"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
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Retaining Students

Wanted: Chief Retention Officers

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To make retention programs successful, colleges need a central authority with broad reaching power.

There is currently an increasing focus on student retention across the higher education field, with both traditional students and non-traditional students. Today, our system of higher education is under great scrutiny and the success of our students, especially in achieving a degree, has become an issue of heightened importance. Within the accountability movement, student affairs professionals are looking at persistence and time to degree measures as indicators of institution quality, while university business managers look at student retention as a major revenue issue.

In theory, retention is a simple issue - make the student happy and they will stay. In reality, the issue becomes much more complex as students are expected to work and produce academic results, which is not always synonymous with happiness. Some natural attrition is expected - as the rigors of academia are believed to be beyond the capabilities of a certain percentage of students, there are various natural barriers intended to filter out those who do not have what it takes to succeed. In the past, we have come to accept attrition as part of college life, noting that ample resources are available for those students who "choose" to succeed. In the same vein, those students that choose not to take advantage of resources to support success have previously been accepted as natural erosion.

This approach to retention has to change if our system of higher education is to take significant steps forward. Simply offering counseling centers, faculty with office hours, and a calendar of academic events is not achieving institution retention objectives. Like it or not, today's generation of students have been guided through life more so than any other generation. They are close to their parents, are therefore are not as independent as previous generations. Millennial students are very social and are consumers at a young age, expecting to be treated as customers and have higher expectations of all types of service providers. In the higher education sector, students expect to be treated as the customer with schools serving their needs.

This last statement is not always a philosophy shared by our esteemed institutions of higher learning. Quite often, these organizations are controlled by the faculty, and a group that does not necessarily share the same point of view. Faculty members are often engaged in their own academic pursuits like research, book and paper composition and in some cases, innovative scientific discovery. Success in the faculty world does not come from teaching; rather, success comes from noteworthy scholarly work. At some institutions, the faculty appears to be the group to which schools cater, not the students.

For today's student, this indifference to their success is often disturbing. When students arrive on campus with an "it's all about me" mindset, established practices that fail to endorse this sentiment creates agitation and extreme disillusionment. If left unchecked, this disillusion often grows and evolves into dissatisfaction, a frame of mind that, in many cases, leads to departure from the institution.

Efforts to deter campus departure are growing on campuses nationwide to match the increasing rates of student attrition. Recent research suggests that only 58 percent of students who enroll in a 4-year college or university will earn a bachelor's degree. Some 60 percent of those students who do earn a bachelor's degree earn it at a different school than the one at which they started pursuing the degree. Only one-third of traditional freshman will earn their bachelors from the same school in 4 years, and drop out and stop out rates are much highere with adult and online learners.

If these numbers seem acceptable, consider the fact that attrition rates are not the similar across the board in higher education. At law schools, attrition rates are less than seven percent and, more impressively, the dropout rates are less than three percent at medical schools.

Current retention efforts tend to be focused in the various areas of student life. Initiatives to combat attrition generally manifest in the form of counseling or coaching, programs that require troubled students must be identified or volunteer their status. Such efforts, while noble, seem unable to gain ground against the tide of increasingly self-centered students and over-involved parents. The problem of student engagement needs a stronger, more comprehensive effort. Engagement and retention initiatives must be central to the operation of the institution as a whole, and needs a powerful champion to drive the efforts against student attrition – a chief retention officer, if you will.

In building a database of prospective attendees for our National Dialog on Student Retention, I recently assembled a directory of higher education officials called the ‘Higher Education Directory.’ Out of nearly 85,000 senior officials in American higher education, only 39 had the word "Retention" in their titles, and most were only at Director-level. Using the advanced search option of Google, the phrase "Chief Retention Officer" shows up only 37 times in all of the .edu domains combined, as opposed to appearing 7,850 on all web pages.

The term "ombudsman," a term referring to an official charged with representing the interests of the student population, appears on 58,100 .edu pages as compared to over 10 million of all web pages, but even if ombudsmen's were prevalent on campus, students are not finding them to be effective personal advocate.

In the service industry, unsatisfied and unhappy customers leave and don't come back. Since students increasingly consider higher education to be a type of service industry, considering themselves customers, we might need look at "customer satisfaction" as the major theme of student retention. Maybe this approach will disintegrate the complexities of retention issues, making them simpler to address. Following this logic, students will stay enrolled in colleges where they feel wanted.

To cultivate this feeling in students, higher education institutions will not only need to put learning and support resources in place, but will also need to make them approachable for students. To be successful in keeping students engaged and retained, schools should consider creative ways of bringing students closer to libraries, research facilities, academic activities and faculty. Simple things like "greeters" and "service desks" may help make universities more approachable, and who better to lead such a charge than a Chief Retention Officer.

Nothing shows commitment to a cause more than assigning someone with the title of ‘Chief’ to oversee the task. Appointing such officers truly marks an institutional priority. Universities have built initiatives around such titles as Chief International Officer and Chief Diversity Officer, so given the increasing importance of retention, we should now add Chief Retention Officer to the list of higher education officials at institutions across the country.

Related Articles include:
Innovative Ways to Improve Undergraduate 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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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.