities
I also love plants and gardening. I have a vegetable garden that’s a raised bed, two feet by six feet, so it’s small and manageable. I like to do my own landscaping. In my neighborhood, everyone hires a landscaper, but, growing up, I would walk around the neighborhood and earn money mowing lawns or shoveling snow, so I can’t let it go yet. I get a lot of satisfaction and a sense of pride from my plants and yard.
