Student Success Units SSUs
Advising is a highly configurable system combining permission settings, roles, configurations, and functionality, so how do we make it work for each institution? To a large degree, by creating “SSUs”.
A Student Success Unit (SSU) is a department, office, division, college, or campus that provides student support and contributes to your advising structure. Each SSU has its own unique configuration:
- Data visibility
- Feature visibility
- Sharing rules (for advising notes, in particular)
These are some common SSUs:
- Academic Advising
- Athletics
- Student Affairs
- Disability Services
- Financial Aid
- Tutoring
- Off-campus study
- Career Services
Reasons for an SSU
There are three main reasons for defining a new SSU:
- Advising note visibility/sharing: If the institution has two offices that must not see each other’s shared notes, they must be separate SSUs.
- Student data visibility: Student data exists on the student profile, advanced search, and in reporting. If there is an office that must not see specific data elements from another (such as Financial Aid Data), they must be separate SSUs.
- Student population: If an office should only see certain students at the institution (Athletics, Honors, Fellowships) they must be a separate SSU (otherwise, it could be handled through Groups). If an office has a narrow student mission (such as Career Services) they may opt for a separate SSU for ease of reporting (events and note reporting).
Example: The image below outlines three different SSUs configured for one institution and includes the primary user roles available within each SSU.
Here are the configuration decisions made for each SSU within this example:
| SSU | Advising Note Visibility/Sharing | Student Data Visibility | Student Population |
| Academics | Notes should be visible to all Academic and Counseling advisors. | All data | All students |
| Athletics | Notes should be visible by athletics advisors only; but shared with academic advisors as needed. | All data | All Athletes |
| Counseling | Sensitive notes should be kept within the SSU. | All data | All students, available to all |
Each SSU has different primary users, rules around advising note visibility/sharing, specific student data visibility, and access to different student populations.
- Academics SSU — Academic advisors, major advisors, and first-year advisors. Advising notes that are created in this SSU are visible by all other advisors in the Academics SSU, as well as Counseling Advisors in the Counseling SSU. All students appear in this SSU and advisors have access to all student information.
- Athletics SSU — Athletic advisors and coaches. Advising notes that are created in this SSU are only visible to other users in the Athletics SSU, but these can be shared with users in the Academics SSU as needed. Only student-athletes appear in this SSU, and these advisors have access to all student information.
- Counseling SSU — Counseling advisors. Advising notes that are created in this SSU are always private and cannot be viewed by members of other SSUs. All students appear in this SSU and Counseling advisors have access to all student information.
Tip: Users can exist in multiple SSUs.
Reasons against an SSU
Complexity increases as you add SSUs, so be sure to add only ones that are truly needed.
Use these questions to guide decision-making around adding SSUs and help avoid unneeded ones.
- Is the work of this team centralized?
- How do you share information about a student? interactions with the student?
- Do you serve and have access to all students’ records at the institution? Or a subpopulation?
- Do you need or have access to sensitive student data that other offices do not?
- What are your reporting needs?
SSUs are determined during configuration with your deployment team, and users are added to SSUs automatically based on a data feed.