Turn retention data into student success.

Mike Freel & Sharon Rea of Bellevue University

Academic institutions often measure bottom-line performance using student enrollment. However, the actual number of students who matriculate through to graduation have a significant impact on program and institutional success. In 2023, Bellevue University undertook an initiative to examine prior evidence-based research as the foundation for an internal investigation focused on a student-centered analysis that identified strategies for assessing current trends in student persistence and retention rates. The assessment took a pragmatic, applied perspective to identify university best-practices and analyzed data related to academic programs demonstrating high performance through specific, targeted metrics. Furthermore, interviews with administrators of the top-performing programs provided a cross-section of different curriculum delivery modalities (online or face-to-face) at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Five university programs with exceptionally high retention percentages were examined. Findings identified four categories of best-practices contributing to student retention including a focus on faculty engagement, modes of engagement, communication strategies, and practical and experiential curricula. Six recommendations were supported through the data analysis. Specific examples of student-centered changes are provided. A guide for assisting academic institutions to complete an internal analysis is presented.

Lisa Richardson & Lorena Lopez of Waubonsee Community College

In the aftermath of the “Great Resignation,” community college staffing has been disproportionately impacted. When colleges are expected to do more for their students with fewer resources, two major concerns arise: how to keep current employees engaged and satisfied for retention while providing the support, resources and services students need to be successful. This is especially important for first-point-of-contact staff directly engaging with students. At Waubonsee Community College (WCC), we learned from employee and student feedback that roles were not clear in terms of responsibilities and how they interface with students and campus partners. An initiative was created by the Student Success and Retention division to address this feedback to boost employee engagement and quality of student support. This presentation will explore the work done related to role clarity activities, including a diagnostic assessment, positional goals revision, shared case management plan outlining responsibilities, and professional development. This initiative resulted in a 10.5% increase in work priorities clarity for the SSR division in comparison to the rest of the college, and an increase of 14.4% in comparison to the rest of the college’s Engagement Survey responses in 2021. In turn, WCC saw a 5% increase in enrollment of continuing students above pandemic years.

Robert Terry, George Bogaski & Nicole Campbell of University of Oklahoma

Since the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, many universities have either eliminated standardized tests or instituted a test-optional system for admissions decisions. Our previous data analytic solutions to admissions, placement and academic interventions relied on standardized tests to augment other information. Because our university has implemented the test-optional admissions policy, rethinking our data analytic strategy is warranted. We investigate numerous alternative solutions, including modeling test-optional applicants as a separate population from the test-available applicants. Using a series of logistic regression analyses, we conclude that it is feasible to use the same predictive model for both test-optional and test-available applicants with little loss of predictive accuracy, in contrast to pre-COVID findings. Further work using the findings of Taylor and Russell (1939) supports our conclusions based on the predictive accuracy of our model, the selectivity of our admissions process, and the overall base rate of success. Finally, we discuss one caveat to eliminating the standardized test entirely. We still find the test valuable when making math placement decisions.

Kim Williams, Sarah Wray Marshall, Adrienne Pollard & Alicia Caruso of University of South Florida

Graduation pipelines need to be tended throughout the undergraduate student life cycle to enhance graduation rates. Beyond first-year attrition, national data demonstrate that there are significant enrollment drops in the second and third years that impact these rates for four- and six-year graduation. The progression academic advocates at the University of South Florida identify and case manage students who are experiencing barriers to improve graduation metrics and minimize attrition. The academic advocacy model is a holistic student success approach that relies on timely student interventions, data-informed practices and practitioner insights. Using a data analytic platform designed by the advocates for their work, they monitor large cohorts of students and provide individual support to those most in need based upon their unique circumstances. The advantage of this holistic case management approach is that graduation rates at this institution continue to improve, and this cultural shift has elevated the institution’s undergraduate student success profile. This paper will address common barriers, demonstrate how practitioner-informed data drives academic advocacy, and discuss the significance of this approach in improving equity in student outcomes.

David Leasure & Kathleen Hogan of University of Maryland Global Campus

The University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) developed a straightforward model that focuses on competency development through holistic approaches such as project-based learning, assessment of competencies, personalization, coaching and penalty-free revisions. This model fosters student engagement and motivation by aligning educational activities with their goals in a respectful and supportive environment. Faculty receive training to provide personalized, culturally sensitive feedback, enhancing students' sense of belonging and confidence in their skills. A two-tier coaching system supports both faculty and student development, leading to improved academic excellence and personal growth. Research on the course results revealed significant improvements from coaching and penalty-free revision: competency attainment (passing or higher) increased from 81% on first submission to 98% on final submission. Additional research on a two-tiered model showed course completion rates grew by two percentage points from pre- to post-implementation. These achievements highlight the model's success in enhancing student and faculty satisfaction, learning and completion, and suggest the model is a viable course framework that supports competency-based learning and fits within traditional financial aid and accrediting structures.

Rocio Morello, Mohammed Moizuddin, Monika Rohde & Erikka Vaughan of New York Institue of Technology

The Achieving Collegiate Excellence (ACE) program is an evidence-informed initiative that mobilizes faculty and staff to serve as academic coaches to support students at risk of losing their institutional scholarships. ACE, with its holistic approach, provides participating students with personalized support through coach meetings, student success modules and access to engagement activities. Students who successfully complete the program can maintain their institutional scholarship. Implementation of ACE is associated with improved retention and graduation rates for the target group of students, particularly among Pell-eligible, first-generation and BIPOC students, indicating its benefit for student success and efficacy in promoting equitable outcomes. Notably, our data suggest improved retention is due to participation in the program above and beyond scholarship renewal alone. The success of ACE has fostered a culture of continuous improvement through coach conversations, emphasizing mental health support, financial literacy and other emerging areas that students and coaches have identified. Moreover, ACE has prompted institutional changes in policies and practices, such as simplifying GPA criteria for scholarship renewal. Overall, ACE has impacted New York Tech at many levels—in student success and well-being, as well as faculty, staff, alumni and institutional development.

Grant J. Matthews of Lane Community College, Michael Morsches, John Halliwell & Laura Hernandez Corkrey of Moraine Valley Community College

Over the past 10 years, the developmental education program at Moraine Valley Community College has been involved in longitudinal assessment aimed at evaluating the efficacy of course changes in terms of student retention and promotion. The plan began when the department decided to redevelop coursework and course sequences to improve retention. The faculty looked beyond simple success and failure rates in order to establish a baseline. They looked at less traditional metrics such as the ratios of grades awarded, the percentage of students passed who did not formally withdraw from the course, the ratio of withdrawals to passing grades, and the probability of students passing a course and then passing the subsequent course in succession. Eventually, the data served as a proactive tool leading to new questions and new programming. When developing the baseline data, the faculty had no idea of the two significant issues on the horizon—The COVID-19 pandemic and the Developmental Education Reform Act in Illinois. The latter limited the number of developmental courses a student could take to one per subject. This session will focus on how the team answered the question, "How are we doing?" and the follow-up, "How are we doing despite....?"

George Bogaski, Nicole Campbell, Cassandra Negron & Robert Terry of University of Oklahoma

University College created a five-question survey that students take in preparation for their academic advising appointment. The survey captures their self-assessment in the following areas: major confidence, academic performance, financial situation, connectedness, and mental and physical wellness. The survey was initially designed to identify potential areas of concern that might need to be addressed in the advising appointment. Subsequent statistical analyses revealed a single factor underlying the five items. The aggregate score—the “Thrive Index”—provides a holistic snapshot of student wellbeing and is predictive of student retention. Our presentation will navigate the development, implementation and statistical analysis of this “Thrive Index.” Our hope is to help you replicate our success.

Jennifer A. Wade-Berg, Rachel E. Myers, Kandice Porter, Janeen Amason, Brian Etheridge & Rebecca Shabo of Kennesaw State University

In 2019, Kennesaw State University (KSU) adopted a strategy entitled "It's About Engagement" as its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). This plan features three high-impact practices: internships, undergraduate research and service-learning. The intent of this QEP is not only to provide engaged learning opportunities for students to increase their critical thinking and communication skills but also to provide them an opportunity for greater connection and belonging with the community (both internally and externally) that can impact overall retention. In the Wellstar College of Health and Human Services (WCHHS), internships and clinical field experiences quickly became a signature pedagogy due to the college's majors and their accreditation standards. Additionally, service-learning and undergraduate research were adopted and integrated further into the curriculum of most majors. This paper examines the definition of high-impact practices (HIPs) and their use as a retention strategy. Data generated from the student perspective are offered to highlight how learning occurs and to identify areas for improvement.

Lisa Richardson & Lorena Lopez of Waubonsee Community College

Community college student support services historically have been a “walk-in” service. Students identify that they need help, they connect with a college support service, they (hopefully) get the help they asked for, and they leave, often with no follow-up. This approach is transactional and not proactive, nor does it capture students who might not identify they need help or address all the needs they may have. Waubonsee Community College (WCC) leveraged Title V Grant funding to pilot a success coaching program to provide targeted, in-time support for students. The gains in student success and retention that were made in this coaching pilot informed a redesign of advising services at WCC to a case management model. This paper will explore the success coaching and advising structures and the data demonstrating their impact on student success and retention. This paper will then discuss the process of transitioning from a walk-in model of advising to a case management model and how different positions were leveraged for a larger focus on sub-population student support. Data to be presented include comparisons of student enrollment patterns, gains in continuing and readmitted student enrollment, and the change’s impact on focused populations.

Rebekah Welch, Danielle Clarke & Wendy McMillian of University of Alabama

Covid-19 changed everything, and higher education was not immune. During the pandemic, student services and advising offices across the country were forced to shift services offered from mostly in-person to fully virtual within a matter of days. Never before had we offered mass advising virtually, and a unique set of challenges arose during an already very uncertain time. The return to in-person advising took months to years, depending on the institution. As a result, advising appointments were often focused more on course selection and registration with less focus on goal setting, long-term academic planning and the cultivation of habits that contribute to student success. Student expectations of academic advising have also changed in recent years due to the availability of virtual advising as well as Gen Z specific wants and needs. In this session, the presenters will discuss getting “back to the basics” of academic advising for retention by utilizing the NACADA Core Competencies and data-driven best practices with the goal of improving student persistence and graduation rates, particularly for at-risk students.

Ashley Dees, Melissa Dennis & Racheal Durham of University of Mississippi

This presentation will delve into the collaboration between the University of Mississippi Libraries (UML) and the Center for Student Success and First-Year Experience (CSSFYE) to boost student success through the First-Year Instruction Initiative (FYII). For a decade this partnership has evolved, significantly contributing to both the achievement of library goals and meeting student learning outcomes for the first-year seminar courses in the CSSFYE. By aligning course objectives with FYII goals, the UML and CSSFYE have strategically integrated information literacy instruction into first-year courses, ensuring that students develop essential critical-thinking skills for academic success. This presentation will focus on recent data comparing library teaching models, goals, and library impact on retention in the first-year experience course, EDHE 105. The assessment aims to provide insight into the outcomes of the long-term partnership that could be replicated at other institutions and identify areas for improvement to further enhance student success.

Zach Weinstein of Coastal Carolina University

This evaluation study measured the influence of an academic skills course for at-risk students on academic probation at Coastal Carolina University (CCU) on their academic success. The study identified significant gains in cumulative and semester grade point averages (GPA) for students who passed the course. Additionally, students who were eligible for the Pell Grant within this sample experienced increased GPAs.

Sarah Kyte, Lisa Elfring, Ashley Hurand, Jenn Schilling, Eduardo Guerrero, Amber Montz, & Lisa Rezende of University of Arizona

Previously, instructors at the University of Arizona had no way of examining (in)equities in their course outcomes or how changes to their course design or teaching might impact the success of students underrepresented in higher education or in particular fields of study. The Analytics Certificate for Course Equity and Student Success (ACCESS) Fellows program empowered tenure- and career-track faculty members to redesign their courses with an eye toward reducing curricular barriers to student success. Fellows received actionable data and ongoing support for implementing evidence-based instructional strategies, ultimately reaching 1,300+ students the next semester. Beyond promoting more equitable course outcomes and persistence in majors and at the university, these efforts developed an infrastructure to support a focus on student success and equity in teaching and learning. This paper details the lessons learned from the ACCESS fellows program with a focus on programmatic development, impact, and lessons learned. In doing so, we share the perspectives of leaders from student success, teaching and learning, institutional research, as well as faculty participants from multiple disciplines with the goal of modeling how our work could be adapted across institutional contexts.

Kristina Sharra of Berklee College of Music

This paper will discuss the inner workings of Berklee College of Music’s highly successful peer tutoring program in creating a collaborative learning environment that has significantly improved student retention and success. We will highlight the fundamental principles of our program, including selecting and training peer tutors, developing a student-centric approach, and monitoring the program's effectiveness. Additionally, we will discuss strategies for overcoming potential challenges such as stigma, tutor burnout, and logistical issues. The paper will provide evidence-based research to support the implementation of some of the special initiatives within the program. Finally, we will examine the impact of fostering a supportive learning environment on student retention and success. The presentation aims to give attendees a better understanding of how Peer-to-Peer Collaborative Learning can effectively promote student retention and success in higher education.

Christine Salvesen, Jennifer Ludwig, & Sarah Kyte of University of Arizona

Starting in 2015, the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) implemented the “2025 Impact Arizona” strategic plan, which outlined critical goals for each Arizona university to promote increases in enrollment, retention, and graduation. As we continue to progress toward the ABOR goal of a 91% first-time full-time (FTFT) retention rate by 2025, The University of Arizona has seen our best performance in the three most recent years, despite the national volatility introduced by COVID-19. Helping students stay enrolled and working towards their degree is a collective effort at The University of Arizona; yet we are highly decentralized. This past year, we drew on established collaborations to coordinate centralized supports for decentralized retention efforts that ensured students heard the right message from the right person at the right time. We then communicated a wide range of data-informed insights back to partners. This paper details the collaboration, coordination, and communication behind the strategy that led to the 85.6% FTFT retention rate at the end of that cycle, our highest retention rate ever.

Debi Rutledge & Erica Suszek of Rochester University

Student support for conditionally admitted students is often approached from a deficit perspective. During the Spring of 2022, Rochester University performed an evaluation of the support programs in place to help these students achieve academic success. Despite institutional attempts to provide additional support, students entering conditionally struggle to meet Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) standards at a disproportionate rate. In response to this, a cross-departmental collaboration between Academic Support and Retention and Student Success and Well-being was developed to recreate the program with a strengths-based approach designed to motivate and empower students to achieve their academic goals. The program included academic coaching initiated prior to registration for classes and continued throughout the first semester, an online self-paced seminar delivered before classes started during the month of August and required enrollment in a three-hour study skills course. Each component of the revised program had a strong relational emphasis. Outcomes for students in all areas demonstrated significant improvement in first-semester grade point average and persistence.

