Tired of Moving Mountains? Getting Retention Results Really Is Easy by Randi Levitz and Lee Noel
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ou’re tired of trying to move mountains, tired of carrying the torch alone. Retention should be a priority on your campus. Everyone says it is. But like many other campus issues, there’s lip service paid, and no one’s making a move. That’s because retention is hard to define, hard to package, and so all-encompassing that it’s hard to know where to start and what to do. First, a definition: Retention is an institutional performance indicator. It’s a measure of how much student growth and learning takes place. It’s a measure of how valued and respected students feel on your campus. It’s a measure of how effectively your campus delivers what students expect, need and want. In other words, retention is a measure of your overall “product.” And that makes retention everyone’s business. It is so central to your work, and to the success of your institution, that it can’t be viewed as an issue of the moment, ready to be replaced with tomorrow’s hot topic. A number of years ago we coined the phrase “student-centeredness” to describe the concept as well as the spirit of campuses that were truly retention-focused. By putting students squarely at the center of your institution, everyone benefits — students, faculty, staff and administrators alike. Next, a word about the scope of retention: Virtually every program, person, and procedure on your campus has the potential to have an impact on students, and therefore on retention. But there are conflicting axioms: when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible; when no one is responsible, nothing gets done. And, the job is simply too big for one person to handle. Confused? There is a step-bystep path out of this conundrum. For maximum impact, retention improvement efforts can proceed on two planes. The first is an immediate individualized approach which can be quickly implemented. The second approach requires a longer-term effort, and leads to substantive long-
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lasting changes in the culture of your institution. The step-by-step path is outlined on the following pages.
I. The Immediate Individualized Approach Want to do something specific that will show results within a year? It’s amazing how people rally after a successful start! While a task force is organizing and broader retention issues are being discussed and researched (see below), you can take a concrete step that will jump-start your retention improvement effort. The successful implementation of an individualized student approach will deliver substantial results almost immediately. Why? Because it is based on the concept that attitude and motivation are better predictors of who stays and who leaves than are traditional cognitive measures. By building on this researchbased insight, you can identify specific dropout prevention plans for incoming students. And, importantly, you can leverage your time, staff and money by focusing first on those students who are most likely to be dropout-bound, who most need/want your help, and who will let you help them. This identification is made using the Retention Management System as the assessment tool. Once the assessment is completed, a “triage” approach can be folded into your retention practice. That means you will first take the initiative to work with the most dropout-prone students who are likely to respond to your intervention. As resources are available, you can then focus attention on subsequent levels of dropout prone students. You will be aided by the System’s accompanying intervention guide which prioritizes students’ needs. As hundreds of colleges and universities have discovered, your increased retention success will come from working with students who didn’t appear to be “at-risk” because their traditional cognitive performance (high school grades and test scores) were okay.
© 2000 USA Group Noel-Levitz, Inc. All rights reserved.
tion and student success. It is extraordinarily important that there are rewards and recognition in place for excellent teaching. A single “Teacher of the Year” award is too unattainable, and further sends a message that great teaching, especially in the freshman classroom, is nice but not necessary. Ultimately the tenure and promotion criteria established and adhered to are the determiners of whether intense energy is devoted to becoming a great teacher in the freshman classroom. Until that happens, consider establishing 10 or 50 great teaching awards (depending on the size of your campus). When accompanied by even modest monetary awards, this will begin to capture the attention of faculty members, causing some to change their classroom behavior.
Once you’re on your way to getting retention results with this approach, you can then proceed along a more traditional path of change.
II. The Longer-Term Approach A. Maximum improvement in your retention performance requires implementation of programs that lead to long-lasting campus culture changes. Hallmarks of the best retention programs: •
Are highly structured, and don’t leave student success to chance. In each case, the institution views itself as responsible for creating a success structure rather than merely retaining a reactive, “sink or swim” philosophy.
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Rely on extended, intensive contact with individual students—retention is a one-on-one activity. Results are predicated upon a relationship, a connection. Academic advising, the primary one-on-one activity between students and faculty or staff, is today on most campuses an artificial construct. In order to get any retention power out of advising, your advisors need to know more about the affective needs and motivation levels of the individual student and need more time to establish a relationship.
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Are interlocked with other programs and services—for example, academic advising should not be done in a vacuum but should be woven into the fabric of a required freshman success course. Are based on a strategy of engagement—students are brought into situations in which the risk of participation is reduced. That is, the faculty or staff member takes the initiative to reach out to bring the student into the fold, rather than a passive stance which offers students the opportunity to participate.
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Place special emphasis on staff quality. In addition to position qualifications, there is increased emphasis placed on the importance of a student-centered approach, in the classroom and everywhere else on campus as well. This message is communicated clearly at point of hire and is reinforced through follow-up development and training activities after employment.
