Q Success: supporting underrepresented students in transition

This report provides an analysis of Q Success, a first-year transition program designed to help incoming direct-entry undergraduate students at Queen's University in Ontario develop personal and academic skills through a series of seminars, delivered in-person and online in Fall 2015. A particular focus of the research was on the participation of students from historically underrepresented and marginalized populations. Outcome measures included retention rates, grade point average (GPA), a measure of thriving (the Thriving Quotient or TQ) and participants' ratings of the program. The specific research objectives of this project were: (1) to examine whether and how the in-person and online versions of the Q Success program can support the distinct needs and challenges of historically underrepresented university students; and (2) to explore the cost-effectiveness and scalability of the virtual program model to inform its potential transferability across the higher education sector for the benefit of underrepresented students in diverse settings.

Findings include that: (1) new students continue to be motivated to access supports for their transition to university life and students from historically underrepresented and/or marginalized populations are registering for this programming at a proportionally higher rate; (2) students who attended the online and in-person cohorts provided positive feedback about the program, and reported that it provided them with supports that were not being offered elsewhere; and (3) even with students reporting that they found the program engaging and helpful, retention was a significant challenge, in both in-person and online formats - the first six weeks of first year are very busy and students reported that they had struggled to juggle other commitments with attendance at Q Success.

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