Student Affairs, Residential and Student Life, and Academic Affairs work closely together to create learning opportunities not only in the classroom, but outside the class as well. Through both the Residential Curriculums offered by the Office of Residential and Student Life, a wide variety of educational programs are offered to students that meet their needs and interests.

An important sub-component of the model is the “Purchase College Experience,” which dedicates itself to academic cohort-specific information and services to assure that student needs are addressed in a logical and sequential manner over the course of their four years here.

Student Learning Model

Mission Statement

The mission of Student Affairs is to provide, support, and enhance students’ educational opportunities in their curricular and co-curricular endeavors while aiding in the development of skills necessary to succeed professionally and academically. Working collaboratively across the college, Student Affairs creates an environment that engenders the intellectual, psychological, physical, cultural, social, and professional development of students while promoting civic engagement, service learning, and experiential learning within the educational mission of Purchase College.

Goals Statements

The Division of Student Affairs reflects the institutional goal of educating the whole student by promoting active participation in its programs and services. In doing so, we strive:

  1. To facilitate intellectual growth through participation in the educational process, professional experience, leadership training, service learning and development;
  2. To promote personal accountability through health and wellness education, community standards, and athletics;
  3. To foster social accountability through volunteerism, civic engagement, global responsibility, and collaborative partnerships.

Divisional Strategies

  1. First and foremost, we implement our intentional learning models strategically. There are many categories and types, including but not limited to the following:
    1. One-on-one conversations (proactive or reactive, formal or informal)
    2. Committee participation (vary by size, meeting frequency, charge origination, etc.)
    3. Training workshops
    4. Program (local, building, campus-wide, one-time or series)
    5. Technology driven services (Moodle, blogs, social networking)
    6. Passive program (bulletin boards, newsletters, email listserv)
  2. Our model coincides with the college’s “8-semester plan to graduation,” an individualized plan that guides a student’s academic progress toward a timely graduation. The Student Affairs complement is a personal and social engagement plan that gains its inspiration from the well-studied barriers, checkpoints, and questions students encounter during the course of their four years—referenced as “cohort specific”—in terms of intellectual, psychological, physical, cultural, social, and professional development.
  3. Staff members are trained on an ongoing basis to ensure that strategies stay relevant but also that they, as individuals, continue to be effective in implementation.
  4. We subscribe to the leadership cycle, acknowledging the critical importance of learning by seeing and learning by doing. Our programs and services offerings are both student-centered, facilitated by professional staff, faculty, and contracted external experts for students, and student-led, initiated, coordinated, and facilitated by students for students.

Programs and Services

Our offerings are defined within three general categories. Overlap is possible, meaning that a type can easily be mentioned in more than one category. Categories are loose and amendable to the ever-changing landscape of the field. We anticipate, acknowledge, and welcome the revisions and transformations that occur as a symbol of the continued progression of the field’s commitment to student learning.