Once a student steps foot on your campus, your main goal is to for them to graduate with a degree in approximately four years and go on to join the work force. In order to keep them on track, universities have to ask themselves a myriad of questions in order to best serve their students. In a session presented by Brian Galloway, the Director of Student Retention at Villanova University and Daniel McDevitt, the Director of Student Success & First Year Experience at Saint Joseph’s University, attendees were offered solutions and best practices to a variety of potential challenges universities face when it comes to keeping students at their institution and helping them earn their degrees.
The first question they tackled involved recognizing what students should be counted when it comes to statistics. According McDevitt, it’s important to clean up the cohort before locking in the number that all of your retention and graduation statistics will be based on. This includes subtracting students who never came to campus in the fall, didn’t pick up their residence hall keys or didn’t attend classes in the first week or two. It’s also important to ensure all offices involved with these statistics are in agreement as to when the cohort number is locked in.
When it comes to better serving students and keeping them on campus, it’s important to know why students don’t return. A major place to look for information is students who choose to leave. Some higher education institutions don’t have a process in place for students who are leaving, which McDevitt argued is a missed opportunity.
“It’s a big decision for a student to come to your university, but it’s also a big decision for them to leave,” he said.
Additionally, he believes the exit interview or survey is important because students tend to be more honest when they don’t fear repercussions for their statements, so the data is likely to be informative. When a student chooses to withdraw from Saint Joseph’s, McDevitt invites them into his office and offers them a game board with 12 options and hands them ten poker chips. He then asks them to place the chips in the categories that are associated with their decision to leave and explain why they chose them. This allows the university to track why students are leaving as well as how things are fluctuating from year to year. Through this process, he has found that the top three reasons students leave are financial, social and campus location.
“The data doesn’t lie,” McDevitt said. “When we’re talking about changes that can happen at the university, we have data to share.”
At Villanova, Galloway receives a weekly email with students who have requested transcripts for transfer. Through this data, he’s found that the more transcripts a student requests, the less likely they are to remain at the university.
“Students who are requesting five or more transcripts are not happy,” he said.
He then conducted a survey of approximately 150 students who requested transcripts for transfer but stayed. The first answer was that they didn’t get into the other school they applied to, but their second answer was that when they came back they found what they were supposed to be doing and felt happier on campus.
Data at Villanova also showed that the students who enrolled in the spring semester of their second year had a 99 percent graduation rate. Galloway realized if the university took the approach that this problem isn’t an eight-semester marathon, but rather a four-semester sprint, it became more manageable and easier to help students get to that point.
“We know if we get them to their fourth semester, there’s a 99 percent chance they’ll complete their degree,” he said.
When it comes to retention, it’s more than numbers and statistics.
“The end goal is to help students remain, persist and make it to graduation,” McDevitt said.
Here are the key retention questions you should be asking:
1) Who are your students? Track student engagement at designated points throughout the summer, and follow up with less engaged students. Identify no-shows at the beginning of the semester by connecting with residence life and faculty, and determine your cohort.
2) What does 1 percent look like at your institution? Know how many students translate to a 1 percent increase in retention and work to improve that number.
3) When do your students leave? Earlier leavers and later leavers are two distinct groups and require different strategies for engagement.
4) Have you done a self-assessment? Work with all offices that provide support for students to identify what could be done better.
5) What support options are in place to assist struggling students? Consult with a wide net of people who interact with students in different ways to identify, monitor and provide outreach to students facing obstacles. Consider establishing an Invisible Safety Net (ISN), a Behavior Intervention Team (BIT), and a Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT).
6) What are you doing to work with students who are not making academic satisfactory academic progress (SAP)? Improve communication to students who are not making SAP, and then target those students through personalized communication plans including follow-ups and multiple modes of outreach.
7) How do you connect with students who demonstrate no at-risk behavior? One way is to look at how many students are submitting transcript requests and meet with these students confidentially to make sure they have all of the information they need to make decisions about staying or leaving.
8) Do you have an effective exit interview process? Keep your process centralized, with one office handling all student withdraws.
9) How do your retention and graduate rates different across departments or colleges? Collaborate to help to identify specific areas of need. This provides for natural experiments.
10) Is anyone checking in with the students who should have graduated? Connect with those students who are enrolled past the four-year window in the 9th semester and beyond. This helps students reconnect with the university and make a plan to graduate before the six-year mark.