Achieving Student Success: Effective Student Services in Canadian Higher Education

In today's colleges and universities, whether students succeed depends in large part on access to effective services that can support and guide them in pursuit of their educational goals. Policy and practice in the field of student services has been largely based on professional literature from US sources. Donna Hardy Cox and Carney Strange offer the first comprehensive description of professional student services in Canadian colleges and universities from the perspective of the practitioner-scholars who create and lead them.

Hardy Cox and Strange begin with an overview of student services dealing with the matriculation of post-secondary students - through enrolment management, financial assistance, and orientation to the institution and accommodation - and then discuss housing and residence life, student leadership programs, systems of judicial and academic integrity, and student support and adjustment through counselling, health and wellness initiatives, career and employment advice, and a variety of services that can respond to a variety of needs.

How these services are integrated professionally on campus, including their organization and leadership as well as their design within differing institutional contexts, and delivery methods, is the focus of the closing chapters, followed by a distillation of principles that underlie effective student services.

Contributors include Murray Baker (University of Western Ontario), Bruce Belbin (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology), Deborah Eerkes (University of Alberta), Donna Hardy Cox (Memorial University/University of New Brunswick), Ted James (Douglas College), Heather Lane Vetere (Toronto Metropolitan University), Chris McGrath (University of Toronto), Roberta Mason (Royal Roads University), Patricia Mirwaldt (University of British Columbia), Bonnie Neuman (Dalhousie University), Michel Ouellette (Cochise College), C. Carney Strange (Saint Xavier University), Nona Robinson (University of Toronto), Jack Russel (University of Western Ontario), Robert Shea (Memorial University), and Brian Sullivan (University of British Columbia).