Leveraging on Stakeholder Involvement to Create a Student Success Culture Through Institutional Capacity Assessment at a University in South Africa

Institutions of higher education face the ongoing challenge of fostering a culture that empowers students to excel academically, professionally, and personally. Such a culture requires a common understanding among all university stakeholders on what constitutes student success and how this can be achieved, and the Institutional Capacity Assessment Tool (ICAT) is one tool that can be used to establish this. Using the quantitative methods, this paper discusses how the ICAT helped one South African university assess its capacity for enabling student success and identify strengths and areas for improvement. A structured survey (the ICAT tool) was administered to gather data from institution staff and stakeholders, applying mixed methods, which combined qualitative and quantitative insights to evaluate institutional capacity comprehensively. Results show that completing the self-assessment tool enabled institutional executive management, academic support staff, and academics to evaluate their institution’s capacity to improve student success. Through ICAT, the university gained several benefits: insight into the key capacities for student success, stakeholder engagement across all areas of the institution using a common framework to share opinions and identify perception gaps, prioritization of areas for improvement, and the development of strategies to build and strengthen student success interventions.