Decoding Student Retention: A Comprehensive Guide for Higher Education

Introduction

Student retention is a critical metric for colleges and universities, reflecting their success in keeping students enrolled and on track to graduation. It's more than just a number; it represents the experiences, challenges, and triumphs of individual students. Understanding and improving student retention requires a multifaceted approach that considers institutional practices, student support systems, and the evolving needs of today's learners.

Defining Student Retention

At its core, student retention is the ability of a college, university, or other higher education institution to keep students actively enrolled in their degree programs. It is often measured by return rates from one year to the next. While a seemingly straightforward concept, student retention is influenced by a complex interplay of factors, making it essential to delve deeper than simple statistics.

National Standards and Institutional Definitions

The federal government has established a standard national retention definition that all colleges must report annually. However, institutions can also use other definitions to better understand student success within their specific context. This raises the question: Can a college examine student retention prior to defining what retention is to the particular institution?

Accreditation and National Standards

A unified national definition of retention, determined by national accreditation commissions and reported by all institutions, could provide a more standardized and comparable measure of student success across the country.

The Interplay of Retention and Persistence

While often used interchangeably, student retention and student persistence represent distinct but related concepts. Student retention rate is a school-wide metric that looks at students as a cohort, while persistence is a granular, individual measurement of a student's activity and engagement. According to Collegis Education, persistence is defined as a measure of “the student’s activity and engagement.”

Persistence looks for exact actions or steps that students take along the path to staying enrolled in a college program. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center's annual Persistence and Retention report highlights a return to pre-pandemic levels of engagement and persistence among college students. Higher education leaders can gain valuable insights by examining student retention and persistence both separately and comparatively. When more students are actively engaged, the retention metric is a positive one.

Current Trends in College Student Retention

Enrollment and retention rates are constantly changing. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center tracks student retention rates nationally, particularly as they relate to specific student cohorts. The average retention rate is around 75%, a slight increase from previous terms, but still below pre-pandemic levels. This statistic highlights that a significant portion of students, about one in four, do not complete their degree at their first institution, leading to difficult decisions about transferring, course credits, and student loan debt.

The Significance of Student Retention

Universities value students as their "educational lifeblood" and want them to succeed, and they also have financial interests in retaining them. Losing students before graduation results in a loss of tuition dollars. Students also benefit financially by remaining enrolled.

Broader Implications

Negative student experiences can negatively impact a school's brand or reputation.

Factors Influencing Student Retention

Many factors influence students' college decisions and their commitment to their degree path. Key experiences shape their academic journey and influence their emotional and logical responses about whether to stay enrolled.

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Admission Practices

Student retention is rooted in admission practices. Some institutions refine their admission policies to promote better retention by examining which students have been successful in the past. However, it is critical not to create rigid admission policies that reduce access for low-income and first-generation students who demonstrate academic promise and the determination to be successful.

Individual Characteristics

Some individual characteristics may portend student success, such as academic preparation or being the first person in a family to attend college.

Campus Environment

Residential campuses with ample student housing typically see higher retention rates. Students who live on campus have more opportunities to engage with the student body and their coursework than those who have to commute.

External Factors

The Coronavirus pandemic forced student retention professionals to re-organize some of their priorities. Health and safety is likely to stay top of mind for students and families for some time.

Financial Considerations

The economy also has a noticeable effect on retention rates. The cost of public and private institutions in the 1999-2000 school year, which includes tuition and on campus housing, averaged $7,302 and $20,277, respectively. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, tuition at a 4-year college represented 12% of the total income for families that fell into the lowest income bracket in 1980, and rose drastically to encompass 25% of their income by 2000. This has created an influx of part-time students and working students.

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The Impact of Grades

Grades earned in a student's first semester are a strong predictor of student persistence. In a Budny longitudinal study of Purdue engineering students, it was shown that first semester GPA was a better predictor of retention than SAT scores.

Strategies to Improve Student Retention

Effective enrollment managers determine how to support students who need help succeeding. They also have to consider the impacts of students who drop out. Does it impact the university’s mission to support students of color or with special needs through graduation? How does it affect revenues?

Personalizing the Student Experience

Taking time to personalize the culture and experience for learners makes all the difference in improving retention rate over time.

Personalize Student Outreach

To combat feelings of disengagement and stress, schools should personalize as many experiences as possible. While this begins with initial marketing and outreach, personalization also extends throughout the admissions process, enrollment, and active class participation. Personalization has the effect of making students see the intrinsic value in their degree or education. It also confirms that the appropriate structures and resources are available to support students throughout campus life, when and if those resources are needed.