Linli Zhou of Lasell University, Damji Heo Stratton of University of Missouri System, & Xin Li of New York University, Shanghai

This presentation focuses on leveraging NCES data for the examination of college student retention. It introduces the significance of NCES datasets in providing nationally representative estimates of student college experiences and guides participants on the selection of a suitable NCES survey based on their research interests in student retention. The presentation delves into NCES sample surveys by unveiling a presenter-led research project on STEM student retention, utilizing the B&B datasets. Participants follow the methodology walkthrough, explore PowerStats—a specialized data tool for NCES datasets—and understand its diverse analytical capabilities. The presentation concludes with general tips and cautions on NCES dataset usage, empowering participants to explore college student retention queries within their institutions or organizations.

Georgeanna Robinson, Ben Newhouse, & Mark Peltz of Grinnell College

What does student success mean? Institutions often define it as 'grades and grads.’ These metrics are easily measurable and thus make effective assessment tools. However, to the students earning the grades and persisting to graduation, how meaningful is this definition? Recognizing that our undergraduates held more nuanced aspirations, we designed a class to examine this question. With an understanding of the variations of “success” within our students, we anticipated being better positioned to offer individualized support and guidance. Students first learned student development theories and how student success has been studied. They reflected on their development and understanding of success. Then, with some research training, the class collaboratively designed interview questions, and each student conducted 8 peer interviews. The results of this class are mutually beneficial to students and the institution, and threefold: 1) students engage in material that is directly relevant to their current experiences; 2) students become aware of, and reflect upon, their behaviors, becoming more intentional to their own engagement and success practices; 3) the institution receives a relatively large qualitative data set that is analyzed and communicated to leadership, with the intent of informing practitioners across the institution. This webinar describes the course and its outcomes. The analysis of the class collaborative research project were continued by students working on a mentored advanced research project. These graduates will share a brief overview of the findings from their research as follows. Students’ definitions of success were initially—prior to matriculation—heavily based on their backgrounds and preparation for college. Once matriculated, students began to integrate into the values of the institution and its student body. Over time, participants developed their identities and associated individual definitions of success, having reconciled their expectations of college with their actual experiences, explored and constructed their path through college, and developed and followed their beliefs of what success looks like. In doing so, students made adjustments to reconcile their expectations with their reality and negotiated their identity in their new environment. These processes of destabilization and restabilization were most evident in the stories of upperclassman participants.

Juan Carlos Apitz, Mahmoud Albawaneh & Tyler E. Nakamura of California State University at Long Beach

In this work, we explored the many causes of attrition and created models to predict and identify students’ risk of attrition, ideally helping administrators so they may intervene and keep students on track to obtain their degrees. We utilized machine learning classification methods to build CatBoost, LightGBM, XGBoost, and Random Forest models, designed to assign a probability of attrition to each student, based on demographic, pre-collegiate, and academic features. We then evaluated the performance and appropriateness of each model to determine how it applies to universities.

Coryn Gonzales & Jamie White of Ohio State University at Newark

This study compares the outcomes of students enrolled in two different required online academic success programs, the Academic Success Workshop or Buckeye Roadmap to Academic Success, following their placement on academic probation between autumn semester 2018 to 2022. The Buckeye Roadmap to Academic Success is a new, comprehensive, non-credit-bearing course that was introduced in autumn 2021 to replace the Academic Success Workshop. The program is designed to provide holistic support to students by strengthening academic and personal skills to increase their overall success. Significant improvements in academic outcomes were found following the implementation of the Buckeye Roadmap to Academic Success program. Of those students who completed the redeveloped, full-semester Buckeye Roadmap to Academic Success program, 87% achieved good academic standing or met their required GPA conditions (13% dismissal rate). This rate is in comparison to the overhauled Academic Success Workshop, which saw a 33% dismissal rate (67% met or exceeded required GPA conditions). Additionally, this paper expands on the expected learning outcomes of the new program, topics covered, and intentional changes made.

Melissa Dennis & Ashley S. Dees of University of Mississippi

The Research & Instruction Department (R&I) at the University of Mississippi Libraries (UML) has a longstanding partnership with campus units to embed the library into first-year courses called the First Year Instruction Initiative (FYII). In particular, the Center for Student Success and First Year Experience (CSSFYE) has grown significantly during UML’s FYII program (nearly 2 decades) and has quickly become a significant partner in library goals for student success. CSSFYE is made up of multiple units all working towards student success. The library works with these units to ensure that course goals strategically align with the library’s information literacy learning outcomes for librarians and CSSFYE to create meaningful information literacy instruction sessions for UM’s diverse student population. This case study will present how UML has assessed and evaluated the effectiveness of this partnership over time and plans for future FYII sessions that help students develop needed critical thinking skills at various levels in their time at the university.

Michael Morsches of Moraine Valley Community College & Grant J. Matthews of Lane Community College

What advice do you give to struggling students—students who do not know how to start studying or students who have begun to study but who are now lost? Would that advice be the same for any level of students in any subject? Are there standard principles of studying that can benefit all students? These are the questions we have contemplated over the past What advice do you give to struggling students—students who do not know how to start studying or students who have begun to study but who are now lost? Would that advice be the same for any level of students in any subject? Are there standard principles of studying that can benefit all students? These are the questions we have contemplated over the past 30 years in subjects ranging from developmental mathematics to graduate coursework. In this pursuit of a standard set of practices, we have developed a model that has shown success across the spectrum of college-level courses. As important as the results, we have also realized this model has a high level of face validity with students. Students find comfort when they realize there are concrete solutions to their studying issues instead of just needing to “study harder.” In essence, students have three responsibilities as they study: 1) they must first learn the material at the appropriate level, 2) they must manage the material in their memory, and 3) they must be prepared to prove that they have mastered the material. We have identified these as the 3 Responsibilities of Students. This paper will detail the components of the 3 Responsibilities of Students model, the appeal it has for students and instructors, and the success it has achieved in dozens of applications.

Jairus L. Johnson & Renyetta M. Johnson of East Mississippi Community College

U.S. community colleges play a vital role in providing higher education opportunities for members of society and are often viewed as the gateway to a post-secondary education. Two-year colleges foster a robust mission that is supported by a variety of curricular functions. Most colleges have an open-door policy with minimum admission requirements. These factors have created inherent challenges associated with persistence, institutional retention, program completion, and graduation rates. As compared to universities, community colleges have lower graduation and retention rates. Researchers suggest that student persistence is influenced by the social and academic integration of students into college life, and the classroom represents the site for social and academic integration. Studies suggest that there is a positive relationship between transformational leadership (TL) characteristics that are exhibited by instructors and outcomes such as extra effort of students, effectiveness of the instructor, and satisfaction with the instructor. Missing from the literature is an exploration of the association between instructor leadership and students' motivation to persist in a course. This study supports previous TL studies and the findings are applicable to community college classrooms. Instructors who exhibit TL characteristics are related to students' motivation to persist in a course.

Mary Dioise Ramos, Monica Nandan, Kandice Porter, & Susan Mac Leod Dyess of Kennesaw State University

Institutions of higher education frequently develop solutions using a siloed approach and design services without necessarily involving the end user in the development process. The webinar will describe the application of Human-Centered Design Thinking (HCDT) in understanding student challenges and will aid in the development of student success initiatives. The session will introduce participants to the HCDT principles and demonstrate how they can be applied to create more effective, engaging, and meaningful learning experiences for students. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to engage in activities and discussions designed to enhance their understanding of the HCDT process and its application in educational settings. The session will also illustrate the impact of HCDT on student progression, retention, and graduation. Participants will have a thorough understanding of the principles of HCDT and the tools and techniques needed to implement them in their educational contexts. The webinar will provide teachers, administrators, educational technologists, and other participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to promote student success through implementing HCDT.

Kim Brooks, Sarah Jurden, &Glenn Davis of Bowling Green State University

Students at Bowling Green State University who receive early alerts are less likely to successfully complete their courses and be retained. For this reason, we are working to improve the impact of our early alert initiative through careful differentiation of students by areas of need, enhanced timeliness, personalization of outreach, and ensuring that students get connected to critical resources. Our previous approach was mostly passive and relied heavily on automated or otherwise less personal emails. The revised model leverages existing relationships by connecting students with staff members they are already close with and therefore best positioned to offer meaningful support. To accomplish this, we introduced the role of Outreach Coordinator (OC), which is ascribed to existing staff members. OCs, who use phone calls and texts as primary communication strategies, are assigned to students based on their degree of connection: for example, student athletes are assigned to coaches or another staff member from Athletics, and students in high-touch scholarship programs are assigned to their scholarship coordinator. We are gathering data to measure the impact of this revised strategy, though early indicators suggest that more students are being directly connected to a broader range of campus resources than before.

Rory McElwee, Amy Ruymann, & Erin Hannah of Rowan University

Academic advising drives student success and completion. In today’s landscape of data democratization and online retention platforms, advising has become more professionalized with protocols driven by data-fueled case management in addition to relationship-building. This session will describe strategies to optimize the reach and efficacy of Rowan University’s centralized professional advising organization via leveraging online student success platforms, dashboards and reports, and institutional partners including Institutional Research, Registrar, academic leadership, faculty, and more. Advisors are assigned specific students, typically from one or more specific academic programs, in a case management approach, and typically are embedded in the academic departments of the students they serve. Data-informed protocols are used to identify and intervene with students on numerous dimensions, including those who impact the four- and six-year graduation rates, those with 120+ credits, those registered for a duplicate course, those in academic jeopardy, and more. Advising protocols evolved in response to emerging data sources to ensure best practices in proactive advising, particularly in reference to equity gaps in success outcomes for students from minoritized populations. This paper addresses the change management strategy for the institution and advising unit as well as suggests strategies for other institutions.

Robert Terry of the University of Oklahoma, George Bogaski of the University of Oklahoma, Nicole Campbell of the University of Oklahoma, Adelle Sturgel of Lehigh University, & Jordan Loeffelman of the University of Oklahoma

Planning and executing strategies for improving first-year college retention begins long before the actual retention outcome is observed. Using data to inform planning and decision-making requires integrating data collection and analysis plans into the yearly admission, enrollment, and course performance cycles. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how such a data-driven strategy has been implemented by focusing on six key windows in which getting timely data with accompanying analytics has resulted in an approximately 10% increase in first-year retention across the last six years. Moreover, we intend to show how embedding these key data gathering and analytic windows within a Continual Performance Cycle (CPC) across years has led to refinements in how we come to understand the factors that may play increasing roles in whether students achieve the degree of success required that makes retention more likely.

Jennifer Wade-Berg. Deborah Baxter, Kandice Porter, & Susan Dyess of Kennesaw State University

The Wellstar College of Health and Human Services (WCHSS) at Kennesaw State University developed a new theoretical model to understand and impact student success by combining two existing frameworks: Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) (Willgerodt and Maloy, 2021) and the Student Success Ecosystem (Millet et al, 2020). The WCHSS Student Success Model also appends novel constructs to produce an innovative holistic student success model with four key domains and two strategic initiatives. This model provides academics and practitioners with a framework to conceptualize student success, develop actionable interventions to drive improvement, and evaluate outcomes that continue the call to define student success more holistically.

Catherine Nutter & Wayne Perrin of Texas Tech University

Roughly 40% of students who begin a college degree drop out before they finish (Causey et al., 2020). Some students decide the cost outweighs the benefits of a degree given their goals. Some value the degree, but have to work to fund it, and often that job takes priority. Others face struggles unrelated to finances, such as time management, social activities, and lack of study skills. Many eventually find themselves on academic suspension due to low grade point averages. The Academic Recovery Advising (ARA) program at Texas Tech University works exclusively with students who are returning from academic suspension or academic dismissal. This program facilitates student success through targeted, one-to-one advising that addresses academic, personal, and financial barriers and provides support to address those issues. The program begins working with students while those students are away from the university, creating a structure and relationship that forms the foundation of the advising partnership when the student re-enrolls.

Rex Butterfield & Philip Allred of Brigham Young University-Idaho

In 2004, ACT, Inc. noted that there were three elements that contributed most to retention: first-year programs, academic advising, and learning support. As more evidence of the effectiveness of a campus-wide, multi-pronged approach to retention and student success, Vincent Tinto recounted, “Though it is true, as we are often reminded, that student retention is everyone’s business, it is now evident that it is the business of the faculty in particular. Their involvement in institutional retention efforts is often critical to the success of those efforts. Regrettably faculty involvement is still more limited than it should be” (2007, p. 5 emphasis added). Involving the whole campus in retention efforts can be challenging, but there are some economical ways to enlist more help. Between 2015 and 2020, despite some ups and downs, Brigham Young University Idaho has enjoyed an overall six percent increase in retention, from 68% to 74%. In that time, a college success course has begun to fill the role of a first-year experience, advising has increased focus on retention and student success, and to fill the learning support area, faculty are increasingly involved in retention efforts through mentoring and targeted interviewing. Statistically significant results in the internal assessments of the efforts have been somewhat rare, but the two efforts that have shown statistical significance could be especially high impact and helpful: the Student Success class has shown recent significance, and students who were interviewed by faculty members have a statistically higher GPA than those who were not interviewed. The paper explores the implications of these results.

Chen Zong & Suzann Koller of the University of Wyoming

The purpose of this study is to examine the predictors of transfer student success at a large transfer-in 4-year public university using the three-stage transfer success model, which includes student demographic background, pre-transfer academic experiences, and post-transfer academic experience. In this study, the transfer student success was defined as one-year (fall-to-fall) retention or graduation of a transfer student. The research question is: What are the statistically significant predictors of transfer student success in the first year at a large transfer-in four-year public university, and at what stages are the significant predictors? The sample included 5,041 transfer students from Fall 2015 to Fall 2019 cohorts. Binary logistic regression analysis was conducted to assess whether the selected variables were statistically significant predictors of transfer student success. The findings indicate that the significant predictors of one-year transfer student success include variables for all three stages: tuition residency, current age, transferable associate degree, on-campus or distance education, cumulative GPA, student classification, attempted credits, and undeclared major. This study demonstrates how to use the conceptual model at a large transfer-in four-year public university, and discusses the possible implications and recommendations for similar institutions.

