Better Together: Building Student Success Through a Comprehensive Coaching Model

At Columbus State University (CSU) in Georgia, student success is the top priority of the institution’s new strategic plan, Better Together: 2030. This vision defines success not only by retention and graduation but also by ensuring that every student leaves CSU career-ready and employable.

To achieve this ambitious goal, CSU has launched a transformative coaching model and invested in building a comprehensive Center for Career Design. In 2024, CSU made an unprecedented $4 million investment to expand advising into a dual academic and career coaching system. This bold shift moves the university beyond transactional advising and siloed career support toward an integrated, holistic coaching framework. Every student is paired with professional coaches who walk alongside them throughout their CSU journey.

Unlike traditional advising that focuses primarily on course selection, CSU’s coaching model provides individualized, purposeful support that empowers students to develop self-determination, critical thinking skills, and personal accountability. Academic Success Coaches guide students through their degree pathways, ensuring progression, timely graduation, and a strong sense of belonging. Career Success Coaches provide targeted career planning, experiential learning opportunities, and pathways to professional success. Together, this unified model strengthens retention, persistence, and graduation while advancing career readiness outcomes.

Housed in the new Center for Career Design, the career success coaches ensure that students simultaneously build the skills, connections, and confidence to launch successful careers. Each coach specializes in a disciplinary area—business, STEM, education, fine and performing arts, health professions, and humanities—allowing tailored career coaching and employer connections relevant to students’ chosen fields. By embedding career readiness across the student experience, CSU has made employability not an afterthought but an institutional promise.

A hallmark of this initiative is Charting Your Course, a required first-year seminar designed and taught by career coaches. The course introduces all new CSU students—across every major—to career exploration, life design, and the NACE Career Readiness Competencies. Students learn to identify strengths, articulate skills, and begin shaping a professional identity. By embedding career development in the curriculum from the first semester, CSU guarantees that career readiness is universal, not optional. Together, academic and career coaching create a powerful synergy. Academic coaches help students navigate the path to graduation with confidence and support, while career coaches ensure graduates leave CSU prepared to succeed in the workforce.

This integrated approach reflects the heart of Better Together: 2030—a commitment to holistic, equitable, and future-focused student success. CSU’s investment is already showing promise. Peer institutions, such as the University of Kentucky, have documented higher retention and persistence rates through similar coaching models. At CSU, uniting academic and career coaching within a strategic framework provides students with clarity of purpose, employers with well-prepared graduates, and the institution with measurable outcomes aligned to its highest priority.

This session will explore CSU’s journey to design and implement a comprehensive coaching model, from securing institutional buy-in to embedding career readiness in the first-year curriculum. Participants will gain practical strategies for building scalable coaching infrastructures, aligning academic and career success efforts, and advancing institutional goals for student success.

Following this program, you will be able to:

• Apply practical strategies for embedding career readiness across the student experience.
• Identify key structural and cultural elements required to transition from siloed advising and career services to a comprehensive, student-centered coaching ecosystem.
• Explain how an integrated academic and career coaching model can advance institutional priorities for student success, retention, and career readiness.