Dante Cantú, SUNY New Paltz’s new director of the Center for Student Resources and Academic Support, has been named one of ten recipients of the 2016 Outstanding First-Year Student Advocate Award, which will be presented later this month at the 35th annual Conference on the First-Year Experience in Orlando, Fla.
The award honors college faculty, administrators, staff and students for outstanding work on behalf of first-year students and for the impact their efforts have on the students and culture of their institutions.
As founding director of the Center for Student Success at Mount Saint Mary College (MSMC) in Newburgh, N.Y., Cantú worked tirelessly to help build a support infrastructure for first-year students.
His original role at MSMC was as director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program, where he oversaw transformations in that office’s recruitment, advising and tutoring operations that produced significant gains in student retention and academic performance.
“We found that instead of looking at students based on a traditional cognitive assessment framework limited to standardized test scores and high school GPA, which doesn’t give a full picture of a person’s potential, we could have a much more meaningful impact on our students, from recruitment to graduation, if we focused on more holistic processes,” Cantú said.
Cantú carried the momentum of his success with the opportunity program over when he was asked to lead the development of the MSMC Center for Student Success, where the work of his team contributed directly to a ten percent increase in first-year student retention over a period of four years.
“We developed the Center for Student Success based on that same strengths-oriented holistic model,” Cantú said. “The foundation of that approach is to consider the student as a whole: student motivation, their ideas for their futures, their resiliency and their personal strengths. From this starting point, we are able to guide and support students in a personalized manner, which supports in-course student learning and facilitates their engagement in co-curricular learning activities outside the classroom, all in support of their integration within the academic and social fabric of the college.”
Cantú now brings the lessons he learned developing these programs to New Paltz, where he sees similar opportunities to extend the reach and the efficacy of the Center for Student Resources and Academic Support in partnership with the entire campus community.
“I’m on a listening tour right now, meeting with different people on campus to learn about they do and to hear how we might collaborate in the future,” Cantú said. “I’ve been hearing some great things, and I’m looking forward to working hand in hand with these other offices in support of the student experience as a whole here at New Paltz.”
The Conference on the First-Year Experience is co-sponsored by the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina, and by Cengage Learning. More information is available online.