Matthew Little of University of Tennessee Southern

In July 2021, Martin Methodist College became The University of Tennessee Southern, and with this change came the opportunity to reimagine student success. In its 151-year history the institution had learned to be flexible and resilient, but, like many small, struggling, faith-based institutions, emphasis was placed on recruiting students rather than student success. Its location in a rural, under-resourced region also created obstacles towards better student success metrics. To serve the needs of its service area, several changes were instituted for student success. The institution, for the first time, created a position with a singular focus on student success, and another to support online learning. An early alert system was put into place, and student success was reframed for faculty, parents, and students in a new manner. Initiatives were undertaken to increase retention and persistence rates, and data was collected, analyzed, and acted upon in new ways. Within one semester cohort retention rates had increased by 7.9%, persistence increased, and students in academic distress decreased. The rates of students with a high-risk of stopping out improved in every area. The actions taken to achieve this improvement will be discussed as well as how the culture of the institution has changed around student success.

Michael Tucker, Jonathan Poon, & Sophie Greenwall of the University of South Carolina

As more higher education institutions participate in offering college-level courses to high school students (often referred to as dual enrollment) it becomes increasingly important to evaluate the impact of participation in these courses on subsequent higher education student success outcomes, such as first-year retention and graduation rates. In recent years, there has been an increase in the body of literature devoted to this topic, however, much of this literature is aimed at analyzing the impact of dual enrollment courses on performance in community colleges. This study will examine the relationship between high school students taking dual enrollment courses and their later performance at a public, R1 university. Additionally, this study will employ Classification and Regression Trees (CART), a type of supervised statistical learning for identifying the success factors for dually enrolled students based on academic, demographic, and socio-economic features. The intention of this study is to offer results that provide generalizable knowledge for institutional decision-making pertaining to dual enrollment and success in higher education.

Marla Mamrick, Claire Robinson, Sara Reinhardt, & Phil Moore of University of South Carolina

The importance of student advisement has been a topic of discussion in higher education for decades. Student success and time to graduation can be profoundly impacted by course schedules. This has led to the advent of the use of professional advising in conjunction with faculty members. Without reliable feedback regarding course scheduling, however, these professionals are limited in their ability to optimize course schedules for students. To fill this void, vendors are offering apps and instruments that provide standard reports and predictive modeling. While informative, these products generally lack contextual information at the institutional level. This paper will describe a collaboration between an academic advisement center and enrollment management researchers to leverage information concerning course DFW rates, course sequencing, and an at-risk student indicator to optimize course schedules for students.

Victoria Wallington, Reginald Simmons, Emily Cardinale, Sarah Gianetti, & Valentina Hernandez of Central Connecticut State University

College students face many challenges in their first years of college. One intervention designed to assist in college success is Success Central, a peer-mentoring program developed at a mid-size regional university. Success Central peer mentors use college life coaching techniques to help mentees build the skills necessary for college success. This program was developed to increase student success, primarily measured through persistence to the following school year. Recent data analyses conducted by the university indicates that in recent years, commuter students are more successful than residential students, an unexpected outcome given prior research (Chickering, 1971; Pascarella, Terenini & Blimling, 1994). This paper will begin with an introduction to issues affecting persistence of residential versus commuter students. The differential impact that Success Central has on residential versus commuter student success will be examined. The paper will end with case examples illustrating the model and a discussion of the results.

Will Miller & Rob Berwich of Jacksonville University

A campus with an undergraduate experience rich in the traditional liberal arts, over the past eighteen months, Jacksonville University has worked to supplement a high touch model of advising and student success with new technologies and partners to help ensure maximum potential for students to succeed. While ownership of student success had been disbursed historically, efforts began by creating a student success taskforce, which brought together two dozen institutional leaders that represent key areas considered in holistic student success and charging it with helping to ensure that “only students who we could envision retaining, graduating, and thriving were offered admittance to our campus.” The taskforce continued to maintain the importance of high touch interactions but also quickly saw the need for supplemental tools. As a result, just as COVID caused new challenges for student success, the campus rolled out a defined case management system to enhance communication, a proactive and reactive artificial intelligence-based textbot for regular check-ins and conversations, and a partnership to help our stop out students return and thrive. This was coupled with making student success data more accessible to the campus community. Technology has been integrated to augment the essential interpersonal relationships already on campus.

Kristen Nakamura Wallitsch, James D. Breslin, & Lory L. King of Bellarmine University

Our institutional data was clear: academic advising was poorly understood, its reputation was lacking, and there was no clear impact on student retention. This paper presents the evolution of an advising model at a four-year, private, liberal arts institution from inception to maturity. In the new advising structure, all first-year students and many second-year students were assigned to a professional academic advisor. Students experience a proactive, holistic, and learner-centered approach aligned with the university mission and the strategic goal to create a transformative experience for all students. Once the model was established and ties to retention and persistence were evident in the data and assessment, we continued to advance the model through continual improvement and expanding opportunities. We provided a mandatory training and development program for all professional advisors and extended training opportunities to faculty advisors. Our goal was to create a culture of academic advising that empowers students to take ownership of their educational experiences and persist to graduation. In this paper, we will share our experiences, discuss how we overcame challenges, and share the evidence we used to demonstrate success, which goes beyond satisfaction to illustrating the impact and value of academic advising.

Daphne Holland & Deborah Conner of Coastal Carolina University & Mary Fischer of Western Carolina University

Coastal Carolina University was experiencing increasingly low retention rates for students after their first year. University leadership issued a call to action to address these alarming trends and increase first-year student retention. The Student Success Team, composed of student support practitioners, data analysts, faculty partners, and academic affairs leadership, undertook a data-driven, collaborative approach to identify and address underlying retention barriers. The multifaceted approach ultimately yielded successful results. An academic recovery program was implemented in Fall 2018 for students on academic probation with increasingly positive results over six semesters. Eligible students successfully completing the program in Spring 2020 were retained at 66.0% versus those who did not at 39.7%. This paper provides a roadmap to develop, implement, and assess a successful university-wide academic recovery program for first-year students, including updating an outdated probation policy, creating course curriculum, developing a comprehensive academic recovery program, and creating an academic coaching department to support students reactively and proactively through meaningful intervention. This has also led to investing in predictive analysis tools to further our success.

Tabetha Adkins, Scott Heinerichs, & Lorraine Bernotsky of West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Institutions have an obligation to develop effective support systems that positively contribute to the educational experience and foster student success. The research is clear: institutions must focus retention efforts on not only high-risk students (GPA <2.0) but also students within the “Murky Middle” (GPA <2.0-3.0). This paper focuses on a comprehensive and affordable intervention at one institution that included entities from different divisions on campus, a day of programming we called RAMp Up. Using institutional data to inform the planning process, this day of programming between students’ first fall and spring semesters targets retention of first-year students who are at risk of not returning the following year or graduating within six years. Using a multi-pronged approach, institutional partners contributed to the program on a variety of topics including career readiness, goal setting, studying and learning strategies, and funding their education. In this paper we will share the specific approach taken by the institution and three years of outcomes data.

Sarah Kyte, Laura Andrews, Jennifer Ludwig, & Christine Salvesen of University of Arizona

Seemingly neutral academic policies can have major consequences for student success. When institutional research revealed that the existing academic eligibility policy was having an outsized and negative impact on the persistence of first-generation and minoritized first-time students, The University of Arizona decided to introduce a warning semester. We will share how and why we crafted a clearer, more intentional policy featuring a warning semester as an opportunity to connect students with supports and resources to help them thrive in college. Also, by adopting principles of regression discontinuity designs—which are ideally suited to observing the impact of policies featuring a cutoff—we estimated that introducing a warning semester could lift retention among first-time students by as much as two percentage points. Indeed, we observed a one percentage point gain in retention among the first cohort of students under the new policy. In this webinar, we review the institutional and scholarly research motivating a revised academic eligibility policy as well as the multifaceted assessment that drew on institutional, programmatic, and qualitative data to identify how it improved the student experience. You will leave with the tools and strategies to consider connecting the dots needed to consider a similar change at your own institution.

April Fugett, Chris Atkins, Kateryna Schray, & Karen McComas of Marshall University

In 2015, we began an experiment to increase retention for a group of students identified by high school GPA as “middle-ability.” This experiment resulted in a 14% retention gain for that population by Fall 2019 and in the creation and adoption of a risk analytics survey (Marshall University Student Success Forecasting Model [SSFM]) many times more predictive than high school GPA. Just as we started gathering strong evidence around our data-based interventions, COVID-19 changed the student success dialogue. After many conversations, we were able to modify the SSFM risk analytics survey and intervention strategy to create a program that allowed us to analyze risk and begin offering students customized interventions before Orientation. This paper will focus on the student success factors (cognitive, noncognitive, and behavioral) that we assess in our evaluation of incoming students in order to personalize the student experience and develop timely and appropriate success initiatives. In addition, we will focus on a variety of initiatives that utilize the SSFM including orientation (pre-matriculation), first-year seminar, peer mentors, and technology-enhanced centralized advising. Participants will learn about these initiatives and how the crucial, initial focus on experimental design of the SSFM has led to actionable, scalable, measurable, and real-time results.

Kari Gary of Utah Valley University

Universities across the nation are faced with the challenge of retaining students to graduation. Administrators also face challenges adopting technology to support student retention and effectively using data to evaluate programs to drive change aimed at increasing retention. Data and technology alone are not sufficient to manage organizational change. Rather, data are meant to inform student retention strategies and technology to support the execution of said strategies. Informed leadership and clearly defined strategies remain essential to propel and implement programs to meet student needs, particularly underprivileged populations who are at risk for attrition. This study evaluated two programs, common to universities across the country, for their effect on student retention or persistence. The programs studied were academic advising and high impact courses targeted to students in their first year at the University. The results from academic advising showed significant positive movement in retention across many sub-groups of students, particularly populations most at-risk for attrition. Results from high impact courses were mixed showing statistically significant lifts in persistence for a few groups, but the majority of groups returned non-significant findings. This paper also documents the challenges and successes Utah Valley University experienced while sharing data and fostering adoption of new technologies in support of student success.

Catherine Nutter of Texas Tech University

How does being undeclared or exploratory relate to persistence and time-to-graduation? The answer is, it seems to help. In a data review at a large research university in the southwest, two-year retention analysis suggests that students who begin college as undeclared in an exploration program before declaring a major are retained at a rate equal to or higher than the general declared student population.

Grant J. Mathews of Lane Community College; Rita Ferriter, Susan Godwin, Jennifer Lee-Good, & Michael Morsches of Moraine Valley Community College

Like most developmental reading programs, the Developmental Education reading faculty members at Moraine Valley Community College have worked long and hard to develop transitional skills for students who place into reading/study skills courses. Seven years ago, the reading faculty members decided to review the grade patterns and distributions of their students to improve instruction. That initial analysis was eye-opening when faculty members discovered that there was a severe compression of passing grades—most of the successful students received grades of C, with only 4% receiving grades of A. The program decided to work on decompressing these successful grades without challenging the threshold between C and D students. The subsequent results were dramatic as faculty members shifted the distribution of passing grades and raised the overall course success rates by more than 45%. The developmental reading program has now changed focus to individual grade patterns and the actual meaning of the grades faculty members give. What happens to the students who earn A’s, B’s, and C’s when they move on and are at the next level? This paper will outline the faculty members’ general grade analysis as well as their individual explorations of the grades they give and the future success those grades can predict.

Dawn Coder, John Carter, & Richard Akers of Pennsylvania State University

Online learning in higher education continues to grow due to the flexibility it offers learners. Adult learners choose online learning at a rate much higher than residential learning. Adult learners in the online environment tend to be retained at a lower rate. To counteract lower retention rates, understanding student needs through targeted student satisfaction surveys is necessary. The academic advising department at The Pennsylvania State University, World Campus examined student data from a recent student satisfaction survey to understand adult learners’ needs. Several proactive projects were implemented to address the identified needs with a result of increasing student satisfaction and retention. A discussion of the results and a summary view of the projects implemented are discussed.

Desmond Stephens, Maurice Edington, Lewis Johnson, Carl Moore, Serena Roberts, & Codjo Akpovo of Florida A&M University

Two issues that impact the retention and progression of first-year students entering STEM programs are mathematics placement and their ability to cope with the increased rigor and workload of the college curriculum. In this webinar, we will discuss Florida A&M University’s Preparing STEM Scholars for Success (PS3) summer program and provide strategies for engaging incoming first-year students, improving their mathematics placement using ALEKS modules, and helping them develop an appreciation for the rigors and pace of college courses.

Audrey Meador, Vinitha Subburaj, Pamela Lockwood Cooke, & Anitha Subburaj of West Texas A&M University

Peer-led Team Learning (PLTL) is a model of instruction and learning that has been in use for many years to combat low success rates in various science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses and other fields in higher education. Although research conveying the efficacy of this model of instruction remains mixed, this webinar will provide the details of the successful efforts of one College of Engineering (COE) at a four-year university to implement PLTL as an aid in increasing STEM achievement. More specifically, and in response to decreasing enrollment of first-time, full-time freshmen, the COE targeted a population of community college transfer students (CCTS), who were provided with additional academic, social, and financial supports, with this PLTL model. Through the students’ shared experience, the presentation will convey information regarding STEM degree success attainments and challenges faced by CCTS participating in the PLTL initiative. Information regarding implications, considerations, and extension of implementation will be provided and correspond to engagement and retention efforts directed at STEM students from the community college population.

Leslie N. Martinez of University of the Incarnate Word

A mixed methods research study reveals the perceptions that not only student affairs educators have of the services available to and for underrepresented college students, but also the perceptions of underrepresented undergraduate students themselves on the student services available. This study identifies the role of student services at a private, religiously affiliated, Hispanic serving institution in South Texas and how those services are utilized. Students described their lived experiences with campus student services detailing events that help or hinder their enrollment. In addition, a sample of social science students completed a pilot study providing detail on their usage of institutional student services. The findings reveal both strengths and areas of improvement, including opportunities for advancement for accessibility and communication, how mentoring and advising matter, and implications for training and awareness. Insights gained from these students provide beneficial ways to positively influence retention practices in higher education for this specific demographic and to connect the sense of belonging to retention practices in institutional student services.

