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Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short

  In this issue: Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students This year is seeing increased public and federal pressure on colleges and universities to improve completion rates, raising pressing questions of both policy (Will pressure on completion coinciding with cuts in state funding force public institutions to increase their selectivity and decrease access?) and practice (What efforts will move the needle on degree attainment? Who should lead them? How should they be funded?). Yet despite the increased attention to the issue, relatively few institutions have adopted a campus-wide and adequately resourced initiative to improve student success and student persistence. Two factors appear to be holding institutions back from seeing significant gains in retention: Under-investment in retention efforts, often due to uncertainty over the scope of the initiatives needed and over how best to allocate funds to them; and Driven in part by that uncertainty, a reliance on one-off programs (often housed within one department and isolated from other offices) What’s needed now is a […]

Tackling the Retention Challenge: Defining and Delivering a Unique Student Experience

by Amit Mrig

In this report: April 2011. Large organizations in any industry often suffer from a misalignment of people, policies, and practice. Colleges and universities are no different. And the issue of student retention is a prime example of when good intentions, money, and technology aren’t enough to overcome policies, structures, and incentives that work at odds with one another. Amid the increased public pressure on completion rates, many colleges are pursuing one-off programs whose impact is sometimes difficult to measure. Less focus has been paid to the need for a broader conversation of organizational alignment as a means of tackling the root causes which contribute to student attrition, increased costs, and external demands for accountability. The first step in promoting student success is to define the specific educational experience and value an institution offers to students — and then align recruitment strategy, organizational structures, student support initiatives, academic policies, and incentives to support that experience and ensure that the institution delivers on its promise. That’s why we’ve convened a cadre of experts in higher education policy, research, and practice to present an integrated, strategic view of the challenges and opportunities for addressing student success. We hope their insights and advice will be […]

Student Success: A Team Effort

Our Member Exclusive report Tackling the Retention Challenge: Defining and Delivering a Unique Student Experience emphasizes the importance of achieving a broad alignment of academic and student support services, rather than trusting to isolated, one-off retention initiatives. Yet there are often organizational and cultural barriers that keep efforts within student affairs and academic affairs separated and siloed. This week, we asked James Cook, co-editor (with Christopher Lewis) of the book Student and Academic Affairs Collaboration: The Divine Comity (NASPA, 2007) and past vice president of student services at Laramie County Community College, to identify some of the most difficult and pervasive barriers to effective partnerships across these divisions. Cook also suggests some tips for breaking down those barriers. What Gets in the Way Cook notes five barriers that represent the most significant — and difficult to address — obstacles to effective coordination of academic and student support services: Organizational structure — these functions typically report to separate vice presidents Residual antipathy between some student services professionals and some faculty (there are still faculty who view student services professionals as “the party people” who hold pizza events for students; there are still some student services professionals who stereotype faculty, seeing them as too […]

Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students

  In this issue: Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students Even with a clearly defined student experience; close alignment of people, practice, and policy; and a concentrated effort to remove barriers to a student’s momentum in pursuing educational goals, some students will remain unlikely to persist. With a well-coordinated early warning system, an institution can intervene and provide or refer the necessary support to ensure more students stay enrolled and ultimately graduate. Identifying At-Risk Students: What Data Are You Looking At? The earlier an academically at-risk student is identified, the better the prognosis for their success in college. Early alert systems, implemented within the first four to eight weeks of a term, can be instrumental in beginning an intervention that can help facilitate students’ success and increase retention. However, faced with frequent studies offering multitudinous data on factors influencing student attrition, it can be challenging to sort through the information available to determine what indicators deserve most attention, both to proactively identify students who may […]

Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs

  In this issue: Where Current Retention Efforts Fall Short Starting with Fit: Defining and Delivering the Unique Student Experience Designing the Student Experience: Building Bridges across Student and Academic Affairs Delivering on the Promise: Removing Barriers to Student Success Identifying and Intervening with At-Risk Students If your institution opts not to “be all things to all people,” but to offer a specific, defined student experience that it is uniquely positioned to design and deliver (a single experience for a private liberal arts college; a cluster of linked, cohort-based experiences for a regional public university), the next step is to consider how you will align the various academic, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities your campus has to offer in support of that experience — and how you will align academic and student support services to ensure student success. Kim O’Halloran, associate dean for the college of education and human services at Montclair State University, offers a few scenarios to illustrate. SCENARIO A Institution A provides a unique residential experience marked by a seamless learning experience in and out of the classroom. The experience this institution has designed might include residential colleges, living-learning communities, classrooms located in the residence halls, student leaders and club […]

