Building student success through community at Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College

Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College (NHSC) has a big reason to celebrate this year: The Tribal College on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota recently announced record-setting retention and persistence rates for its students.

The college’s fall-to-fall retention reached 69.6% in 2025, 20 percentage points higher than it was in 2020 and almost double the rate in 2011 when retention tracking began. NHSC also earned the Leader College designation from Achieving the Dream in 2024 in recognition of meaningful progress in expanding access and improving early momentum outcomes.

These achievements are the result of campus-wide, transformative efforts to build resilient systems that support students and contribute to community vitality for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation.

Advising that centers students and community

NHSC joined the ATD Network in 2017 as part of Project Success, an initiative to implement evidence-based reforms at Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) across the country, which was administered by Ascendium Education Group on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education.

Early in the partnership, NHSC identified advising as an area of focus. It was an opportunity area for faculty, as many took on advising responsibilities on top of several other roles. Student input suggested there were opportunities to strengthen and streamline advising processes, but few faculty members had the capacity to lead these efforts.

To better support both students and faculty alike, the college implemented a split-level advising system. Under this model, all incoming students — including re-enrolls and transfer students — are assigned to Dena Dorval, chair of general studies and NHSC’s sole academic advisor, for their first semester. After the first semester, students “split” and are assigned to a faculty advisor who provides more specific guidance about their chosen course of study. By this time, not only do they have a strong academic start, but a web of holistic support is also firmly in place around them.

Dorval says having a single point of contact helps new students find their feet on campus. “Coming from a cultural standpoint, it really is important for our students to make a connection with someone and feel like they’re part of a community, that they can be comfortable with who they’re talking to,” she says.

Dorval believes that investing in these relationships with students has been beneficial not just to NHSC’s ability to support learners but also to the way students show up on campus. “Once they’ve made connections, then that relationship goes both ways,” she explains. “They know that we have expectations for them, and they really want to hold up their end of the bargain.”

Photo courtesy of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College

The “auntie approach”

The environment of trust and mutual accountability that NHSC has fostered through the split-model advising system is part of what Amber Finley, director of research and development and a member of the science faculty, refers to as relationality.

“A core piece of a lot of Tribal Colleges is that any time you enter a room, you’re trying to figure out, ‘Who am I related to?’” Finley explains. “So we started to look at advising through that ‘auntie approach.’”

Incoming students, in addition to working with Dorval as advisor, are also paired with a first-year coach, a Student Services staff member who helps students navigate the nonacademic parts of their campus experience. Students also have opportunities throughout the academic year to join campus-wide “family study nights,” events held during typically busy periods in the semester. During these events, the college offers daycare, provides food, and makes faculty available for tutoring while students tackle challenges in their coursework.

“We try to do as many things on campus as we can to help create that family community energy so the students have a sense of belonging,” says Finley.

The college also invested in a retention module that has digitized its early alert system and helped faculty and staff identify potential barriers to students’ success, allowing them to intervene and support learners’ momentum.

Because NHSC is such a small campus, many technology companies selling early alert solutions don’t offer packages that suit the college’s needs. College leaders opted to add a module to their existing learning management system after seeing United Tribes Technical College, another member of the Project Success cohort, take the same approach.

When all NHSC staff meet for weekly “Student Success Friday” meetings, they use data from the retention module to discuss how to support students who may need it. Thanks to strong data democratization and communication, any member of staff or faculty is equipped with granular knowledge about the student experience — from class attendance to financial aid — that can help them decide what course to take for a particular student.

“That system goes hand in hand with the community relationality on campus,” Finley says. “We want to make sure our students have access to all the things we can offer them.”

Photo courtesy of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College

A decade of collaboration

The progress made at NHSC is the result of more than a decade of steady, incremental work, much of which took place as part of Project Success. Dorval recalls how daunting their task seemed in 2017, when college leadership began laying out their hopes for the institution and their goals for the future.

Chances to connect with other TCUs — at events like the DREAM annual convening or through communities of practice — have helped college leadership work through institutional challenges as part of a community, with a network of support not unlike the one NHSC has established for its students.

“Communication with other Tribal Colleges has been super helpful because there is no point in reinventing the wheel,” says Dorval. “There’s no literature out there that tells you how to be a Tribal College leader, but it’s helpful to hear so many other experiences that are similar to ours.”

“We wouldn’t have known about the retention module had we not talked to United Tribes Technical College,” Finley adds. “We wouldn’t have known about how the split-model advising worked had we not seen another Tribal College doing it as well.”

Building data capacity has also been a major part of NHSC’s work with Project Success. Finley recalls how Jennifer Hill-Kelley, an ATD coach who worked closely with the college, persistently encouraged college leadership to use data to answer important questions. For example, when NHSC interrogated why enrollment for students aged 18–24 was low compared to similar institutions, the team looked to historical data for answers and found that the dip in enrollment coincided with the college ending its dual credit programming. That knowledge informed the team’s next steps for strategic enrollment management.

Throughout NHSC’s partnership with ATD and its role in Project Success, Dorval and Finley say the most important contributor to the college’s tremendous success has simply been the environment of support and encouragement cultivated across multiple teams.

“We got matched with a really good coach,” Finley says of ATD coach Jennifer Hill-Kelley. “She could understand all of our nuances, how our communities work. She really has been solid in the same way that we are for our students.”

“The support from these organizations has been immensely helpful,” Dorval says. “So often, we are being pulled in seven different directions, and it’s hard to keep going down the straight and narrow when you’re being pulled sideways. That faith in us and in what we’re capable of doing has kept us inspired to keep doing the work.”

Photo courtesy of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College