"Successful college student retention strategies need to address this complex mix of procedures and regulations and look to minimize the burden on the customer, the individual student."

Mark Shay
Chief Academic Liasion
EducationDynamics

National ACademic ADvising Association is a great resource for more information about how advising can improve student retention.

The National Survey of Student Engagement is an annual survey whose results will provide an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college. Survey items on NSSE represent empirically confirmed good practices in undergraduate education.

Student Retention . org is a non-profit center for the study of student persistence in postsecondary education and offers an effective practice database along with workshops

The Policy Center on the First Year of College invites postsecondary institutions in a model for voluntary, comprehensive self-study and development and implementation of an intentional action plan designed to enhance the effectiveness of the first year.

What is Student Retention?

College Student Retention Articles Archive

• Sophmore Slump or Jump
• Successful College Student Retention
• Improving Undergraduate Retention
• It's The Faculty
• COMPLETE ARTICLE LIST

Retention is in the numbers

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As the National Dialog on Student Retention (NSDR) conference swiftly approaches, EducationDynamics has been holding a number of meetings in an effort to tie the agenda to our speakers’ expertise and our nationwide survey, the first step in the dialog process. The following are early observations stemming from those brainstorming sessions:

As the old saying goes, “There are statistics, damned statistics, and lies.” Nothing supports this adage than retention numbers. Most experts in the field reference data from IPEDS, the core postsecondary education data collection program for the National Center on Educational Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education (http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/), the numbers yielded from this source have proven not entirely representative. Because IPEDS only tracks incoming students with ZERO college credit hours, Students that transfer in or shift from part-time to full-time students are not counted in IPEDS. For example, a few years ago, it was noted that at University of Texas at El Paso, 70% of those earning their bachelor’s degree were not tracked in IPEDS. Our guess is that many other schools would report the similar results.

Expected outcomes are another statistical problem with retention analysis. When discussing indicators of low persistence, academic achievement, low entrance examination scores for example, is cited as a major concern and prime signifier of students at risk. While this is true to an extent, high scorers are equally as likely to leave an institution as their lower scoring counterparts. Do they become bored, or did they plan to leave? These are important questions that higher education has failed to consider in regards to retention. Research suggests that many high achieving students stop out for a variety of family, maturity and financial reasons, and they will start their higher education experience close to home and plan to transfer after their first or second year. This finding leads us to wonder if, upon application, students should define their objective? If a student believes success is a 4.0 after 2 years followed by a transfer but the school sees the transfer as a problem, whose problem is it? Should we be measuring the student’s objective rather than making the assumption that the student plans to attend through degree completion?

It is a widely accepted belief that family obligations represent a great burden to the first generation college student. Often unintentionally, families, especially immigrant families, put undue pressure on their new collegiate to succeed in higher education whilst staying integrated with the family. One of our panelists, herself a first generation student, talked about her family’s insistence that she return home from college each weekend for church. By calling the student home for Sunday morning, a time during which the campus community does a lot of bonding, she found herself becoming increasingly isolated and less ingrained in the collegiate culture, an unintended alienation for the student and a naive barrier from the family. In this process, the retention folks would be well advised to not only counsel the student on college life, but counsel the families and the community structure around the student about setting them free to succeed.

And then there is the legacy student who really doesn’t belong but whose parents, themselves perhaps children of graduates of the same college, push the student into attending that school. This is a natural extension of their parents’ education even though that student may not be ready, willing or able for the intensities of college rigor. Highly selective colleges so encourage legacy admissions that some set aside a number of slots to bring these students onto campus, a practice which at times provides a bias in the admissions process that can negatively affect retention rates.

As we look to learn more about why students stop out or move between schools, we should consider why they began and their individual desired outcome. By focusing the retention discussion on the goals of the schools, we are missing the point—serving the student. Unlike other consumer-driven industries, our higher education system all too often caters to the schools as opposed to the actual consumers, a group comprised of students.

In no area is this school-focused philosophy more evident than in our industry’s statistical data. By not tracking and reporting on true student mobility, the science of studying retention is weak. Today, we rely on anecdotal evidence, random sampling and common sense as the primary measures of gathering industry performance data. This hard data—while largely ignored—does exist. Every student submits an application to a school whose admissions offices compile incoming student data – mostly unpublished. Almost all students complete a FAFSA form hoping for financial aid, collected by schools financial aid offices. Those that receive federal assistance are tracked in a student database managed by a vendor for the Department of Education, but reporting from this data is viewed as a violation of student privacy.

A number of years ago, “time to degree” was an important indicator of a university’s success. Therefore, creating a culture wherein the majority of students did not graduate in the prescribed time was problematic. “Time to degree” became a statistic that schools focused on and within a reasonable period of time, this problem has been reversed.

Today, in light of dismal student retention rates, there is a call to action to identify contributors to student attrition and to improve retention. Too many students are attending classes from too many different institutions in order to get a degree. Some reports have a growing number of students enrolled at more than one institution simultaneously (see column on “swirling”), demonstrating that students are clever, ambitious and creative in working toward a degree. Higher education needs to get to the bottom of this phenomenon and find out why they are feeling the need to attend so many different schools. This information will likely help us improve our offerings and management so the students efforts can be better be spent on academics.

Related Articles include:
Retaining Students: Sophomore Slump or Jump?
Retention: It's the Faculty, Stupid
Understanding Gatekeeper Courses
Innovative Ways to Improve Undergraduate Retention
The Fundamentals of College Student Retention

Additional sections of this journal address student recruiting and Innovative Practices in Communicating with Students. 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 Student Retention portal.

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College Student Retention

Mark Shay is the founder of EDU - a leading academic directory advertising provider, - part of Education Dynamics, a leader in student lead generation and enrollment management services.