Jennifer F. Humber of University of Alabama

The concept of student engagement has adopted many definitions and descriptions over time. Student engagement is often linked to various measures of academic achievement, including retention, student satisfaction, and institutional success. Further research to determine student engagement as it relates to online students is now more necessary as online enrollments continue to increase. To understand how student engagement applies in online education, it is important to gain additional insight as to how online students define student engagement on an individual level. In this qualitative case study, online learners were interviewed to gain their perceptions of engagement in an online course required for certain majors at a large public institution. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, their perceptions were used to determine how this specific group of online students define student engagement in an online learning environment. The study also revealed various types of activities that were perceived to be most engaging to students enrolled in the course. The results of this study provide administrators and faculty the ability to better understand student perceptions so that they can be considered when developing resources to enhance instructional design and communication with online learners.

James R. Stefanelli of Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Wedged between undergraduate and doctoral students exists the oft-understudied population of master’s students. The dearth in master’s-specific research is astounding considering master’s degrees represent the fastest growing degree credential. Why is there such a lack of information about master’s students from a national perspective in comparison to other degree-seeking students? Perhaps it is because assessment, like IPEDS, and prestige, like US News rankings, are not tied to it. In simple terms, there is no carrot to incentivize it and no stick to mandate it. Nevertheless, the absence of research has far-reaching implications and manifests predominantly in three ways; little is known about the rates in which master''s students graduate, time to degree, and the attributes associated with graduation. Thus, administrators are unable to assess any retention-effort efficacy and analogous graduation rates. This paper provides university administrators with a comparative benchmark and the attribute-based context to improve master’s student completion rates thus effectuating positive gains in retention and returns on investment for all those involved; individual students, specific student subpopulations, institutions, and society. This is the first-ever, multi-university study employing a predictive model to analyze master’s degree completion, and the most comprehensive in terms of program breadth.

Case Willoughby, Joshua Novak, & Sharla Anke of Butler County Community College

Research, strategy, and multi-level leadership across an institution are necessary to make meaningful advances in student success. The adage “culture eats strategy for breakfast” underscores that brilliant plans fail without changing hearts, minds, and processes. Butler County Community College engaged faculty and staff in a process that increased graduation rates by 15 percentage points. This presentation will situate transformational student success initiatives in three bodies of research—organizational culture, organizational change, and improvement science—in a case study showing real results. Actions taken by academic and student affairs guided by a theoretical approach were key. Participants will leave with concrete strategies to bring to their home institutions.

Sara Kelly & Devon Smith of SUNY Brockport

This webinar will discuss effective strategies to shift engagement and the culture around student success interventions. Through a case study of one medium sized, public institution’s efforts to improve first-year retention and overall persistence rates, this webinar will outline organizational structure and development strategies, as well as sustainable partnership efforts in the Academic Success Center, Residential Life, Career Services, and student services areas like Financial Aid and Student Accounts. Included will be examples of successful programs, shifts in organizational culture, and data sets to help illustrate the campus’s efforts to break down departmental and divisional barriers.

Addalena Virtus of Galen College of Nursing & Sarah Howell of Frederick Community College

This study examines the impact of a pilot academic probation program at a public university located in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The Charting Your Success program (CYS) serves students who would have been academically dismissed from the university and have 32 or fewer earned institutional credits. The CYS program allows students another opportunity to attend the university. The CYS program has three main requirements: students must earn a semester GPA of a 2.0, meet with their CYS coach 12 times during the semester, and complete 5 extra help activities. Since the start of the program during the fall 2017 semester, 312 students have participated. As of the fall 2019 semester, 107 students from the CYS program are still enrolled at the university, 27 students were eligible to return but left, 26 students withdrew from the university, 150 students were dismissed and 2 have graduated. The success of the program has sparked institutional change with the dismissal policy being edited and the pilot program becoming permanent.

Georgeanna Robinson & Kaitlin Wilcox of Grinnell College

In the frequently siloed work of higher education professionals, cross-campus collaboration between multiple departments can feel like a Sisyphean task. However, although our work is typically organized into a departmental structure, students do not necessarily experience college as siloed and departmentalized. To them, staff and faculty from around the institution all represent the college, to a greater or lesser extent. Given this lived experience, therefore, it makes sense to enlist faculty and staff from around the institution in the vital work of assessment for the purposes of student retention and success. Unfortunately, such collaboration is rare and can be challenging even to contemplate. This session presents a new model developed and tested at Grinnell College to involve colleagues from around the institution in assessment work for understanding barriers to student success. It will focus on a recent effort from the Office of Analytics and Institutional Research, where staff rallied together representatives from 13 offices on campus in preparation for implementing Schreiner’s Thriving Quotient. The 61% response rate from students that are clearly representative of the overall student body, as well as excitement about the initiative and ongoing discussion of the findings demonstrate the success of this new model.

Dan Gianoutsos, Anne White, & Nicole Stella of University of Nevada, Las Vegas

While higher education literature has frequently addressed undeclared students and math remediation students, research examining a subpopulation—Major Pathways students—is scarce. Major Pathways students are undergraduate students who initially selected their major when applying to the institution and while they were accepted to the institution, they were not admitted into the academic college (e.g., Sciences, Engineering, and Business) of their desired major primarily due to their math test scores. Considered “at-risk” students (Educational Advisory Board, 2020), administrators at a large, diverse, southwestern research university implemented a multifaceted programmatic approach to improve the retention rates of the Major Pathways students. These efforts include a strategic new student orientation process, marketing/outreach, proactive academic advising, and a specific first-year seminar. Since implementing the program, the university has seen the fall-to-spring retention rates increase from its baseline 84.5% (2016-2017) to 88.5% (2017-2018) to 89.6% (2018-2019) to 89.7% (2019-2020). In addition, the fall-to-fall retention rate for Major Pathways students has also increased 12.9 percentage points from 64.5% (2016-2017) to 77.4% (2018-2019). The purpose of this paper is to examine the retention plan and how these programs improved the success measures of the institution’s Major Pathways students.

Jennifer L. Rowsam of Southern Arkansas University

In this webinar, we will explore how institutional policies, such as those related to registration, can have an impact on student persistence. Southern Arkansas University examined its registration procedures and discovered that 64% of students in Fall 2015 whose schedules were removed for non-payment re-registered for the term. A presidential task force made recommendations to registration procedures. In Spring 2016, the university piloted an extended deadline to make payment before the schedule was removed, included a reinstatement policy if the schedule was removed to guarantee that the student would receive the same schedule, and initiated multiple contacts with students about making payment. Under the old policy, more than 415 students were deregistered in Fall 2015. Under the new policy, the number of students deregistered fell to 62 in Spring 2016 and has ranged from 62-149 students each term. When compared to the old policy (Fall 2015: 64.10%), more students who would have been removed for non-payment also enrolled for the term under the new policy (ranging from 87.50%-94.37%). The university also saw a freshman one-year retention rate increase of over four percentage points between the Fall 2014 cohort and Fall 2018 cohort. These data point to the new policies impacting retention and persistence rates.

Mark Leany & Jason Terry of Utah Valley University

The IPEDS Outcome Measure has changed the completion playing field. As a result, Utah Valley University (UVU) is now more accountable for the completion rates of transfer students, part-time students, and students seeking any degree. This has required the university to redesign completion calculations and predictions to more accurately reflect its student body. This model will be dissected to create a colorful and explanatory visualization with yearly steps of available data that look seven years in advance. This paper will showcase data visualizations and prediction models used to calculate and predict the institution’s Outcome Measure Goal, as well as a detailed explanation for how they were created. In addition, this paper will also discuss programs, initiatives, and strategies that have been implemented to help the institution reach its targeted Outcome Measure goal. The ultimate goal of predictive analytics is to change the future. Through these efforts inspired by the Outcome Measure changes, UVU will have the data, strategies, and initiatives to do so.

Dawn Coder & Jodi Harris of Pennsylvania State University

Penn State World Campus is The Pennsylvania State University’s (Penn State) online campus. Three years ago, World Campus leadership realized the importance of intentionally focusing on student retention and success. Data showed a significant number of students were not retained from year one to year two, with less than half of incoming students earning a degree at Penn State. Through its three-year strategic planning process, leadership identified goals and objectives for improving retention. This project management-based approach to strategic planning has gone through two phases. The first phase was based on a structure that allowed staff to submit ideas through a charter to be considered for implementation. The second phase was initiated to build upon lessons learned in Phase 1 and create a forward-looking roadmap to guide the implementation of retention projects. This paper will tell the story of how we have been deliberate in our journey to improve retention. Data, early projects, methods, and processes for developing a roadmap will be presented.

Roy Chan of Lee University

This study explores what effect a statewide financial aid policy has on the academic outcomes of college promise program recipients at two 4-year public research universities, Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) and Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). Using secondary administrative data from the Indiana University’s University Institutional Research and Reporting (UIRR) office, representing 7,842 low-income students who enrolled shortly before the policy was implemented, this study employs a quasi-experimental, difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a credit momentum policy that was supported by the Complete College America (CCA) 15 to Finish initiative on the academic progression and completion of Indiana Twenty-First Century Scholarship (TFCS) recipients at IUB and IUPUI, compared to non-TFCS Pell recipients from the Fall 2011 cohorts through the Fall 2014 cohorts. Results suggest that the 15 to Finish initiative (30-credit hour annual completion policy) showed a modest significant effect on cumulative credits and grades, but had no effect on degree completion status (Year 4 Graduation Status, Year 6 Graduation Status) at IUB (primarily residential, more selective, flagship research university). The policy had no significant interaction effect on the TFCS recipients enrolled at IUPUI (primarily nonresidential, moderately selective research university). The findings of this research suggest that credit momentum policies, which was related to a broader, national 15 to Finish initiative did not produce its intended effect, nor did it have any adverse consequences for low-income, first-generation students. Implications for future research and policymaking are discussed.

David S. Hood & Danielle Insalaco-Egan of Montclair State University

Montclair State University has identified a retention trend downward for undergraduates over the last three years, with undecided students leaving the institution at higher rates than other populations. Further, Ruffalo Noel-Levitz data has demonstrated students’ dissatisfaction with advising services across the campus. In late 2017 Montclair State determined that a dramatic shift would be required to address these issues, and so launched University College, an academic home for undecided students, and created a decentralized advising model, Advising 2025, for the University. Montclair State developed large-scale advising reforms that are expected to improve retention outcomes, including redesigning all advising services as well as the first-year seminar to ensure that all students have a consistent, high-quality learning experience. In particular, an intentional approach to the transient nature of undecided students was developed as a retention strategy; University College gives them a pathway to success via a network of caring professionals and high-touch programming and supports. The investment in University College places undecided students at the center of Montclair State’s retention efforts, and early data demonstrates that a focus on dedicated, proactive advising and other supports is leading to greater engagement and satisfaction.

Laurie Hazard & Stephanie Carter of Bryant University

In student success literature, attention has been given to individual student characteristics and how behavioral and affective variables mediate college adjustment. Perhaps not as much attention has been given to environmental factors influencing the college transition, such as understanding the student in the context of their family structure. How do students and families manage the dynamic as individuals and as a unit when a student transitions to higher education? Traditional developmental psychology theoretical frameworks, coupled with student development literature and an innovative way of looking at this issue, can inform approaches to understanding and leveraging the impact of families on student success and retention. To do so, institutions must recognize that family support is a critical factor in first-year student success and must develop strategies to help parents understand how to appropriately support their students. Families need to know about the broad areas of first-year adjustment that experts in higher education have identified: intellectual, social, emotional, cultural, academic, and financial adjustment. This webinar provides a framework for institutions to constructively educate families about transition issues during the first year, so parents can support their students from a healthy distance.

Daniel Martinez & Katie Chartier of College of the Desert

College of the Desert instituted a college readiness program that consisted of a review of math and English to help incoming students reduce or eliminate the number of basic skills courses they needed to complete. As the program grew, the college added wrap-around student support services to increase student completion and persistence. Results show that first-time college students in the program performed better or as well as other first time college students who were not in the program on several metrics, including the completion of college-level English in the first year, the number of units completed in both the first-term and the first year, and persistence from the first semester to the second semester through the second year of college. A description of how the program grew and plans are discussed.

Rebekah Reysen & Kyle Ellis of University of Mississippi

A significant number of students struggle to persist in the transition from high school to college each year. According to Tinto’s (1993) Theory of Institutional Departure, academic integration and social integration are critical to student persistence toward degree completion, and the first year of college is most vulnerable to attrition. Existing research has demonstrated that academic success courses positively influence the retention and academic self-efficacy of students on academic probation (Mellor, Brooks, Gray & Jordan, 2015). By piloting student success practices such as peer mentoring (Crisp & Cruz, 2009) in the academic success course, we have aimed to improve students’ academic integration and retention at the University of Mississippi, and we hope to provide new insight about the practical implications of academic success courses on retention through the use of this program. The purpose of the current study is to examine the effectiveness of our EDHE 101 Academic Skills for College peer mentorship program, which was established to increase the retention rates of at-risk freshmen at the University of Mississippi. Our results indicate that this intervention is effective for helping specific populations of probation students persist into their sophomore year.

Catherine Nutter & Kristi Fierro of Texas Tech University

This webinar highlights a proactive alternative admission program for students originally denied admission to our four-year university. The Tech Transfer Acceleration Program (TTAP) is a fall-semester provisional admission program for students who were denied direct admission to Texas Tech University (TTU). TTAP provides students an opportunity to learn the skills – academic and personal – necessary for college success while providing the university with transfer students already steeped in university tradition, knowledge of policy and practice, and engaged with faculty, staff, and students. Provisional admissions programs such as TTAP provide innovative opportunities for universities to increase transfer student enrollment and improve student graduation rates while providing more students the opportunity to graduate with a four-year degree.

Steven A. Mauro of Gannon University

With many academic institutions facing a diminishing applicant pool, efforts focused on retaining existing students have intensified. Using greater than fifty variables in the areas of engagement, academics, and financial status, we have developed a predictive model that drives student intervention efforts. Implementation of the model combined with specific actions derived from the data has greatly improved our ability to develop rapid and specific interventions tailored to each student. These efforts have contributed to an improvement of first-year retention of students at the institution by five percentage points, equivalent to millions of dollars of added revenue. At the conclusion of this webinar, participants will be able to 1) recognize common academic, engagement, and financial student persistence risk factors; 2) understand how different retention indicators can contribute to a predictive model; 3) apply a five component framework to utilize a retention predictive model to student interventions; 4) develop measurable outcomes associated with retention efforts.