Create Recognizable Milestones

To help students succeed, provide visualization tools to enable their success. Connect students with positive and motivational resources, like advisors, mentors, or counselors. Creating a roadmap with achievable milestones is one way to support students and improve retention. In many instances, academic advisors communicate these milestones and monitor student progress along the way. The result offers reassurance and confidence. As students move through key benchmarks along the path to graduation, they build motivation in eventually finishing and attaining a degree. Frequent reminders about goals also make degree attainment seem more achievable than would be possible with a detached or disengaged academic culture.

Early Intervention

Spotting red flags early can provide clues to academic advising. Early intervention is one way to be proactive rather than reactive.

Identifying At-Risk Students

When students are at-risk, the following statements could be true:

Struggling students stop attending certain classes.
Performance slips and grades start to decline.
Students stop responding to regular outreach or communication.
Some students have external issues (health, family, etc.) that contribute to decisions.

If you have a student engagement platform or CRM tool, establish a way to look for warning signs and identify certain signals with data. Whether you need to update a student’s contact record after a conversation or look at their entire history holistically, make sure to have tools in place for handling retention red flags and identifying at risk students.

Leveraging Technology

A student engagement platform helps schools keep and monitor the pulse of the enrolled student body. Customizable experiences allow advisors and other school leaders the ability to learn more about each individual student, which further contributes to a positive campus culture and student lifecycle. Engagement tools also provide numerous benefits to students. Instead of getting generic messages that don’t really apply to where they are or what resources they need to succeed, they’ll instead receive targeted communications that offer solutions right on time. This makes all the difference between a student who feels alone in their decision versus one who is able to carefully consider enrollment options.

Addressing Specific Needs

Community colleges, which often require a lower upfront financial investment and time to degree completion, face unique retention challenges. To shape the student experience at community colleges, higher education administrators must focus on valuable support services that help students learn academically and grow personally. Because they hold a unique role in the higher education market, community colleges must stay proactive to prevent students from leaving prior to degree attainment. Community administrators can strategize to remove financial aid roadblocks, recognize the unique balance between school and personal responsibilities, and offer flexible learning pathways to help students earn degrees.

Intervention Strategies

First-Year Seminar & Learning Communities. Many institutions require an introductory college course for new students. Whether it is called a freshman seminar, first-year experience, or first-year seminar (FYS) course, the class generally focuses on transition information to help new students adapt to life within the campus community. Many offer study skills instruction, class visits to various offices on campus, and instruction in some academic discipline.

Developmental (Remedial) Education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2007), almost 100% of two-year public schools and three-quarters of four-year public schools offered remedial services during the 2006-7 academic year. Between 2003 and 2009, 68 percent of college students starting at a public two-year institution and 40 percent of those starting at a public four-year institution reported taking at least one remedial course (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016).

A Combined Approach. Pan, Guo, Alikonis, and Bai (2008) studied the retention effects of a combined intervention approach at an urban university in the Midwestern United States. The institution had received a grant to encourage the retention of at-risk undergraduate students as well as to encourage those students to graduate within a four-year time span. The college created several intervention programs to encourage student retention. Pan et al. (2008) collected data to note the retention rates and cumulative GPAs of student participants over the three-year study.

Communication and Support

Communication has renewed importance among retention officers. You need to keep students and families informed about efforts to ensure the safety of classrooms and student housing.

Retention as a Result of Engagement and Success

At Element451, the belief is that retention is the desired final result of critical preparation work that happens at the beginning of the student’s story. When schools effectively engage with students from the very first interaction, the stage is set for better outcomes down the line. Engagement naturally flows into student success. Once students experience the level of support that they need (in different contexts, including academic and social), motivation to succeed becomes second nature. Outside of extenuating circumstances, when students begin to succeed, they grow more determined about persistence. The strategies that keep them going become second nature, and persisting through graduation and degree attainment becomes the clear choice. In short-you can successfully retain more successful students, and engagement undoubtedly helps that goal become a reality.

The Role of Academic Advising

Academic advising plays a key role in retention, persistence and graduation (RPG) or retention, persistence and completion (RPC) by students. Retention can be considered an institutional measure of success in getting a student to return to school until completion and persistence can be considered a student measure of success in their chosen program of study.

Reframing Retention: Beyond Traditional Metrics

Retention is commonly defined as staying in school continuously until degree completion. For some institutions, retention rates measure the proportion of students who remain enrolled at the institution year over year. Higher education systems often focus less on what institution students are attending as long as they are enrolled at any college or university in the system. If a student transfers out of the system and attends a private institution, they are no longer counted. And, for many schools, part-time, non-degree seeking and transfer students are not counted at all. But is the retention of a student the best way to measure institutional performance? Retention, as evidenced by the student referenced above, is affected by myriad variables, many of which are outside the control of the student and the institution. With the cost of education increasing year over year, the working learner is the new model. In a world where students demand more flexibility in scheduling and part-time options, we are still using a retention model based on full-time resident learners.

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