Student Success

Our campus is the heartbeat of our community. An increased commitment to supporting and fostering undergraduate research has encouraged our students to more actively participate in research and present their findings at research symposiums and poster presentations. Our students are also succeeding in a variety of other ways, including sustained high nursing and teacher licensure passing rates on board examinations, admission of graduating seniors to major medical schools including Harvard Medical School, and receiving Fulbright study abroad awards. Old Dominion students have also regularly won prestigious internship opportunities in the White House and with the NASA Space Academy.

A point of pride for Old Dominion University is its profoundly diverse population of students, including transfer, military-affiliated, distance learner, and international students. To support them, Old Dominion University will build on its current strong retention and graduation rates. The Old Dominion University experience will provide students with co-curricular active learning opportunities that will usher graduates into successful careers, whether employment is immediately following their undergraduate accomplishments or after graduate school.

In addition to these efforts, we know that for our students to be truly successful, their academic adventures must reach beyond our campus. Thanks to the pledges of donors, we can provide financial assistance to students who land internships on Wall Street, music apprenticeships in San Francisco, and coveted opportunities at the CERN lab in Geneva. Our study abroad programs can become more plentiful and robust, which helps to prepare our students to enter a globally-competitive, diverse job market- one in which they need intercultural, foreign language, and other competencies developed through study abroad to succeed.

Enriching the student experience helps us increase retention and graduation rates. We typically retain more than 80 percent of our freshmen. And we graduated our largest class yet in 2016-2017. Plus, we awarded the second-highest percentage of STEM-H degrees among doctoral institutions in Virginia. Together we can continue to broaden our impact and set in motion the next wave of student success stories.