Amber R. Smith of University of Indianapolis; Charles Donaldson & Janice Warren of University of Arkansas at Little Rock

A 10 million-dollar collaborative effort between three colleges/universities and two school districts was spawned by a desegregation lawsuit and has resulted in the positive impact of more than 2,000 students in the last four years in an urban city in the South. Through culturally-relevant pedagogy and artistically enriching opportunities specifically designed for African American students, students have seen great success. The goals of the program include improvement in academic achievement and in test scores used in college admission; an increase in high school graduation rates; entry in post-secondary programs without the need for remedial courses; and completion of a baccalaureate degree in four years. Through summer bridge programs that have resulted in 99 percent of participating students bypassing at least one remedial course, and highly engaging ACT preparation programming, the program is seeing phenomenal success to date.

Noël Bezette-Flores of San Diego State University; Patricia Ugwu, Kumuda Fernando, Tamara Baker, Stacy Welcome & Phillip Nicotera of Houston Community College

Rescheduled from February 17, 2021. Houston Community College (HCC) is an open-admission, public institution of higher education offering a high quality, affordable education for academic advancement, workforce training, career development, and lifelong learning to prepare individuals in our diverse communities for life and work in a global and technological society. As one of the largest community colleges in the nation, HCC has served the Greater Houston area for over four decades. To provide every student an opportunity to succeed, HCC offers several intervention programs including Early Alert, Case Managed Advising, and Guided Pathways. This presentation will share information about how the integration of Early Alert and Case Managed Advising resulted in significant alert closures and student engagement with advisors following the implementation of new informal but appreciative and intentional proactive communication with assigned students. Participants receive a sample communication email and Early Alert bookmark that they can adapt as necessary. For the 2016 and 2017 year, implementation data show an increase in Early Alert closure rate from 720 in 2015 to 1121 in 2018, an alert closure rate of 64%. These same data show academic issues as the reason for most alerts and revealed fourteen courses that generated most alerts.

Joshua P. Sills of Texas Tech University

Retention efforts continue to evolve across the country. One of the new approaches being employed is life coaching. Academic Life Coaching by licensed Academic Life Coaches is a new addition to some university systems. Best practices have yet to be established within the life coaching community under the context of the university system. By using predictive modeling approaches using data from intake surveys that target key psychosocial factors, life coaches can build their coaching practices on empirically validated foundations. This means interventionists can target stakeholders with statistics-driven student-centric support which aligns with the principles of life coaching. Having students self-assess on former empirically-validated psychosocial factors that predict GPA outcomes, retention-by-semester, or graduation rates allows life coaches to confidently gain insight into a stakeholder’s current situation and thus help them improve their likelihood of graduating. Thus, coaches are equipped to better meet needs and offer targeted services that address the stakeholder’s self-expressed (or even unrecognized or subconscious) concerns. Within our preliminary findings, students self-reported increased levels of confidence in the areas that interventionists targeted with their coaching.

Melissa Lang & Kelly Grant of Tulane University

Those of us who work in higher education know this to be true: student information lives in silos. Various databases and systems exist all over campus, and campus partners are often unable or skeptical about sharing up-to-date information. What if, instead of linking disparate datasets and pieces together, those datasets were strategically linked to established and empirically supported theoretical concepts? What if a roadmap existed that would help university personnel link theoretical constructs to data that can therefore drive an informed decision-making process? At Tulane University, the Office of Retention and Student Success has taken on the process of “auditing” and organizing its data in an attempt to understand and use it more strategically. Rather than collecting data points and lumping them into large datasets, we are methodically collecting all available data points, organizing data by type, topic, source, and timing, and anchoring each data point to theoretically based empirically supported concepts related to student retention.

Kate Loughlin & Michael F. Mascolo of Merrimack College

First-year students often face a multitude of personal and academic challenges that affect their overall success in college. To promote the development of academic resilience among first-year students, it is necessary to focus on cultivating both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, including those related to a student''s developing sense of self. Because identity develops within a sociocultural context, understanding the conditions that contribute to such self-development cannot occur by merely focusing on isolated individuals. Instead, it is essential to examine how student identities evolve within the various collegiate milieus. Grounded in a first-year, cohort-based learning community for academically underprepared students, the study presented focuses on creating conditions that matter (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh & Whitt, 2010; Tinto, 2017) in order to promote a student''s sense of self and belonging. Participant observation and focus groups were utilized to investigate the experience of the selected undergraduate students. Informed by the shared experiences of current and former students of the program, findings suggest that participation in a first-year learning community built on high expectations and emotional sensitivity; intensive academic support and incremental success lead to genuine transformations that sustain long after the formal interventions and support have ceased.

J.D Jayaraman, Sue Gerber, & Julian Garcia of New Jersey City University

Student retention is a major challenge at American universities with the average six-year graduation rate hovering around 59%. Among minority students the graduation rate drops to 46% for Blacks and 55% for Hispanics. Thus, improving student retention, in particular, minority student retention, is of paramount importance. This paper describes a data mining approach to predicting minority native and transfer student dropout using a dataset from a four-year minority and Hispanic serving institution in the northeastern United States. The results show that standard data mining models can predict minority transfer student dropout with a high degree of accuracy of 97% and minority native student dropout with an accuracy of 81%. The features that were most important in predicting minority transfer student dropout were SAT scores and college cumulative GPA, while high school GPA and college cumulative GPA were the top predictors for minority native student dropout. This study demonstrates that educational institutions can use cost effective off-the-shelf standard data mining/machine learning models to achieve a high degree of accuracy in predicting minority student dropout. The high prediction accuracy helps in reliably identifying at-risk minority students and providing them with necessary interventions to support their academic success.

Michelle Bombaugh, Leslie Tod, & Kim Williams of University of South Florida

In Spring 2017, University of South Florida implemented a Deferred Probation procedure to redress the issues first-year students often face in their transition to the university. Under the previous procedure, first-year students could be academically dismissed prior to completing two full semesters at the university. Summer admits were particularly disadvantaged as they could be dismissed as early as fall without having a full academic year to demonstrate their academic abilities. Due to Winter Break closures, the university was challenged with a reduced timeframe to assist these students, particularly those who had extenuating circumstances that might reverse their dismissal. As a result of the Deferred Probation procedure, first-year students were granted one additional semester to address their academic standing. This webinar will discuss the origins of the procedure, current data on this population of students, and the potential of this procedure as a strategy to increase first-year persistence and graduation rates.

Patricia Bice of Purchase College, SUNY

Research on student retention and persistence has often overlooked organizational behaviors of colleges and universities as an impactful construct, instead focusing more on precollege characteristics of students or characteristics of the college rather than its behaviors. In their comprehensive model of influences on student learning and persistence, Terenzini and Reason (2005) place the organizational context of the model before the student peer environment, indicating that organizational behaviors can be powerful tools influencing the peer environment and student outcomes. The organizational context framework assisted the researcher in developing a deeper understanding of the complex nature of internal organizational structures, practices and behaviors through the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators. Through the presentation and discussion of the findings and recommendations from this study, educators will develop an understanding of the potential impact institutional behaviors may have on student outcomes.

Robert Terry, George Bogaski, & Nicole Campbell of University of Oklahoma

To facilitate success in students’ initial encounter with college-level mathematics, many Universities require incoming freshmen to take a mathematics placement (MP) test before enrolling in mathematics courses. For the purposes of this study, our goal was to examine the efficacy of augmenting a MP test score with additional, readily available academic success predictors for predicting freshmen DFW rates (D, F, or Withdrawing) in mathematics courses. To accomplish our goal, we built one model predicting overall DFW rates from the MP score and additional academic success predictors, and we built another model predicting students’ MP test scores with academic success predictors. Both models only use information from incoming students’ application process, which makes it a no-cost extension of the MP test scores. Our findings indicate models with increased information about students better predict DFW rates, suggesting possible improvement in the placement of freshmen in math courses and reduced DFW rates.

Reginald Simmons & Alexandra Castillo of Central Connecticut State University

Initiatives supporting the persistence of incoming freshmen are a staple at many colleges and universities. However, the transition from sophomore to junior status can be a time of great attrition. There is increasing recognition that pairing successful undergraduates similar in background and experience with other undergraduates in a mentoring relationship can be effective, particularly for enhancing the academic success of under-represented and first-generation students. This webinar will introduce the audience to Success Central, a university-supported intervention where junior and senior undergraduate students use coaching techniques to mentor freshmen and sophomore first-generation college students. Student coaching has demonstrated results in enhancing the persistence of undergraduate students (Bettinger & Baker, 2014). The audience will learn how mentors are chosen, trained, and supervised. They will also see case-studies that demonstrate the intervention and data pertaining to the mentees who have completed Success Central. The presenters will also facilitate a Q&A session.

Sheri Wischusen & E. William Wischusen of Louisiana State University

Retention of college students in STEM majors is strongly linked to their experiences and success in introductory courses. The Biology Intensive Orientation for Students (BIOS) bridge program, a five-day pre-freshman program at Louisiana State University (LSU), has consistently increased the success of students in introductory courses, their retention to the second year of college, and four-year graduation rates. In addition to overall gains, this program has led to specific gains for underrepresented groups – ethnic, socio-economic and first-generation college. Data show that biology majors who participated in BIOS immediately prior to their first semester were more likely to be successful in an introductory science course, more likely to remain in the major than their peers at LSU, and more likely to graduate in four years as biology majors.

Joanne Goldwater of St. Mary's College of Maryland & Ross Conover of Hood College

St. Mary''s College of Maryland has found success by building partnerships between Institutional Research, Retention and Student Support Services, Registrar''s Office, Wellness Center, ADA, Residence Life, and other offices on campus in building impactful student success networks. Join us as we share how we built collaboration among departments to implement our early alert system four years ago, and continuing with our advising programs, Academic Probation system, mentoring programs, outreach to students, response to mental health issues (which significantly impacts retention), and identifying, collecting and using our data all while on a small college budget. Participants will engage in thoughtful introspection and walk away with programmatic ideas, tips for improving communication, strategies for creating buy-in and building collaboration, as well as a useful list of questions relating to collaborative efforts.

Andrea J. Keith & Lauren C. Bell of Randolph-Macon College

The transition to college is among the more difficult transitions a person experiences during their lifetime. Fraught with emotion, new students—particularly those who are first-generation college students—often find themselves unsure how to navigate the challenges that await them. The myriad support services and personnel that colleges and universities have put in place to assist new students can exacerbate the problem; the sheer number of people available to provide help to new students may lead them to be unsure of how to access the support they need. In this webinar we discuss a successful effort at Randolph-Macon College (Ashland, Virginia) to provide each new student with a peer mentor—a New Student Transition Captain—who serves as the principle point of contact for managing the college transition, and who, alongside other mentors, helps to form a community of upper-level students that is invested in new students’ success.

Phil Moore & Marla Mamrick of University of South Carolina & Megan Schramm-Possinger of Winthrop University

Despite the importance and emphasis placed on college outcomes, retention and graduation rates have stagnated nationally. As a result, early alert systems have gained in popularity. These systems attempt to detect groups of students who have lower than institutional average retention or graduation rates, and then prescribe and implement strategies to assist these students. This study investigates using a measure of academic work ethic derived from admissions test scores and high school GPA to detect students at-risk. The group of students with low academic work ethic is less likely to return each year and is less likely to graduate. Academic work ethic also appears promising when used with existing admissions decision indexes, and can lead to higher retention and graduation rates and an increase in enrollment numbers for minority, Pell eligible, and in-state students.

Wendy Robinson of Inver Hills Community College

This webinar will explore the findings from two recent independent and nationally representative surveys: one for parents with children not yet in college and one of current undergraduate students. This research investigates how messages students get about college from their parents may influence their persistence and retention by shaping their pre-entry expectations for college. Attendees will be encouraged to consider how overtly their college or university addresses incoming beliefs (from both students and parents) about the value and importance of not only enrolling in college but also completing.

Melissa Irvin & Lisa Landis of University of South Florida

On-time graduation continues to be an elusive area of improvement for many institutions; research by Complete College America shows that only 38% of students enrolled in four-year research universities graduate in four years. Many institutions are implementing complex data systems to track student progression to discover opportunities for improvement; however, it has become increasingly clear that universities must be intentional about supporting front-line staff, particularly academic advisors, in the effective use of this data and the accompanying technologies. This webinar will examine a case study within the University of South Florida’s College of Behavioral and Community Sciences (BCS) exploring this college’s transition from a paper-based, prescriptive advising model to a technology-mediated proactive advising model, resulting in improved graduation metrics. Participants will start the process of institutional self-evaluation to conceptualize technology-mediated advising reform while discussing lessons learned during this implementation.

Peggy Whaley, Cindy Clemson, & Jeff Henry of Murray State University

Murray State University has piloted student success discipline-specific freshmen transitions courses in which academic affairs and student affairs personnel collaborate as partner instructors. Faculty who are assigned to teach their disciplines’ one-credit- hour transitions course are paired with student affairs, library, or graduate student volunteers. Discipline faculty deliver discipline-specific content and volunteer instructors deliver content on time management, strategic learning, resiliency, managing college life and successful student behaviors. This webinar will highlight the results of four years of data indicating the success of this collaborative model for students and instructors.

Rory McElwee, Rowan University; Sean Hendricks, University of California at Berkeley; Penny McPherson-Myers of Rowan University

Although many retention initiatives focus on the early years of college, considerable attrition also occurs in the later stages of the student lifecycle (in the second half of the degree program). This webinar will address programs and policies at later stages to facilitate retention, progression, and graduation in the context of the national completion agenda. A set of guiding questions will enable participants to assess and improve their institutions’ later-stage retention initiatives, with a focus on availability of relevant data and completion-supportive policies, services, programs, and campus culture. A '"Completion Toolbox'" containing a data-driven suite of programs, policies, and practices to support later-stage retention and completion will be presented. Strategies for campus culture change to support later-stage initiatives for diverse student populations will also be discussed.

Sally J. McMillan & Serena Matsunaga of the University of Tennessee

At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT), nearly 30% of undergraduate students qualify for Pell grants. In 2010, UT adopted a strategic plan that committed to improving graduation outcomes. While UT raised six-year rates by nearly 10 points over five years, Pell-eligible students trailed university averages. These students were often invisible because they spanned race, ethnicity, and gender categories. Students were also reluctant to voice challenges. To better understand this population, UT conducted a “stayers study” to supplement a previous “leavers study” which surveyed students who were not retained to understand drivers for attrition. The stayers study focused on what keeps students at UT—particularly those who considered leaving but decided to stay—to identify success drivers and student perceptions of programs. Research engaged 700+ seniors in a survey that allowed comparison of Pell and non-Pell students. The research helped UT to understand the story of students with financial need, including challenges and success attributes. This webinar reviews stayer study results related to Pell students. It also addresses how the stayers study, paired with existing data, allowed UT to target coordinated action among advising, enrollment management, and student life.

