This book is a call for further development of, research on, and dissemination of existing and new information on strategies to improve the graduate student experience.

We assert that the graduate student experience does not currently include the full spectrum of support needed to get diverse learners in diverse forms of graduate education from entry to successful completion. Therefore, we are calling for greater efforts to understand and help graduate students earn degrees, which means the need for better data collection and transparency, as well as attention to graduate student needs including food and housing security, health care, childcare, etc. We believe that the higher education community must better attend to the vast majority of graduate students who have been overlooked in the literature and often under-served in practice, such as those seeking master’s degrees and professional doctorates. We seek to address all types of graduate credentials, across all program and institutional settings, and in both online and place-based delivery modes. In addition to arguing for the critical needs of graduate students (personal development, health, welfare, goals attainment, and quality of life) to be addressed in more intentional ways by higher educators, the book will include examples of campus/practitioner-based activities which are already working to create a more student-centered graduate school culture.

We intend this book to be a resource for a national graduate student experience reform movement. We believe this movement needs a “north star” book to serve as a source of inspiration and a call to action. To that end, we strive to:

• Provide higher educators who have responsibility for graduate students a highly readable and practical, practitioner-focused guide for increasing graduate student success.
• Spark a national effort to extend the “student success” higher education reform movement beyond its current exclusive focus on undergraduate education by focusing also on the needs of graduate students.
• Build on current and ongoing work that recognizes a more holistic understanding and approach is needed to better support graduate students beyond their strictly academic needs.
• Encourage organizational partnerships between academic affairs and student affairs to enhance graduate student success outcomes.
• Promote the application of the vast array of support services for undergraduates to graduate students.
  Offer practical strategies for increasing graduate student retention and credential completion rates.
• Explore ways to reduce equity gaps in retention and completion rates based on race, ethnicity, income, gender, zip code of origin, thus increasing educational opportunity.
• Ensure that the proliferation of new masters’ degree programs is not merely the creation of “cash cows” that fail to provide necessary student support systems for these students.
• Encourage the expansion of a knowledge base on improving the graduate student experience, just as has been done over the past 40 years with the extensive literature on the first-year experience, also inspired by the founders of the Gardner Institute.
• Contribute to the communities of practice for the graduate student experience that exist and provide a convening space for them (such as the Gardner Institute conference on the topic in March 2024 and October 2025).

With nearly 50 contributors from institutions across the US, this book spans breath and depth. The editorial team includes:

EDITORS:

John N. Gardner, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, Gardner Institute, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow, University of South Carolina at Columbia. While at USC, he was the founder of the First-Year Experience movement, and founding executive director of the National Resource Center for the First Year Experience and Students in Transition. In addition to coauthoring nine professional books on higher education, he has also co-authored a series of textbooks for college student success courses with his wife, Betsy O. Barefoot, who is also co-founder of the Institute.

Andrew (Drew) K. Koch, Chief Executive Officer, Gardner Institute. Prior to joining the institute fourteen years ago, he spent two decades working in both independent and public postsecondary institutions. That work included teaching graduate student courses and participation in thesis and dissertation committees. He has served as the principal or coprincipal investigator on more than two dozen grant-funded research and education improvement projects with support coming from sources such as Ascendium Education Philanthropies, ECMC Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Lilly Endowment, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Co-editor of The Transfer Experience (Stylus, 2021), his newest book, Transforming the Gateway Course Experience: A Call to Action for Higher Education is from Routledge, 2025.

April Perry, Professor in the M.Ed. Higher Education Student Affairs program, and Department Head/Chair for Human Services at Western Carolina University. She is the co-editor of the recent, award-winning book A Practitioner’s Guide to Supporting Graduate and Professional Students (Routledge, 2022). She has served in various leadership roles in the academy such as Department Head, Assistant Department Head, Interim Associate Dean of the Grad School, and Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) Graduate Program Director. In 2016, April received the WCU Graduate School’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. In 2017, she was named Outstanding Professional in Graduate and Professional Student Services by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) Administrators in Graduate and Professional Student Services (AGAPSS) Knowledge Community. In 2022, she was honored with NASPA AGAPSS’ Outstanding Contribution to Research and the Profession Award, and also in 2022 received NASPA Faculty Council’s Outstanding Support for Graduate Students Award. In 2024, her co-edited book was selected as the Outstanding Publication from NASPA’s Faculty Council.

Additional Editorial Support:

David Brightman, Fellow and Editor, Gardner Institute. Prior to joining the Institute, Brightman spent 15 years as lead editor of higher education books for Jossey-Bass, followed by eight years as senior editor with Stylus Publishing, which was the only independent publisher devoted entirely to books on higher education. His extensive experience includes working on previous works with both John Gardner and Drew Koch.

Alicia Morey, Chief of Staff, Gardner Institute. Prior to joining the Institute, Morey worked as the Assistant Director of the Office of Student Services and Undergraduate Affairs at the Florida A&M University-Florida State University College of Engineering, a shared program located in Tallahassee, Florida. At the Institute, Morey was involved in the planning and execution of the first Graduate Student Experience conference, and also works with Gardner and Koch on many of their other writing projects.