Shonda Goward
Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Advising and Success
Phone: 408-924-2499
Email: shonda.goward@sjsu.edu
Biography
Dr. Shonda Goward is the inaugural Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Advising and Success, overseeing 10 student success centers dedicated to closing equity gaps and increasing graduation rates. Since joining in Fall 2021, she has built upon the foundational work of each college in developing these centers, and collaborated closely with leadership in Undergraduate Education to enhance academic advising and advance broader student success initiatives. Her role has recently been elevated under the provost to provide increased focus on various facets of student success beyond advising alone including serving as the campus lead for the AASCU Student Success Equity Intensive.
Beyond her responsibilities at San José State, Dr. Goward is the Network Director and Advisory Board Chair for the CSU Student Success Network (Network), which is housed at Education Insights at Sacramento State University. In this role she leads the strategy and vision for the Network to support staff, faculty and administrators across the California State University System in implementing equitable student success systems and practices.
Dr. Goward's professional focus and research center on strategies for retaining historically excluded students and fostering their academic achievement and well-being. She holds a B.A. with dual majors in journalism and mass communication, and political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.A. in English with a concentration in African American Literature from Southern Connecticut State University, and an Ed.D. in higher education administration from The George Washington University.
A California native, Dr. Goward's family migrated to the Bay Area during the Great Migration of the 1940s. She is a first-generation college graduate from a working-class background, and is proud to represent that perspective as a part of the academic leadership team.