Alan Bearman & Sean Bird of Washburn University, & Elaine Lewis of Virginia Tech

Washburn University, a publically funded open admissions university in Topeka, Kansas, exhibits how a commitment to good data analytics and evidence-based student success practices can improve retention without a significant financial investment. With less than a $100,000 investment, first-time, full-time retention increased 10-percentage points in just five years. The authors discuss calculated risks, grounded in research and data analytics, taken to re-allocate portions of a university’s undergraduate libraries budget to create a student success unit and develop new initiatives to improve retention and on-time graduation. This webinar highlights three initiatives that aided in this retention success story: the creation of the Center for Student Success and Retention (CSSR), linking first-year student success initiatives to the University Student Learning Outcome (USLO) of Information Literacy and Technology, and a strong partnership with Institutional Research. These three elements formed the backbone of a replicable model that allowed Washburn University to focus its resources in ways that maximized their impact on student success.

Michael Morsches of Moraine Valley Community College & Grant J. Matthews of Lane Community College

Student engagement can encompass many different levels of interaction. Whether it be between student and instructor, among students themselves, with the actual subject matter, or with the various resources and departments on campus—getting and keeping students engaged is a challenging proposition. Frequently, students say they fear speaking in public, being called upon in class, going to the whiteboard, and being singled out by an instructor. Collectively, these fears could be conceptualized as a wish or need for anonymity. Faculty have cited student actions such as participation, question asking, volunteering, office hour visits, and favorable body language as preferred behaviors. These preferences could be conceptualized as a wish or need for engagement. “East is East and West is West, and never the twain…” (Kipling, 1929, p. 75). This webinar will outline the authors'' Elicitation Model and theoretical Student Engagement Constructs to explore psychological factors that prohibit engagement. The webinar also presents many practical, proven examples of classroom techniques, gestures, and considerations for using the Elicitation Model that can help produce healthy student engagement in all academic spheres of interaction.

Stacie Grisham, Elizabeth Johnson, & Yancy Freeman of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Transfer students create a unique challenge for institutions during the orientation and enrollment process. Although transfer students make up approximately 30% of our incoming class enrollment at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), they were experiencing a more difficult transition than our first-time college students. Transfer students were not able to get into the courses they needed to become full-time students or make timely progression to graduation. Students were frustrated with the multitude of closed classes, course waitlists, and course registration errors during orientation registration. This critical issue peaked during the summer of 2015 when over 100 students completed an orientation session without registering for any credit hours. UTC resolved to take a proactive step in solving this roadblock for future transfers. Having successfully preregistered first-time freshmen for five years, the decision was made to expand the process to transfer students. Revisions had to be made to accommodate the unique needs of transfer students, and a significant amount of time was devoted to encourage faculty and staff buy-in to the process. This presentation will explain the development of the transfer preregistration process, the results from our pilot year, and provide an update on our current process.

Anique Falconer & Sue Adragna of Keiser University

More than 50% of doctoral students drop out of their doctoral programs (Gardner & Gopaul, 2012). The purposes of the current mixed-methods sequential explanatory study were to examine the relationship between doctoral student personality types and persistence and to explore doctoral students’ perceptions of the impact of personality types on their persistence. The theoretical framework of educational psychology and retention guided the study. The overarching research questions were used to determine whether a significant correlation existed between doctoral students’ personality types and their persistence, and to determine how doctoral students’ perceptions of personality types influenced their academic persistence. A mixed methods sequential explanatory study was conducted using the correlational and multiple case study designs. In the first stage, 47 participants completed the college persistence questionnaire and the 5-factor model. In the second stage, 11 participants completed semi-structured interviews. The statistical tests included the cross-tabulation with associated chi-square, independent samples t test, and analysis of variance. The thematic analysis was used to uncover themes from the interviews. Results indicated a statistically significant relationship between neuroticism and academic persistence. Within-case analysis showed themes in the personality traits extroversion and conscientiousness. Cross-case analysis themes included cognitive load, finances, dissertation chairs, committee, professors, and institutional and peer support.

Rory McElwee, Sean Hendricks, Penny McPherson-Myers, & Alison Novak of Rowan University

Affordability is a major determinant of retention and completion, and institutions can bolster affordability through their practices. In light of national data and best practices research, the presenters will describe the work of Rowan University''s Affordability Task Force, comprised of faculty, staff, and students, who have engaged in campus study and the development and promotion of affordability-related programs and services. Since its launch in 2016, the Task Force has engaged in multiple studies of affordability-related programs, services, and student experiences on campus. We then launched a campus food pantry and resource center; implemented programming for National Financial Literacy Month and created a financial literacy course; created a program to support faculty efforts to create lower-cost or free course materials; and used numerous strategies to raise awareness among students and employees regarding available resources. This webinar will describe the Task Force''s use of data to create specific deliverables and effective advocacy to impact campus affordability. Discussion will address strategies that participants can use to improve campus mindset and programs that boost affordability at their institutions.

Jared Tippets & Eric Kirby, Southern Utah University

In recent years there has been a movement in higher education to shift the role and responsibilities of academic advisors (McClellan and Moser, 2011). Gone are the days of a singular focus of serving as course schedulers. Advisors are now being asked to serve as academic experts, life coaches, career counselors, and so much more. But how does a campus go about shifting the culture of advising on their campus? Attempting to shift the organizational culture can feel like an insurmountable task. This webinar, grounded in the theory of organizational change, as written about by Kotter (1996), highlights how one public, regional campus successfully shifted their campus culture from a transactional academic advising approach to a transformational holistic student success coaching model. As a result of this change, the number of advising appointments grew 100%, student satisfaction improved significantly, and the number of students who visited other campus support services doubled. All these efforts were made with the overarching goal of reversing a five-year slide in first-to-second year retention rates. The result? The campus successfully stopped the slide in student persistence, reversed the trend, and ended up with a 7% bump in retention rates.

Georgeanna Robinson, Kaitlin Wilcox, & Randall Stiles of Grinnell College

Institutional decision making is typically informed by quantitative data. However, the factors that promote student success are many and varied, and have complex relationships that may not be understood quantitatively or be meaningfully quantifiable. While student behaviors may be measurable, the motivations underlying their actions are often inaccessible via quantitative data. This paper describes one approach taken by Grinnell College to understand student success holistically. Researchers noticed students dramatically improving their recent term GPA compared to their cumulative GPA, but were unable to determine the causes of this improvement from the quantitative data. In-depth qualitative interviews, lasting approximately an hour, uncovered the complex factors contributing to students’ improved academic performance, as well as the barriers they had previously experienced. Barriers that became facilitators of academic success included class choices, faculty, study behaviors and attitudes, and help seeking. Other barriers included adjustment to the Grinnell environment and suboptimal mental health. Use of resources, self-care, organization, extra-curricular activities, and friendships acted as facilitators. The presentation closes with a brief review of how the greater understanding of student motivations underlying their behaviors are being used by faculty and staff in various roles at Grinnell College to inform practice, program development, and decision making.

Kate E. Meudt and Elizabeth Machado of Cardinal Stritch University

In 2013, the Leadership, Development, Reflection, and Service (LDRS) Initiative learning community was created to increase retention of low-income students, students of color, and first-generation students at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Initial results were promising. While retention of students from these historically underrepresented populations at the University was 64% in 2012, retention at the beginning of the fall semester of 2015 for students who participated in the program was 73%. Given the dramatic increase in retention, a phenomenological study was completed in fall of 2015 to determine participants’ perceived impact of the components of the program on retention. The study found that the essential component of the program was relationships students were able to build with peers, staff, and faculty, and that each element of the program was impactful in providing opportunity to develop these relationships. Since this study, the program has supported two more classes of incoming freshmen and witnessed its first graduates. Four-year graduation rates for the students in the program are 8% higher than previous rates of students from these populations, and 25% higher than previous five-year graduation rates for the same population.

Amanda Phillips & Dana Saunders of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

This webinar has been cancelled.

Sherry Cox, Jeremiah McKinley, & Glenn Hansen of the University of Oklahoma

Increasing student retention and graduation rates is a top priority in higher education. Early identification of at risk students for intervention programs or redirection into other degree paths improves retention and graduation rates. Likewise, given the increasing teacher shortage, identifying strong candidates for Teacher Certification programs and graduating prepared future teachers is crucial. The use of predictive analytics provides a promising method in the quest to increase student success at universities and colleges. Our current predictive analytic model utilizes a machine learning algorithm, extreme gradient boosted machine, to identify strong candidates for Teacher Certification programs as well as predicting graduation and program completion. The prediction model, built on historical data, is being applied as a retention and recruitment tool. A strategic graduation and retention action plan, based on the model, is in use by academic advisors and college administrators with current students identified by the model as at-risk for not graduating. This webinar covers the current model and features, application and analysis with active students, the strategic graduation and retention action plan and its implementation and use by academic advisors and college administrators to assist at-risk students, and future directions.

Michelle Ashcraft, Jessica Ramsey, Taylor Brodner, & Hao Zhu of Purdue University

Purdue University has narrowed the graduation gap for low-income Indiana 21st Century Scholars eligible to enroll in an access and support program called Purdue Promise. The program combines full financial need assistance with four years of student success coaching. Purdue Promise is designed to graduate students on-time and debt-free, and assist students in strengthening self-efficacy, self-advocacy, help-seeking skills, and grit. Cohort-based programming designed on best practices did not lead to increased retention and graduation rates from 2009 to 2012. However, the implementation of an individualized coaching program in fall 2013 led to a more than 18% increase in four-year graduations rates by fall 2017. The Purdue Promise four-year coaching model—including individual meetings, online modules, freshman and senior seminar classes, and at-risk data mining—has contributed to the increased retention and graduation of low-income Purdue Promise students, with more than half the population being first-generation and up to 40% identifying as underrepresented minorities (URM).

Candice Powell, Cynthia Demetriou, Terrell Morton, & A.T. Panter of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Racial disparities in retention and graduation rates are a top concern across institutions of higher education, yet scholars and practitioners rarely look to racism to explain these disparities (Harper, 2012). Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an epistemological and methodological framework designed to reveal and challenge power and oppression dynamics between racialized groups (Harper, 2009; Lynn & Dixson, 2013). CRT can provide insight about how racism serves to maintain and reinforce educational policies, practices, and access to resources and opportunities. Increasing awareness of systemic racial inequities creates opportunity for people in power positions to engage in socially conscious action and decision-making within higher education (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Patton, 2015; Robbins & Quaye, 2014). This webinar will provide a conceptual introduction to CRT for retention practitioners and considers how the CRT framework can elucidate minoritized student retention at predominantly white institutions. Strategies for using CRT to guide institutional decision-making are also offered.

Robert Terry, Mélie Lewis, & Nicole Judice Campbell of The University of Oklahoma

While academic factors such as high school GPA and ACT and SAT scores significantly contribute to higher education success, there are often significant gaps in their ability to predict college retention. Research suggests a number of social and psychological factors can be used to improve the predictive ability of purely academic model. The present study will examine the contribution of five psychosocial factors in predicting first-to-second year college retention: financial concerns, academic engagement, institutional commitment, grit, and growth mindset. This study examined data from the 2014 New Student Survey, a survey distributed to all incoming freshmen at the University of Oklahoma. Factor analytic techniques were used to organize survey questions into valid measures of the factors of interest. Finally, these constructs were explored in a regression model to study the extent to which they are predictive of retention, both singularly and among other well-known academic predictors. Results of a logistic regression suggest that students with higher academic engagement and lower financial concerns had a significantly higher probability of retention when taking into account academic factors.

Sofia Hiort Wright & Daphne Rankin of Virginia Commonwealth University

In an effort to provide an engaging academic experience for incoming first-year students, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) developed a 5-week program called Summer Scholars in 2015. In light of the fact that one-third of VCU’s first year class consists of first-generation students, the initial program invitation was targeted towards high achieving first-generation students, student-athletes, and out-of-state students. The goal of the program is to extend an additional opportunity for high-achievers to get a head start on their path to graduation, develop relationships with faculty and peers, and engage in rigorous academic and social immersion. The students take one small class and one large class in order to become familiar with the academic experience. The program also provides opportunities to interact in the community and explore through an academic lens the cultural and natural aspects of Richmond. Summer Scholars was developed by a task force with representatives from student affairs, academic affairs, and strategic enrollment management.

Sandra Walker & Laura Clark of Paul D. Camp Community College

Students Transitioning through Education Programs Successfully (S.T.E.P.S.) was developed by Paul D. Camp Community College (PDCCC) in September 2012, in response to the Virginia Community College System’s (VCCS), Chancellor’s College Success Coach Initiative (CCSCI). The purpose of this initiative is to increase the number of students that graduate, transfer, or earn non-credit credentials. Students are selected based upon meeting one or more of the following three criteria: First–generation, ethnic minority, Pell grant eligible and earned 14 or fewer college credits. The VCCS defines the aforementioned students as underserved. Low retention rates among underserved students are typically attributed to lack of academic preparedness, limited financial resources, family obligations, and/or social incongruence. Coaches assist students with college survival skills, goal setting, life skills development, and on/off campus resource linkages. To date, the program has served 513 students. Data reveal significant outcomes as follows: (a) 70% of students maintained a 2.0 or above GPA; (b) 134 degrees, diplomas, certificates, or other credentials have been earned; (c) over $235,000 in scholarships awarded; and (d) 3-year average retentions rates: fall to spring (77.86%) and fall to fall (49.46%), which consistently exceed the VCCS and PDCCC by 7% to 18%.

Todd Brann & Craig Rudick of The University of Kentucky

Using predictive modeling techniques, we have found that unmet financial need is among the best pre-matriculation variables in our data for predicting 2nd fall retention of first-time undergraduates. Once students are enrolled, their earned GPA dominates in predicting 2nd fall retention, although unmet need retains a strong and significant effect at all levels of academic achievement. A substantial increase in enrolled students with high unmet need is holding down our institutional retention rate by as much as 1.6%. In order to address this issue, we have implemented the Provost Persistence Grant program to provide financial assistance to students in acute financial stress. Although historically our financial aid programs have been almost exclusively merit-based, we are currently exploring options for a comprehensive need-based aid program to improve student persistence. The goal is to combine dedicated funds for students self-identifying with financial difficulties and leveraging strategies to optimize institutional spending and maximize retention impact.

