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Everyone Complains about Low Student Retention, but Nobody Does Anything about It

By John Courtney and Christoph Knoess

“Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
-Mark Twain

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Every fall, thousands of students begin their college careers with a shower of tears and a heaping mound of high expectations from their parents. The scene has been mythologized in countless movies and televisions ads: parents driving away after drop-ping off their children at college, eyes misty at the thought that their babies have left the nest for good. What isn’t mentioned in any of these scenes, however, is the high likelihood that the nest will be full once again, sooner than anyone might have imagined.

The numbers tell the story: At the average higher education institution, almost half of any entering class (45%) drops out without a degree sometime between Freshman Orientation and Commencement. This massive failure hurts institutions financially just as it hurts the students that are left behind. Most institutions profess to be very concerned about student retention and graduation rates, yet research suggests that they fail to tackle this problem with a management effort commensurate with its size.

Twain’s fatalism seems to have been adopted by many administrators and executives at institutions of higher education around the country when it comes to the problem of low student retention and graduation rates: they don’t like it, but they feel unable to do anything about it.

Why are our higher education institutions letting this problem to persist and even grow? In their defense, research conducted by ACT, Inc. shows that 72% of public 4-year institutions redeveloped their academic advising program in support of student retention, 71% established special orientation programs, 66% established an early warning system and 62% experimented with curricular innovations. However, these efforts don’t seem to amount to more than “tinkering” with tangential aspects of the student experience and fail to address the retention problem head-on.

Significant gains in student retention are possible, and they do not require more spending. What they do require is management focus and a systemic approach, which might be the best course institutions can take to improve student retention as they navigate through the “perfect storm” of cost and price pressures, demand for improved learning outcomes and an increasingly diverse student population with exaggerated expectations for their student experience. Much of the data and technology needed are already in place on campus. To snap out of their current fatalism, institutions must marshal these data and technologies under one overarching effort geared towards identifying and proactively engaging students at risk.

Turning their retention efforts from their current loosely managed and fortuitous incarnations to purposeful programs will strengthen academically and financially the institutions that implement and fund them. When the members of the Spellings Commission titled their report “A Test of Leadership”, they were deliberately broad in their appeal to “leadership” at the policy, industry, institutional and individual level. Student Retention is a problem that calls for leadership at the executive management level of institutions. The rewards will be rich for management teams willing to answer this call.

For the full white paper version of this article please download this pdf.

EDUInsight.com is a new online interactive journal that brings academic administrators together to understand and debate the issues of the day, analyze and review the latest trends, exchange ideas, and evolve common sense approaches to student recruiting, retention and online education.

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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.

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