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Recognize the critical role faculty play in reten-
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Focus on the affective as well as cognitive needs of students. Far too little attention is usually paid to how students are coping, whether they are getting connected to the new environment, whether they are feeling lost and confused. By directing our attention to the individual needs of students, we can set them on a course for success.
B. Improving retention means change, and, as we all know, change doesn’t come easily. Conducting “business as usual” won’t get better results...you’ve got to break a few rules. The rules that all too often seem written in stone on some campuses are: •
We’ve always done it this way!
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We don’t have the money.
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We don’t have the time.
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It won’t work here, we’re different.
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It’s not my job.
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We’re only human.
Listed here are some tips from the trenches to help you get beyond these progress stoppers and get started with the change process. 1. Broaden your power base by establishing a retention task force, even if your campus already has a retention coordinator. “Buy-in” and commitment to your cause are most readily gained when people have a chance to participate. It is essential to include influential opinion leaders from the faculty on your retention task force. In fact, because so much institutional power rests with the faculty, it is critical that membership of the retention task force be heavily
© 2000 USA Group Noel-Levitz, Inc. All rights reserved.
weighted toward the academic side of the campus. This must be done, however, while taking great care to reinforce the valuable role played by student affairs. If your retention task force has been in existence for some time, and results have not been forthcoming, establish a separate task force on student success, using the guidelines above and in 2. and 3. below. 2. Carefully select the person to head the retention task force. This person is central to your success. This person must be the “can see, can do” type of personality. Without vision and the courage to activate it, your task force will spend months, if not years, studying the issue without taking a single important step forward. And it is essential that the task force have the weight of the office of the president behind it. The retention task force puts forth the recommended “platform,” and the president backs it with necessary resources, clearing institutional obstacles that may arise. [It is important to note that on a large university campus, this effort might initially be more effective if undertaken within an individual school, for example the College of Arts and Sciences, rather than university wide.] 3. Make sure your task force spends a minimum amount of time studying the issue—there’s ample current research and the findings are highly transferable—despite the natural tendency to want to explore every last alternative. Rather, the majority of the task force’s time should be spent deciding on a plan of action that fits your campus. Before that can take place, you need to establish priorities for your retention improvement effort. The most effective way of determining those priorities is to assess what is most important to your students, and how satisfied they are with each of these areas. The Student Satisfaction Inventory is an ideal tool to identify performance gaps—areas to attack first. 4. Establish a greater readiness to accept change across the campus by promoting a widespread understanding of what retention is, and what it isn’t. Use data to debunk the myths (such as dropouts are flunkouts) and clearly identify the potential benefits for all parties if retention improves. Sponsor forums to discuss ideas for good retention practice, and the planks of the retention platform will be fleshed out. By doing this, you will minimize the extent to which people on campus feel compelled to protect their “turf” Page 3
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and the natural resistance to change will be somewhat reduced by helping people across campus understand the benefits of improved retention. [Again, this may need to be done within schools in a university.] 5. Don’t tinker around the edges, go for bigger gains. Small pilot programs, programs that are designed solely for academically high-risk students, and minor revisions in existing orientation or advising programs never get broad enough or impressive enough results to convince the skeptics (or even your supporters) that the program has high gain potential. Pilot programs don’t reduce retention but they are useful in perfecting a program’s design and delivery strategies. Once you have passed the initial test stage, it is tempting to launch increasingly larger pilot projects, but the efforts usually run out of steam before producing exciting results. It is far more effective to launch a new program, such as a student success course, with an entire incoming freshman class, and then conduct a retrospective comparison of retention rates with a previous entering class, controlling for academic ability/achievement as measured ACT or SAT scores. 6. Don’t forget to celebrate your successes! There’s nothing like a party atmosphere to reenergize people who feel burned out as a result of giving of themselves with little recognition from their peers or their leaders. Some of the most creative, low-cost rewards we’ve seen for members of the retention task force (who had sworn this was absolutely the last task force they would ever join) include: highly prized campus parking spots reserved for a month, tickets to popular “sold out” campus athletic events; certificates for dinner in a local restaurant and movie passes or tickets to a campus concert or play, as well as the ever-popular dinner at the president’s house, cooked by the president! These work equally well for stellar advisors, counselors, faculty members who make a tremendous difference in the lives of students. Increased retention results in substantial savings for even the smallest of institutions, and millions of dollars to the largest. But beyond the budgetary impact of improved retention, increases in student satisfaction are worth their weight in gold as current students talk with prospective students in their neighborhoods, workplaces and hometowns. Student success and institutional success are truly inseparable.
© 2000 USA Group Noel-Levitz, Inc. All rights reserved.