Michael Latham, Randall Stiles, & Kaitlin Wilcox of Grinnell College

Grinnell College is working to promote a holistic approach to student retention and thriving. This presentation will highlight findings from a 2016 conference on “Thriving at the Liberal Arts College” held at Grinnell and centered on the following themes: 1) “An Appreciative Inquiry Perspective: Why Most Students Thrive at Small, Private, Residential Campuses,” 2) “ The Mental Health Support Challenge for Colleges and Universities,” 3) “Emerging Predictive Modeling in Higher Education,” and 4) “Student Success is Everybody’s Business: Bridging the Work of Academic Affairs and Student Affairs.” Conference participants included faculty and staff from a dozen highly-selective liberal arts colleges, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM), the University of Iowa, Civitas Learning, and the RAND Corporation. Thriving students are engaged in the learning process, invest effort to reach important educational goals, manage their time and commitments effectively, connect in healthy ways to other people, are optimistic about their future and positive about their present choices, and are committed to making a meaningful difference in the world around them. This presentation will focus on reasons why many students at liberal arts colleges thrive, the strategies used to identify and support them, and several key challenges we encounter in providing support.

Tracey Childs of Spring Hill College

Southeast College is a small, liberal arts, religious-based college committed to student success. In 2014, the college designed and implemented an early alert system to identify first-year students who struggle with the transition from high school to college. Students who are identified within the system are connected to campus resources in an effort to correct behaviors that will jeopardize their college careers. By the nature of their contact with students, faculty have an important role in the early alert process. They are often the initiators of alerts for first-year students. As part of a dissertation in practice, an exploratory case study was conducted to determine how faculty attitudes and perceptions affected their participation in the early alert process at Southeast College. The 2015 cohort of faculty (n=94) was surveyed to assess their attitudes and perceptions about the early alert process as well as give them an opportunity to volunteer to participate in in-depth interviews. Four faculty participated in in-depth interviews to provide a deeper understanding of the survey data. This presentation will share the results of the case study as well as strategies that may help to increase faculty participation in the early alert process.

Courtney Walters & Ki Byung Chae of The University of North Carolina at Pembroke

The Striving Toward Academic Recovery (STAR) Program is a noncognitive and counseling-based program for academic at-risk college students. Interventions are individualized and counseling-based with a focus on noncognitive factors, measured by the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) and College Self-Efficacy Inventory (CSEI). This study, which began during the Fall 2015 semester, investigated the effect of the STAR Program on academically at-risk college students’ grade point average (GPA), self-efficacy, and awareness of study habits and academic mindsets. The results indicate that the intervention group’s GPA increased significantly along with CSEI total and subscale scores and LASSI scale scores. The results suggest that the STAR Program is an effective intervention on successful student retention and performance.

Valeria Garcia, Charlene Herreid, & Michelle Bombaugh of The University of South Florida

The University of South Florida (USF) is a public metropolitan research institution enrolling 4,000+ first-year students each summer/fall. Historically, USF has maintained a rigorous focus on performance accountability and monitoring, with student success metrics being at the core. This level of monitoring has been enhanced with the emphasis on performance-based funding across Florida. To streamline the accountability work around student success metrics (e.g., retention, graduation rates), the university organized a Retention Committee to unify and incorporate a variety of strategies, including the use of predictive analytics (in-house, off-the shelf), a case-management approach to students, and cross-unit efforts to efficiently increase retention while maximizing resources. USF’s first-year retention rate has hovered at 89% and in order to improve the rate, the university has understood the need to focus heavily on coordinating the various retention and student success efforts already underway. The Retention Committee utilizes a pre-enrollment predictive model that identifies the top-tier of students identified as potentially not being retained and deploys an array of interventions. In tandem, a list of first-year students and persistence probability scores are securely provided to committee members for feedback on individual student cases. Through these efforts, the university is able to provide targeted interventions for students.

Sri Sitharaman, Tina Butcher, & Kimberly McElveen of Columbus State University

Columbus State University developed initiatives to improve student “access to” and “graduation from” our institution. These initiatives allow students to earn quality degrees in a timely manner. Institutional plans include: 15-to-Finish, consolidation of advising services, consolidation of tutorial services, and enriched services and programs for special populations. CSU embraces the value of inclusion and provides a pathway to success for diverse populations including: military and veterans, students with disabilities, African American males, Pell Grant recipients, and adult learners. Presenters will highlight these initiatives and results from data analysis based on first year students. Research includes these initiatives and the results from our data analysis based on first year first time students. The data will reflect information based on the following criteria: major, gender, ethnicity, Pell eligibility, HOPE eligibility, and special populations. Further incorporated is data for first time first year students who enrolled in 15-To-Finish and students who enrolled in less than 15 credits per term. Comparison data will reflect major, GPA, retention, qualitative data from students on why they didn’t take 15 credit hours. The culmination of the research provided will reflect best practices for first year first time students, and CSU’s dedicated resources for supporting student success.

Kelly Carter Merrill of Randolph-Macon College

This webinar shares the design, curriculum, and evaluation results of an academic transition success initiative at a small private liberal arts college. Launch was a pre-Welcome Week adventure retreat, in August of 2015 and again 2016, aimed at student populations who have traditionally experienced lower retention rates at our college. Through Launch, we sought to provide social and academic strategies for these students, with the hope of improving their retention to their second year. This webinar describes the theory-based design of the retreat, implementation logistics, and the retention and evaluation results.

Sami Nassim & Barbara LoMonaco of Salve Regina University

By the end of 2012-2013, a liberal arts university faced the challenge of declining retention in first-year students, especially students of color. In comparison to the previous year, the overall first-year retention declined by nearly 3% and the first- to second-year retention of students of color declined by more than 15%. In response to this troubling data, a new and innovative model for retention and student success was created and implemented for the next two cohorts. The model identified seven major demographic factors that would likely contribute to student attrition. The model examined the combined effect of these factors on retention rather than focusing on each factor in isolation as suggested by previous researchers. Based on the insights provided by the new model, students at risk of dropping out were identified early in the year and appropriate interventions and support mechanisms were put into place. Utilization of this model has produced dramatic results with first- to second-year retention increasing by 7% and retention of students of color increasing by 23% in two years. The model is currently being implemented for the third year.

Stacie Grisham, Elizabeth Johnson, & Yancy Freeman of The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

One of the struggles many advising practitioners and administrators face is the lack of consistency, communication, and unity across various university advising programs. In our efforts to improve academic advising at the institutional level, an Advisors’ Council was created to address these issues. Since its inception, the UTC Advisors’ Council has established uniform expectations for all advisors, developed an advisor training program, and advocated for important policy changes across campus. The Advisors’ Council also launched our first campus-wide advising assessment process, and initial results have shown both strengths and areas for improvement. This presentation will explain the development of our Advisors’ Council, the process and results from our advising assessment efforts, and provide an in-depth overview of current initiatives. Attendees will walk away learning about the opportunities and challenges experienced by our institution. Additionally, participants will leave with the knowledge of how to create an effective campus-wide advising community, how to address anticipated challenges, and ideas of improvements that could be implemented or modified on a variety of campuses.

William A. Hamilton, Daniel E. Duerr, & Jeffrey M. Anderson of Saint Leo University

The Office of Institutional Effectiveness (IE) is expanding its support of student success by integrating labor market information about pathways available to baccalaureate degree holders. This aligns with recent scholarship on student persistence, as well as with proposed changes at the Federal reporting level, and allows institutions to apply a market research lens to the study of student success. To understand the most promising avenues for this new area of work, we conducted two separate research studies. The first study explores how students use labor market information related to their academic majors—what we term as career relevant information (or CRI). Additionally, we identify how CRI is communicated to students. Our second study uses a content analysis of department websites from 100 institutions to identify common strategies used to communicate CRI and to find effective communication practices. Based on the findings from these two studies, we developed two tools to present this information to students: infographics for each degree that we offer and a dashboard (still in development) that provides students with a mechanism to make direct comparisons of degree programs. We discuss the development and application of these tools, describe how other institutions could replicate the project, and identify how we will evaluate this initiative.

Jennifer Brown, Nicole Iwasaki, & Melissa Jones of University of Hawai‘i Mānoa

A report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that 46 percent of all students who completed a 4-year degree had previously been enrolled at a 2-year institution (Smith, 2015). As this transfer student population grows, transfer programs are of increasing importance to establish a smooth transfer process on college campuses. This webinar will discuss an existing transfer partnership between community colleges and a four-year institution in the University of Hawai‘i system including: dual admission and dual enrollment opportunities, mandatory advising and planning with a designated transfer advisor, connecting students to their major departments at the university early, and identifying the best time to transfer for a timely graduation. Program assessment data on enrollment and success rate of the program will be included.

Michael Dial, Jane Bouknight, & James Winfield of The University of South Carolina

Student interactions with their academic environment including faculty, peers, and student support professionals has repeatedly been linked to a variety of educational outcomes including retention and persistence (Astin, 1977; Tinto, 1987, 2006, 2012; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). The Student Success Center at the University of South Carolina has developed and piloted a comprehensive retention initiative designed to personally connect students at a large research institution with resources as they navigate the rigor of the University. Success Connect is a multi-tiered program consisting of 1) outreach to engage faculty and the assignment of a Success Consultant to all first-year students, 2) an early alert component that includes students referred by faculty and those in target populations, 3) behavior and skill-based interventions via one-on-one consultations with a Success Consultant and referrals to center and campus resources, and 4) follow-up with students and faculty. Throughout this process, Success Consultants utilize a combination of the “action-oriented” model of intrusive advising (Earl, n.d.) with the theory-to-practice framework of Appreciative Advising (Bloom, Hutson, & He, 2008) to aid students in designing a plan for academic success. This paper describes an approach that can be adapted and implemented by student support professionals at any institution.

Peter R. Jones of Temple University

Retention based risk-need-responsivity principles enhance the strategic focus of institutional policies and practices. They help identify who receives attention (highest risk), what interventions to employ (matched to need) and when the interventions should be implemented. Temple University is moving from a mostly passive-reactive model of student support to more proactive interventions utilizing risk-needs-responsivity principles to improve student retention. Risk models are empirically derived using institution specific data. Models are developed for different stages of an undergraduate career and are revised annually. The specific predictors vary by type of student and stage of academic career. The variety of risk factors support the belief that risk-needs based interventions should not be generic, one size fits all approaches. They should respond to the specific risk profile of students and the different demands of their school/college. Appropriate and adequate institutional resources are essential to successful intervention – particularly academic advising, student support programs and financial aid. This paper describes the theoretical, quantitative and practical development of Temple’s risk based retention program and discusses current plans for continued enhancement. Though retention data lag interventions by a few years the early evidence at Temple is positive – with improvements in both retention and graduation rates.

Lynn Briggs of Eastern Washington University

This presentation emerges from a long-term mixed-methods study of the effects of a mental skills training curriculum on English composition students. Our focus here is on how two aspects of the qualitative data—analysis of students’ reflective essays and interview data—demonstrate the potential for the use of mental skills training as a curricular model for introductory writing courses. Our data indicates that the mental skills curriculum made students aware of how they adjust their mindset to find success, how they could enact specific strategies to facilitate this adjustment, how they view the benefits of such an adjustment as effective beyond the composition classroom, and how they could use a growth mindset to view failure as a learning tool. Finally, the results of this study will be contextualized within the fields of student success and Rhetoric and Composition, and a new model for a general, university-wide orientation for student success and retention will be offered.

Nathan Miller of Columbia College of Missouri

Student retention is an important systemic, institutional, and student concern, and dialogue on the topic has gained prominence in the postsecondary education discourse (Miller, 2014). In response, colleges and universities are working to improve student success through programs housed in multiple organizational divisions such as Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and Enrollment Management. In order to develop a campus-wide and longitudinal student success plan, administrative functions must be in place to accommodate the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs across institutional silos. Cross-institutional coordination of these activities will aid in the creation of persistence and completion initiatives that provide support throughout the student lifecycle. This report outlines administrative functions that will serve as catalysts for these types of student persistence and completion programs. Four administrative areas are discussed: analytics and data management, administrative procedures and policies, academic policies and environment, and access to and expansion of student services. Examples of cross-institutional activities in these areas are included, and results on program design, implementation, and evaluation are addressed.

Agnes I. Caldwell & Bridgette Winslow of Adrian College

Two years of declining retention rates at Adrian College resulted in a comprehensive study of attrition. The analysis showed five areas of concern: late depositors, at-risk incoming students, male athletes in basketball and football, out-of-state students, and African American males. An intentional re-structuring of programs and initiatives resulted in significantly higher retention rates in many of these areas of concern including: the at-risk program (56-96%), football retention (33% to 78%), basketball retention (36% to 95%) during fall 2014. This session will share program improvements based on organization and culture theory applied to academic and non-academic programming with a checklist to guide future cross-division planning.

Whitney Scott of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Academic Connections in Education (ACE) is a Noel-Levitz award winning program that supports students returning to The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) after academic suspension or with an approved academic suspension appeal. The program focuses on guiding students in creating positive and lasting connections with faculty, staff, and resources at UNCG. The program provides students a safe and collaborative environment to explore the emotions of being suspended, define their personal success, and create goals for a successful future. Data shows retention rates (after one year) increased 10% (and continues to rise) for students when they participated in the program their first semester after returning from suspension. This paper will provide information about student demographics, retention rates, and programmatic practices that have helped make ACE a successful program for retaining students after academic suspension.

Lyssa L. Thaden of Eastern Washington University & Jacqueline Carroll of Truckee Meadows Community College

A recent report by Higher One and EverFi, which documented results of a survey of almost 44,000 students nationwide (over 90% freshmen), found students feel particularly underprepared when it comes to managing their finances. In fact, only 58% of the respondents felt prepared to manage their money – versus 73% of them who felt prepared to keep up with coursework (Higher One & EverFi, 2015). With finances remaining one of the top reasons students provide for dropping out of school, and student loan debt continuing to mount, financial preparedness needs to become – or remain – an institutional student success objective. Students themselves believe this to be the case with 65% of survey respondents indicating it would be somewhat or very appealing to have their alma mater provide financial literacy (Melior Group & American Student Assistance, 2011). This paper reviews the importance of financial literacy and overall student success, and documents changes in knowledge, confidence and behavior with the utilization of one online program. A discussion of how schools can approach this issue – in both integrative and substantive ways – provides suggestions for direction and success.

