"Mentor programs are perhaps the most powerful form of retention available today."

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

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• Successful College Student Retention
• Improving Undergraduate Retention
• It's The Faculty
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Retaining Students

It's the Faculty, Stupid

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In the great race to declare success in recruiting and retention, we recall the once-famous political campaign advice used during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign - "It's the economy, stupid.” Modifying this statement for the campaign for students, we propose - "It's the faculty, stupid." While a number of factors can draw a student to a school, nothing retains a student like a tight bond with faculty. In this week’s People with Impact interview, Bonnie Holaday describes the power of mentoring and the profound impact it makes on students.

Mentor programs are perhaps the most powerful form of retention available today. At all levels of higher education, students need help getting or staying engaged. Gone are the days that schools can survive with the attitude that "students are adults and they need to be fully responsible for their actions." Waiting until a student is in trouble and at high risk of attrition before intervening simply is not working. Successful universities have implemented aggressive retention programs that push the student to engage. To some, such programs may seem invasive, but it they are packaged as mentoring, then the intervention becomes a positive, rather than a potentially negative, experience.

At the recent Council of Graduate Schools conference, examples of successful mentor programs emerged as a hot topic. Why? Almost half of today's doctoral students are lost to attrition. Those who persist often take such a long time to finish that they find their passion for their field diminished. It is often a lonely pursuit, far too dependent on self-motivation and often so rigorous that the individual's personal development is affected. Grad students are often treated like apprentices in an environment not so unlike the medieval days, wherein faculty-masters drove student-apprentices to do the most menial work and become research drones.

Rather than push these future leaders to the brink of desperation, new thinking has the role of mentor involved with graduate education. In a new book from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470197439.html, faculty is urged to take more of an approachable mentor role than that of a rigid hierarchy around a single graduate advisor. The book endorses building structured programming around mentoring and allow students to have several intellectual mentors in a formal, rather than informal, structure. The hope is to achieve agreement in viewing successful mentoring as "less an accident of interpersonal chemistry and as more a set of techniques that can be learned, assessed, and rewarded." Successful connections help students cope with aspects of their work outside of their immediate focus and how those aspects may impact their lives. Putting their pursuit into manageable context can keep student enrolled in their programs, engaged in their studies, and cultivate stewards of their respective disciplines. Broader scholarship and career management issues are often supported through mentoring.

Expanding the notion of successful mentoring occurring through a systematic approach rather than "an accident of interpersonal chemistry," we look to some broader schemes that may not depend on solely on faculty, but utilize other campus resources, some of which are enhanced by new media.

At a recent GoalQuest Symposium on Student Retention, such a technology solution was discussed as part of the company's FYRe program. FYRe is a commercial retention program built around computer interaction designed to help younger students build their confidence, access resources and improve their skills. These features are built into the system and are presented to parents and students much in the way a face-to-face mentorship would be presented.

According to their literature, Virtual Mentors™ are professionally produced video segments that relate first-hand perspectives on a number of subjects, including substance abuse, sexual assault, making friends/social awkwardness, stress and anxiety and roommate relationships. To engage an increasingly diverse college audience, Virtual Mentors™ video segments appear in a variety of formats, including first person, conversational narrative as well as scripted scenes, and range from serious to more humorous takes on the college experience. FYRe v 2.0 users will have the ability choose from dozens of Virtual Mentor™ video segments and associate them with larger articles.

Whether face-to-face or online, developing closer personal ties with students is a growing trend on campus. Perhaps, this tendency mirrors the desire of today’s millennial students to stay close to their parents. Mentoring, in any form, is a best practice that will positively impact a school's retention and improve student engagement.

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.