The President’s Role in Crisis Recovery

The media this week featured the work of Brandeis University’s new president, Frederick Lawrence, who is tasked with guiding Brandeis through its recovery from both a financial crisis and a reputation crisis. In his three-month tenure at the institution, Lawrence has spent one-third of his time on the road, visiting with donors, alumni, and other stakeholders, and considering new plans for the much-disputed Rose Museum. What the case of Brandeis illustrates is the critical role that an institution’s president has to play during the recovery phase of a crisis. As the public face of the university, the president will be looked to for leadership, transparency, and for clear answers about the details of the situation and the institution’s future. To gain a better understanding of the steps a president needs to take during this sensitive period, we turned to Cindy Lawson, assistant to the chancellor for marketing and communications at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Inadequate Responses First, certain responses, Lawson warns, are entirely inadequate. These include: Deciding not to talk about the crisis — especially with the media — in hopes that the situation will “go away” Failing to take responsibility for the crisis In the first case, Lawson notes that […]

Marketing Your Academic Programs

Amid increased calls for public accountability, public debates that measure the academic quality of an institution according to specific outcomes (such as completion rates), and increased competition for students between peer institutions, there is a need for rethinking the way you market your institution’s academic strengths — and specific academic programs. Increasingly, prospective students and parents want to hear evidence that your institution will help further their educational, career, and life goals, and want to know how the academic experience your institution offers will help them achieve success differently than the academic experience offered at other institutions. This week we asked Bob Sevier, senior vice president of strategy at STAMATS, to discuss with us his approach to promoting the academic strengths of an institution. What Doesn’t Work First, Sevier warns that many institutions still discuss their academic quality in terms that members of the institution may assign value to, but that prospective students and parents do not. It’s important not to rely on historic indicators of quality, such as the size of your library collections or the endowment dollars per student. “In order to measure quality meaningfully from the prospective student’s perspective,” Sevier suggests, “you need to look at the outcomes […]

Planning and Budgeting in a Low-Trust Environment

At a 2011 Academic Impressions conference on “Integrated Strategic Planning and Resource Allocation” (San Antonio, January 2011), 50 presidents, provosts, chief finance officers, and other members of senior leadership teams from an array of  public and private institutions were asked about the key issues and barriers they saw to making a planning and budgeting process effective — and ensuring its implementation. Thirty-seven of the attendees (nearly 75 percent) cited low trust as one of their primary obstacles. Two of the presenters at the AI conference — Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies, LLC, and Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group — have offered to comment on the issue and offer practical steps for strategic planning in a low-trust environment. Commitment from the Top Goldstein and Sanaghan: First, the president and the cabinet must make a public commitment to creating and implementing an inclusive, participative, and transparent planning process. This applies just as much — and possibly more — to the resource allocation process. Plans are one thing, but trust becomes especially critical when money and other resources (positions, space, etc.) are at stake. Without taking steps to cultivate institutional trust, a president simply cannot lead. In a low-trust environment, every decision becomes a debate. […]

Getting Started in International Fundraising

With the balance of wealth shifting overseas — and with more colleges and universities increasing their international enrollment — international fundraising is likely to play an increasingly larger role in development at North American institutions. An editorial this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education noted some of the complexities of reaching out to overseas alumni. To learn how institutions can get started in such an effort, we interviewed Gretchen Dobson, senior associate director for alumni relations at Tufts University. Dobson, who participates in a significant overseas fundraising effort at Tufts, and who will have a book on international alumni relations appearing later this year, recommends several steps that make all the difference in launching an effective effort: Craft a story that will be compelling to your international alumni Get a “data dump” of past informal agreements and memorandums of understanding between your institution and individuals or entities in the target region Develop an advisory committee of international alumni representing the target region Seek strategic partnerships with internal and external allies INTERNATIONAL FUNDRAISING TAX AND LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS: UK, INDIA, AND HONG KONG Legal and tax hurdles can stop the most well-planned international effort before it has even started. Join us online on July 11, 18 […]

Increasing Adult Student Enrollment

With the current pressure on completion rates and the growing demand for higher education from a non-traditional “adult” demographic (a diverse, heterogenous demographic, comprising working mothers, career-aged adults seeking a career change or a safe harbor amid a troubled economy, military veterans, and adults of all ages returning to complete a degree), more colleges and universities across the US are devoting more attention to the recruitment and retention of adult students. Because enrollment policies and practices have long been tailored to traditional-aged students (especially at four-year institutions), efforts to recruit and enroll adults offer special challenges. We reached out to Mike Barzacchini, director of marketing services for Harper College, who has seen considerable success in this area, for advice on how institutions can increase their enrollment of adult students. Increasing Inquiries from Adults First, Barzacchini suggests a two-pronged approach to generating leads: Mine your historical data to identify past stop-outs and other cohorts that have shown interest in a degree at your institution Create an adult-friendly website Stop-outs are those who did not attain their degree — not for reasons of low academic performance, but because of the intervention of life circumstances. An audit of your records can tell you which past students stopped a few classes shy of a degree. […]

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