Using a Transactional Model and Thematic Analysis to Evaluate a Minority Male Student Success Initiative to Improve Participants’ Campus Experience and Retention

While the national discourse about the call for increased effort to help strengthen retention and graduation rates among minority college students seems to be losing its vigor, concerned citizens continue to find other means to sustain the momentum. Similarly, the office for institutional diversity at a public southeastern university established a minority male student success initiative in 2010 to help improve the educational experience of its members. The evaluators’ objectives for this transactional, formative, and qualitative evaluation were to understand this initiative from the different vantage points of its stakeholders, and to determine if they were satisfied thus far with its trajectory. The evaluators found that while some stakeholders held similar perspectives, others differed in their views on the initiative’s goal(s). The majority , however, expressed satisfaction with the initiative's direction at the time of the evaluation.