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Journal of College Student Retention and Recruiting for both On-Campus and Online Universities
Dr. George Walker
Insight into the modern college student
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PEOPLE WITH IMPACT INTERVIEW - Dr. George Walker, Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, Florida International University
As a panelist at the upcoming National Dialog on Student Retention, Dr. George Walker is considered a national thought leader with extensive expertise in the areas of student engagement and retention. In the following interview, Dr. Walker provides insight into the modern college student—who they are and what they want—and discusses the techniques universities can utilize to retain them.
Q: How are undergraduates spending their time, and what are they gaining from attending college? How can that information be leveraged to improve engagement and retention?
Dr. George Walker:
One of the things I find different is the amount of time spent online and the reliance upon the Internet. Another interesting trend reflects the fact that a great many students are now older, are often working professionals and are raising families while completing their education. When we talk about how students are spending their time, there is an incredible diversity in the response depending on whether they are 18 or 19 years old, or whether they are 27, 30 or 45 years old. The important thing is to recognize is that this incredible diversity has encouraged us to begin to think about how we can tailor undergraduate education and issues with regard to retention to the specific audience. Except for the widespread and consistent reliance upon the Internet, we have to recognize that the issues at play in a community college are much different than what is going on at a traditional university in many ways.
As far as what students are currently gaining from attending college, we hope that they are gaining certain habits of mind and knowledge. While the students may not view it this way, a lot of them are going to school because of upward mobility and earnings potential. Many people are very practical about going to college to get a degree so that they can earn more and have advancement, especially some of the older students who are returning to pursue education. issue of concern, in my opinion, is the amount of sleep that students are getting in light of the fact they are carrying additional responsibilities. We have always known that college is not a time when you typically get eight hours of sleep every night, because of personal habits, the stresses of higher education and other things. But now, since many students pursuing undergraduate education have families and are often working as well as going to college, sleep—or the lack thereof—makes a big difference. Several studies show that a lack of sleep significantly detracts from the ability to learn in the classroom, especially in the late teens or early 20’s.
How can this information be leveraged to improve engagement and retention? Now more than ever before, we need to know where our students are coming from. We need to really understand what their ambitions are, what their goals are, what other activities they are engaging in. Unfortunately, as universities, we don’t tend to know these things. We must search out the answers if we are to begin to decide what kind of intellectual community, reinforcement or other undertakings we need to complete in order to make retention rates higher. This information is absolutely essential, and can be potentially gleaned from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) or some of the works recently published, as an example, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching with regard to graduate education, engagement and immersion in a supportive, intellectual, or learning community. Communicating directly with the student body is another route, but given the different types of boundary conditions on various students—most notably the distance constraint—it is often not easy to communicate with students on campus. Commuter students are not around for after school activities, and they are not going to be around for some of the engagement seminars that you might want to arrange for undergraduate students. Unless we conduct special outreach, the non-traditional student might not feel that they can truly engage at the institution, a lack of connection that could deter students from continuing on to graduate and doctoral studies. This sentiment rings especially true for me—as the first person in my family to go beyond the eighth grade, one of the major reasons that I decided to continue on with my education was my rewarding and engaging undergraduate experience at Wesleyan University. The connection to that small liberal arts college in Connecticut was pivotal in my continuing progress as a scholar.
Q: In your opinion, what are the key best practices in retaining students?
Dr. George Walker:
First and foremost, transparency is key. Students need to know why they are being asked to take certain courses, what is going to be expected of them and what level of skill is required in the courses. They need to understand what kinds of job opportunities are available in their discipline and what if any further education will be needed. Students need advising of all kinds. While academic advising is terribly important, there are other kinds of peer-related advising that is crucial in the student truly absorbing and making their own knowledge of why they are doing what they are doing and how they can measure their progress.
