Solving the First-Year Student Puzzle
Improving student success, and thereby increasing retention and boosting four-year graduation rates, is a challenge familiar to all higher education institutions whether they are large or small, public or private. With the national four-year college graduation rate average hovering around 50 percent, the industry has an obligation to confront the issue and take steps toward solving it.
Why Colleges Shouldn’t Focus on Failure
When it comes to boosting retention and completion, many colleges engage in predictive analysis to determine which students are “at risk” of failure—then focus most support resources on trying to turn these students’ fortunes around.
Can Blended Learning Boost Retention?
What if blended learning could do more than utilize in-class time more efficiently and increase student interest in a course? What if it could actually boost retention?
Retention is a critical concern for schools such as Long Island University (LIU) Brooklyn that work with populations that include at-risk and underprepared students.
Melissa Antinori Berninger is the assistant writing program director and Thomas Peele is an associate professor of English at LIU. In an analysis of assessment data collected over the past six years, Berninger and Peele found that:
Combating Student Debt with Financial Education
While budgets are always getting tighter, educators must remember one significant cause of belt tightening is student dropout. In a recent survey, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation discovered that money management problems are the No. 1 reason for college dropout. If schools can stem the money-motivated exodus, there will be more money for financial literacy programs.
Internal Perspective on Data Analysis
Positive recruitment efforts lead to tighter retention numbers, and both spheres operate as a couple in a complementary relationship. The institution cannot graduate students without having students. Likewise, schools cannot recruit students without having retained students.
The Flywheel of Retention
After sagging for several years, our four- and six-year graduation rates ticked upward in 2015. Our fall-to-spring retention rate was up roughly two points, and our preliminary fall-to-fall rate followed suit. The number of students on probation dropped by about one-quarter. All these improvements are having an impact on our overall enrollment and on the number of credits generated.
The Power of Predictive Analytics for Student Retention
What if you could use data you already collect to identify which entering students are most at risk of leaving your institution, allowing you to target the most appropriate services to populations that need them? This is exactly what Eastern Connecticut State University is doing.
Rhona Free, Eastern’s vice president of academic affairs, explains that the university’s retention program allows it to “use data that most people already have” to determine why students are leaving campus, and perhaps higher education altogether, and take preventive steps.
