Top Five Projects: Student Success Center

TAU recently upgraded and transformed its Dean of Students Office into a Student Success Center. Its mission: To provide a streamlined, holistic support framework to Israel’s most precious resource – its future leaders, educators, and innovators – to ensure they successfully complete their degree and achieve their career goals. Particularly now, in the wake of the Iron Swords war, the Center will extend vital assistance to thousands of student reservists with academic difficulties, financial hardship, disabilities, psychological issues and other problems resulting directly from their IDF service. 

Overview

Until today, TAU’s Dean of Students was more of a boutique operation, with a focus on assisting specific groups with special needs, such as minorities, disabled students and single moms, by offering support such as scholarships, mentoring and psychological counseling. Now, TAU has reinvented it as a much broader and expanded Student Success Center to provide comprehensive services to all students across campus. To help students cope with – and overcome – the many obstacles and challenges that they face during their degree studies, the Center now serves as a one-stop-shop for every aspect of the student campus experience, offering new activities including faculty-based 
student retention and career development services.

The Need

With its broad mandate and an ever-growing roster of student needs, the Center has grown out of its modest budget. 

A substantial infusion of funding will enable it to:

• Launch a special projects fund to support important extra-budgetary activities, such as: 
  • Bolstering existing programs for special needs groups and launching new ones – securing the future of existing programs that do not have a stable funding source, and establishing new ones for groups for whom there are as yet no tailored programs. This fund will ensure they have the resources to continue operating for the coming decade.
  • Reinforcing career development services – expanding the scope and range of services, recruiting additional staff to boost capacity, etc.
• Expand and upgrade the Center’s physical home: The Center’s aspirations are hampered by an acute lack of physical space. The construction of two additional floors and modernization of existing facilities at the Mitchell Building will redress this and transform the Center into a more attractive and inviting venue for a range of student activities and a vibrant hub of campus life.
• Secure the Center’s future by establishing a permanent endowment fund, the annual yield of which will support the Center’s operations in perpetuity