Student Success Summit 2026
From Predictors to Practice:
Designing Environments that Enable Student Thriving
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2025
Time: 9 a.m.–1 p.m.
Location: Trabant Multipurpose Rooms
Light breakfast available beginning at 8:30 a.m.
Student Life staff, faculty and academic partners gathered for the annual interactive Student Success Summit, which debuted this year with a focus on student thriving.
The event featured a keynote by Dr. Laurie Schreiner, a nationally recognized researcher on student well-being. Her work centers on a compelling question: What conditions must be present for students not just to persist, but to truly thrive?
Following the keynote, participants engaged in discussions about what student thriving looks like in a modern context at the University of Delaware. This summit helped lay the foundation for ongoing collaboration and longer-term initiatives designed to support all Blue Hens in thriving throughout their lives.
Registration for this summit has closed.
Please email melanier@udel.edu with any questions.
Agenda
8:30 a.m. | Breakfast
Light breakfast available
9–10:15 a.m. | Keynote Address
Introduction to Thriving, Dr. Laurie Schreiner.
10:30–10:50 a.m. | Getting Started
10:50–11:30 a.m. | Guided Discussion
What would we do differently at UD to support thriving for students, faculty and staff?
11:30 a.m.–noon | Debrief and Wrap-Up
Noon–1 p.m. | Lunch
About our Keynote Speaker
Laurie A. Schreiner earned her PhD in Community Psychology from The University of Tennessee. She is Professor Emerita at Azusa Pacific University in southern California, where she taught for 23 years in the PhD program in Higher Education.
An award-winning teacher and researcher, her work focuses on creating a thriving campus—places where students, faculty and staff are meaningfully engaged in their work, energized by learning, involved in healthy relationships and making a difference. Author of the Thriving Quotient, her research has studied over 250,000 students from 300+ universities across the U.S., Canada and Australia, and has led to numerous publications, as well as the edited book entitled Thriving in Transitions: A Research-Based Approach to Student Success.
In addition to her research on thriving college students, Dr. Schreiner has created instruments to assess thriving in faculty and staff and is co-author of The Student Satisfaction Inventory, as well as books on sophomore success. She has consulted with over 200 universities on issues of student success and thriving, strengths-based advising, effective teaching strategies and faculty and staff well-being.
Optional Pre-Summit Presentation
To provide additional context for how thriving emerged as our framework for this summit, an optional presentation, “Understanding Today’s Students,” was offered.
This engaging session examined the forces shaping today’s student experience—rising isolation and loneliness, declining belonging and purpose and the impact of smartphone and social media use on attention and connection. Together, these dynamics help explain why a thriving framework matters now.
Two sessions were offered:
- Monday, March 2, 11:30 a.m.–1 p.m.
- Monday, March 9, 9–11:30 a.m.