What is the Global Forum for Student Success?
The Global Forum for Student Success is a grup of postsecondary educators from 10 countries who are committed to addressing the central issue of student success in postsecondary education globally. We understand that student success practices, policies, research, and vision are often limited to individual institutions or regions. Therefore, we advocate for a global and systemic analysis to tackle complex challenges, while acknowledging the need for contextual actions and solutions. Our goal is to create a database of annotated frameworks, research, and resources to advance student success across borders.
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Our Vision
The Global Forum for Student Success is a dynamic movement of stakeholders from around the global who aim to make Student Success equitable and accessible to all learners in all post-secondary education contexts. Furthering the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the Forum champions access to high-quality and culturally responsive post-secondary education as a critical component of lifelong learning as a human right.

The primary anchor point is the success of the individual learner throughout their lifespan. The focus is on assuring educational equity across thresholds of access, engagement, completion, and post-graduation success for beneficial employability, and societal and active citizenry outcomes for all learners.

Our Mission
The Global Forum for Student Success will create a unified global forum to promote effective student success policy, practice, and research across global and intra-national contexts, respecting diversity in language and national/regional regulatory frameworks.

The Global Forum for Student Success seeks to:

  1. Establish a platform in which multiple voices can provide a critical, global dialogue and collective wisdom in addressing change as a global network of colleagues to frame and continuously foster dynamic exchange on how “student success” is understood both across higher education globally and propose global definitions and/or standards.
  2. Work together on specific challenges of student success, propose potential solutions, and influence educational systems in addressing student success and building global understanding and agency for student success.
  3. Amplify the moral imperative of student success as well as effectively foster global information exchange and harness expertise to ensure that all institutions and their students reach their full potential.
  4. promote student access, inclusion, equity and success ensuring they are at the center of global educational policy.
  5. Initiate advocacy campaigns to persuade individual governments to address equity in higher education and encourage unified voices in advocating for amendments to policy, theory and practice.
  6. Create sustainable practices for student success and serve as an evidence-led clearing house for effective practices spanning the whole student life cycle in post-secondary education.
  7. Foster conversations about teaching and learning by identifying common benchmarks (e.g., assessment, graduate attributes, increasing student access to post-secondary education ).
  8. Include Students as participants in shaping and influencing global trends on student success and foreground the Student Voice

The History of the Global Forum for Student Succes:​
The Global Forum for Student Success was established near the start of the pandemic to bring together two dozen scholars, leaders, and students from six continents and ten countries who had been talking informally about growing global attention to student success in postsecondary education and their shared commitment to more equitable and socially just higher education. Beginning in 2020, Global Forum members met virtually almost every month with the intention of learning from each other’s experiences and contexts and mapping out steps toward a broader, more sustainable set of partnerships between institutions of higher education and the scholarly communities devoted to student success.

Early discussions among Global Forum members highlighted the emerging perspectives of scholars, teaching faculty, administrators, student groups, policymakers, focused on student success around the world. Members exchanged perceptions about challenges in their work and were intentional about raising up and attending to voices and perspectives that historically have been marginalized in higher education, including those of Indigenous students and communities from across the world. In addition, one of the founding values was to engage students in this work as partners in facilitating and contributing to our thinking and resources.

In pursuing this work, the Global Forum for Student Success is distinct because prior initiatives on student success typically focus on a particular institutional or national contexts. In our experience, some notable exceptions aside, when scholars meet at conferences where student success is discussed, this work rarely looks across global (or even institutional) boundaries to consider what we can learn from the diversity and depth of student success scholarship and practices beyond our own national borders. The Global Forum seeks to fill that gap by bringing scholars, practitioners, leaders, and students from around the global together to debate, discuss, imagine, and support the creation of more socially just higher education systems in diverse cultural and institutional contexts, and to develop local and global resources to advance these aims.