Dr. Lawrence Abele Receives Stan Jones Legacy Award
Longtime Florida State University Provost is the Fourth Recipient of the National Award
Complete College America announced at its Annual Convening today that Dr. Lawrence (Larry) G. Abele, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for Academic Leadership and Provost Emeritus at Florida State University, is the 2019 recipient of the Stan Jones Legacy Award. He is the fourth recipient of the award.
The Stan Jones Legacy Award, established in 2016 in honor of CCA’s founder and inaugural president, is given to the individual, organization, or state that has consistently embodied the vision of Complete College America and worked towards achieving the goals of increasing the number of students who earn credentials of value.
“Larry was an early innovator in the college completion movement, leveraging data to improve student advising at Florida State University long before most institutions had begun implementing similar strategies,” said CCA President Dr. Yolanda Watson Spiva. “Larry epitomizes what it means to ‘use the data to drive the change.’ We applaud him for his bold ideas and insistence on policy change aligned with practice to ensure student success.”
Dr. Abele is a CCA Fellow and one of the foremost experts on the use and creation of academic maps. He is best known for challenging institutions to take a more empirical approach for analyzing the effectiveness of their completion strategies. Since 1994, he has directed the Institute for Academic Leadership, providing training for department chairs from throughout the State University System of Florida. During his 16-year tenure as Provost of Florida State University he focused on improving retention and graduation rates.
After discovering through a student survey more than 20 years ago that compartmentalization of student services was detrimental to student success, he organized a 25-member Enrollment Management Group to meet every two weeks—and the group continues to meet today. The goal is to bring all personnel associated with campus life into one setting, where completion strategies in areas such as tutoring and academic advising are discussed, tweaked and addressed on a holistic level.
These efforts contributed to an increase in first to second year retention rate from 10 percent to 92 percent, the four-year graduation rate increased to 61.2 percent and the six-year graduation rate increased to 79 percent. The increase in retention yielded new tuition revenues of over $6 million, fully covering the costs of adding new academic advisors and coaching.
Dr. Abele lead FSU to be one of the first schools to utilize degree mapping, allowing advisers to better track a student’s path to graduation. This program and similar initiatives laid the foundation for future student success programs at FSU, which have since offered support networks to tens of thousands of students.
Dr. Abele has served on many national boards, such as the Voluntary System of Accountability, APLU, and the Council of Academic Affairs as well as on NSF panels.In total, Dr. Abele was with Florida State University for 28 years, serving as provost and dean.