Students are going to fail from time to time—we all do. And when students leave college, often it is because they feel like they did not belong, that they were not part of the community, especially if there is a continuation of the social cliques that begin as early as middle school. These groups are not uncommon in college and serve as an anti-intellectual community or an anti-welcoming group. Everyone is vulnerable in a different way, whether based on appearance, skills or interests, ethnicity, gender or class. Universities have a responsibility to monitor the pulse of the diversity of students so that they can create the supportive social and intellectual communities that are absolutely crucial to retaining students. And, of course, you have to engage students. Engaging students often means utilizing a non-traditional approach to teaching, one in which students are not just sitting there, taking notes, and answering multiple choice questions on high stakes exams. Engagement can pertain to activities in student government, research, athletics, or any other variety of areas, but students must take an active role in something that connects them with the university. Again, facilitating engagement is made more complicated by the fact more and more students hail from highly at-risk backgrounds, are working, are parents or may be taking care of their parents.
Q: What role can research play in developing engagement and retention solutions?
Dr. George Walker:
This question can be interpreted in two different ways. First of all, what kind of background knowledge is needed in order to generate useful and pertinent engagement and retention solutions? And secondly, how can engaging in research as an undergraduate or graduate student be helpful in an engagement and retention solution? For the former, it is difficult to conduct research and present findings without a lot of qualifying words—‘this could be true’ or ‘there might be this.’ Universities can take advantage of studies and surveys that have been done, but there are a lot of other variables at work. So at the end of the day, many of our best efforts in researching are often not satisfying to others because they do not make definitive knowledge claims. People expect important, concrete and strong answers right away, but such findings are not the nature of this type of research. That said, more research is needed, along with more dissemination of that research. In looking at research from the second perspective—the idea of research itself as a way of engaging students—there is nothing more addictive than being the first person in the world to discover something. It may be a diddly little something, but if you believe you are the first person on the planet to know some little thing and you get to tell other people about, it gives you a feeling of worth. And it's a very powerful drug—for many people, all you have to do is discover something once and you're addicted to discovery for life. You will put up with all the things you have to do in order to get that feeling again. You will take classes, you will study hard and you will spend extra hours on projects, papers or reports. Research is important both as a vehicle and as a motivator for students to become engaged in some discovery activity in which they can legitimately feel that they have contributed to something important and sacred to human beings—learning about ourselves and our environment.
Q: You are a panelist at the upcoming National Dialog on Student Retention, presented by EducationDynamics. What can an attendee expect?
Dr. George Walker:
An attendee will likely hear me talk about retention and related issues with regard to PhD programs. Particularly, I plan to address the apprenticeship model, wherein there are multiple mentors immersed in a learning community. We will likely discuss the extremely important role that intellectual communities play in the retention of students. Another consideration we will address at the NDSR is the role of multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary activities as part of the retention process.
Dr. George Walker, Vice President for Research and Dean of the University Graduate School at Florida International University
Dr. George E. Walker became Vice President for Research and Dean of the University Graduate School at Florida International University in September 2006. From 2001 to 2006, he served as Senior Scholar and Director of Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Dr. Walker is a theoretical nuclear physicist who obtained his undergraduate education at Wesleyan University, his graduate education at Case Western University, and his post-doctoral education at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and at Stanford University. Most of his scholarly career was at Indiana University, where he was Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School for many years. He was twice honored by physics graduate students with the “Outstanding Contributions to Graduate Education” award, and by his peers through election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He led the establishment of a Nuclear Theory Center at Indiana University. He is also chair of the Physics and Advanced Technology Directorate Advisory Committee, and chair of the Nuclear Division Advisory Committee, both at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In addition, he is a member of the National Advisory Board of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). Among many other boards, Walker has served as president of the Association of Graduate Schools of the Association of American Universities, as Chair of the Board of the Council of Graduate Schools, and as member of the National Advisory Board of the National Survey of Student Engagement.
See an index of all the "People with Impact" Interviews
Additional sections of this journal address student recruiting and student retention. We have also placed all articles with a common theme of online education and distance education programs in a separate portal. New articles will be posted each Monday, please check back by bookmarking this site or placing a link to this Innovative Practices in Communicating with Students portal.