Nicole T. Carr of University of South Alabama

Since the 2010 academic year, we have focused on improving student success and persistence. Our goal is a year one retention rate of 80% and a six year graduation rate of 50%. Over three cohorts (2011-2013) we improved institutional retention by six percent (from 65% to 71%). With little attention to completion, our graduation rate was generally in the mid-upper 30s. However, beginning with the 2011 cohort, we have seen small annual increases in persistence for four years, and anticipate upward trending six-year graduation rates. Initiative development, implementation, and assessment, coupled with policy adjustments, resulted in normative changes at our institution and appear to be shifting culture. Our multipronged approach makes it difficult to tease out the specific contribution of any one change; however it also enables us to quickly make improvements in many areas related to student academic success. In this presentation, I will describe our course of action and present data related to specific elements, discuss items that appear to be “game changers,” and share what appear to be key elements in the change process and how to capitalize on those for quick wins in the student success arena.

Cathy Alexander, Maria Kohnke, & Angela Naginey of California Lutheran University

How do you overcome the challenges/roadblocks of “fully” implementing a comprehensive set of initiatives to increase the retention and graduation rates of students? Beginning in fall 2007, California Lutheran University did just that with surprising results, a more connected freshman class, and higher retention and graduation rates for both freshmen and transfer populations. The end result is a nine percent increase in the graduation rate of first-time freshmen and a three percent increase in second year retention or graduation for transfer students. The University employed many strategies to address the needs of our students to increase student success; without a major increase in funding. Previously, the University had implemented many of the recommended strategies for retaining first-year students in the first year. This paper delineates the strategies involved, implementation processes, and the data used to inform decision-making and assessment outcomes.

Amber R. Smith, University of Arkansas-Little Rock

Mia D. M. Phillips, University of Arkansas-Little Rock Practitioners at a metropolitan, four-year university have created student success programming that resulted in a 90 percent semester-to-semester retention rate of African American female students enrolled in the program. The primary goal of the program is to retain and graduate minority students. The program subscribes to the Strategy, Unique Approach, Relationship, and Fun (SURF) model, an original programming approach found effective for retaining and graduating minority students, which fuses academic success strategies, relationship building, and fun using creative and inexpensive ways to improve student success programming with tools that are already at a university’s disposal. Even with limited resources, a dynamic student success programming initiative can be developed to yield optimal retention and graduation results.

Melissa Brocato, Louisiana State University

The Center for Academic Success (CAS) at Louisiana State University has partnered with campus units to create an award-winning metacognitive learning strategies program for first-year students on warning or probation (earning < 2.0 GPA). The program is designed to help first-year students acquire the skills required to successfully complete college-level coursework and increase their retention from first to second year. Research shows that learning strategies education is directly correlated to improving student performance, persistence, and timely graduation at the university level (Cook, Kennedy, & McGuire, 2013; Hodges, Simpson, & Stahl, 2012; Kitsantas, et. al., 2008; Ley & Young, 1998; Peirce, 2003; Wischusen & Wischusen, 2007; Zhao, Wardeska, McGuire, & Cook, 2014). CAS metacognitive learning strategies foster both intellectual and personal development by promoting self--awareness in students in order for them to utilize appropriate cognitive--science, research--based strategies for achievement (Kim, 2010; Lovett, 2008). This presentation will discuss the five-year journey of this program in order to assist others who are developing interventions for at-risk-students. Data analysis and detailed information on program design will be presented, in addition to ways in which the data and program evaluations are shaping the program for future years. Information on logistics, such as locations, budget, and developing campus partnerships will also be highlighted.

Cynthia Demetriou, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Candice Powell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The primary theoretical tradition in the study of college retention has been sociological. An appreciation of development among traditional-age college students suggests that a developmental perspective on the retention of youth in college may have more to offer than the dominant sociological paradigm. This presentation argues that a key question in examining undergraduate retention should be: are colleges and universities meeting the developmental needs of the youth enrolled in their institutions? The Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective is proposed as a more beneficial paradigm than the current models used to examine college student retention. Opportunities and resources to support features of positive developmental settings in the college context are explored and examples of the PYD approach in practice are offered. Potential limitations and directions for future research are also discussed. The conclusion discusses the overall benefits of using a developmental and strengths-based approach to supporting undergraduate student success.

Linda Refsland, William Paterson University

The Academic Development Department of William Paterson University was charged with rethinking how incoming students were assessed and how developmental material was delivered with an understanding that improving developmental education would improve overall retention. This developmental model included comprehensive assessment, small group and supplemental instruction, tutoring support, and online programming that prepared students to test out of any initial developmental placements; all at no cost to students. Summer refreshers and workshops were designed to include mastery and individualized instruction using skills diagnostics, high levels of feedback and support, small workshop sizes, and tutoring prior to students matriculating in the fall. Program evaluation was built into the model and included measures of short term gains: completion rates and pass rates, and long term outcomes: success in college level coursework, longitudinal tracking of retention and timely degree completion. The program has reduced the number of students with developmental requirements from 68% to 25% and students in the program show improved time to degree, four year graduation rates and retention when compared to non-participants.

Marguerite Weber, Cabrini College

The University of Baltimore (UB) created a first and second year experience initiative based on proven best practices. Although UB has experienced success in first to second year retention, college completion rates for our new population of native students are disappointing, given the investments in doing the right things for students’ early college experiences. This presentation provides a brief history of the program, the characteristics of the students, and the program outcomes, and then this work identifies “next step” approaches. The purpose of the work is to provide a case study for implementation of high impact practices and to encourage reflections on what counts and what matters in the college completion agenda. It is likely that universities with access missions need new measures of student success.

Allyson Straker-Banks, Montclair State University

Michele Campagna, Montclair State University James Davison, Montclair State University Daniel Jean, Montclair State University Tara Morlando Zurlo, Montclair State University College persistence studies continue to underscore the importance of implementing excellent retention practices to successfully engage and guide college students through their undergraduate experience. When a university seeks to improve the overall effectiveness of its retention services on several student success measures, a strategic plan is put in place to sharply increase the systematic use of data findings in order to achieve this goal. The significant benefits of working collectively through cross-divisional campus partnerships in the analysis and utilization of retention data will be shared. Specific examples of how the data helped to improve the delivery of services to students will be given. Future implications for the refinement of data management processes and the maintenance of a system of ongoing assessment and data review will also be discussed.

Desireé A. Butler-McCullough, University of Tennessee at Martin

Johanna van Zyl, University of Tennessee at Martin Probability models were developed to determine the probability of graduation for University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) students through the use of their ACT Composite, ACT Sub Scores and High School Grade Point Average (HSGPA). Graduation status for each student was coded in binary form and binary logistic regression was used to develop models for the university and for each college, department and major. This presentation will discuss selected models from the results. This study not only benefits the University of Tennessee at Martin for recruitment purposes but also current students at the university. Current students can use this to determine whether their scholastic strengths have led to success in graduating with a certain major from previous students with similar scholastic strengths. On a secondary basis, the study can serve as a guideline for other educational institutions who would like to conduct a similar investigation themselves.

Gina Beyer, Arizona State University

James Lewis, Arizona State University Ken Miller, Arizona State University Ginny Saiki, Arizona State University Probationary students nationally have extremely low retentions rates. These students are often resistant, lacking focus, and facing emotional challenges that make retention efforts particularly difficult. At Arizona State University, all probationary students are required to pass a 1-credit course designed to improve their academic trajectory and improve retention rates. This paper discusses the extremely positive data that Arizona State has collected – both quantitative and qualitative – and it discusses the proven techniques for overcoming the challenges of working with probationary students. Firmly grounded in psychological research and application in higher education, these techniques are facilitated by devoted faculty committed to working closely with probationary students both in and out of the classroom. The pedagogical strategies and techniques discussed are also relevant and beneficial for academic advisors and other university professionals working with probationary students and will provide helpful techniques for dealing with resistant students.

Kyle Ellis, Travis Hitchcock, & Jennifer Phillips of University of Mississippi

Academic advisors are often the front line professionals in institutions'' freshmen retention efforts. Academic advisors have the ability to support freshmen through a variety of transition issues related to student success, satisfaction, and persistence. At The University of Mississippi, the Center for Student Success and First-Year Experience (CSSFYE) utilizes professional advisors to provide guidance and support to the freshman cohort. The University''s retention for first-time, full-time freshmen in 2009 was 81%. Based on a recommendation by the University''s Retention Steering Committee, professional advisors began working with more freshmen. The 2012 freshman cohort had a fall-to-fall retention rate of 85.6%, thus demonstrating the significant role that academic advising can play in student persistence. Each year the number of advisees in the CSSFYE has grown to approximately 80% of the freshman cohort. The CSSFYE''s administrators and advisors are excited to offer key insights on the roles and responsibilities advisors play in freshman retention initiatives. Join us as we discuss our journey, successful cross-campus collaborations, and current initiatives that have helped us promote academic advisors'' roles in retention to the campus community.

Alexandra Yanovski, Temple University

Sophomore year is a critical time for many students. As the excitement of first year of college subsides and students begin to delve deeper into their major coursework, some may experience a sense of uncertainty even if they have already declared a major. This period of “sophomore slump” is marked by second-guessing curricular choices, reviewing of ambitions and sometimes accessing major personal life decisions. During this time students should begin to think about internships, employment and housing, and to visualize how their potential career paths may unfold. Ideally students should be developing new skills and professional competencies, building meaningful interpersonal relationships, developing emotional intelligence skills and establishing a firm sense of identity. Although most universities support first year and sometimes transfer students through transition courses, few offer sophomore seminars to their student population. Temple University''s University Seminar 2001, Sophomore Seminar: Planning for Success is a 1-credit academic course introduced in the fall of 2008 that provides sophomores opportunities to work on professional planning and development. Course topics include individual strengths exploration, academic majors, potential career paths, internship preparation, research opportunities, campus involvement, graduate school preparation, and career transition preparation. An essential component of the course is a close relationship with the career center.

Jebediah Gorham, Victor Velazquez, & Aaron Rock of Southern Vermont College

Colleges that serve vulnerable students are familiar with issues surrounding student attrition. Astin (1985), Pascarella (1985) and Tinto (1993) theorize on the student change and withdraw process. These theories and others linked to impact models show commonality in factors perceived as affecting persistence and achievement. The student experience is ultimately the construct of cognitive, social and institutional factors. Hoffman, et al (2005) defined peak experiences linked to certain engagement-themed conditions. Uhl (2010) described practices that enliven the classroom and create real learning versus just “covering the material”. Slingerland (2014) suggests that spontaneity, specifically “trying not to try” can support effectiveness without forcing outcomes. This is similar to the psychological concept of “flow”. The current study seeks to understand student perceptions of a retention-focused curriculum. The Business Administration curriculum offers opportunities for student-centered learning, self-directed teamwork, community partnerships and risk-taking. Quantitative and qualitative evidence from this study indicated that the curriculum supported the ‘peak student experience’ and therefore retention through faculty involvement strategies, high level engagement, social development and community collaboration.

Deirdre Heistad, Kristin Moser, & Kristin Woods of University of Northern Iowa

Freshmen who enrolled in a first-year only section of a general education course their first semester at the University of Northern Iowa in 2012 were retained at a rate of 85.6% into their second year of college, in comparison to 79.6% of those who did not take a first-year only section. One key aspect of these freshmen-only sections is the mentoring relationship between host instructors, course-embedded peer mentors, and first-year students. The peer mentors in these classes are 2nd, 3rd, or 4th year students who work with the host instructors to effectively address students’ first-year transition issues. A faculty/staff leadership team and host instructors guide peer mentors in the use of best practices for engaging students, while the peer mentors then model this similar behavior with first-year students. Our data show the presence of these mentoring relationships creates a learning community for all involved, making a difference in the classroom and students’ lives. This presentation will present the research we have done illustrating why this classroom-based faculty-peer mentoring program works, using survey and retention data. This model has worked well across disciplines and existing general education courses at the university, and therefore can serve as a model for other campuses.

Janice Zummo, Medgar Evers College-City University of New York

Vincent Banrey, York College-City University of New York This presentation integrates the findings from two research studies focused on improving student retention. The rationale for integrating the findings from the two studies is to provide a theoretical model of student success and retention that includes a programmatic and institutional focus. One case study conducted at a public community college examined student success within a programmatic structure that included counseling, academic support, mentoring and financial assistance. This study focused on how students transition and are integrated into the institution via support structures. The other case study conducted at a small, private, liberal arts college examined collaborations between academic and student affairs with a focus on institutional structures. The findings of both studies are summarized and integrated to highlight the importance of student support services and organizational structures in improving student success and retention. The findings of both studies indicate that support services delivered in a collaborative, holistic and team approach support students in their educational experience to achieve their goals. The presentation includes a discussion of how when used to guide practice, theoretical concepts and principles could have positive effects on student retention.

Lauren Bell, Randolph-Macon College

Grant Azell, Randolph-Macon College Supporting academically at-risk students is of paramount importance to improving student success and retention in college (cf. Tinto 1993; Kuh 2007; Pascarella and Terenzini 2005; DeBerard, Spielmans, and Julka 2004, Heisserer and Parette 2002). Nevertheless, institutions often wait to intervene until a first-year student has demonstrated poor academic performance, typically after a few weeks or at the midpoint of the student’s first term. For some students, however, even midterm intervention is too late. Moreover, many academic support programs neglect students’ emotional and social health. Beginning in the 2010-11 academic year, Randolph-Macon College (Ashland, Virginia) implemented a holistic, peer-based academic support for at-risk first-year students at the time of their matriculation, rather than after Fall midterm grades were reported. This earlier intervention has led to substantially improved student performance and significantly higher retention rates. In this presentation, we discuss Randolph-Macon College’s successful program, including the data and analysis that led to the implementation of this earlier intervention program, as well as the results of careful monitoring of the students who have participated in the program since its inception. Our results suggest that other institutions may be able to improve student success and retention by adopting similar approaches.

Lisa Helmin Foss, St. Cloud State University

David Robinson, St. Cloud State University Sharon Cogdill, St. Cloud State University Data analytics has been demonstrated to offer advantages to organizations in the corporate sector that use data for operations and decision making, but in higher education, an initiative to implement data analytics is unlikely to succeed unless deliberate plans are made to “naturalize” data into the organizational culture and professional practices. Naturalization has occurred when change is deep, wide spread and systemic, which requires that as many sectors be engaged of the institution as possible, including students, faculty, senior leadership, middle management, and student-services personnel. Engaging faculty in analytics can contribute to the development of projects that constitute experimental research, generating knowledge within the organization that can contribute to successful change. Engaging students can increase the capacity of the number and kinds of projects that can be attempted, while at the same time offering students authentic educational experiences with real-world data and analytical problems. Beyond the usual indicators for successful implementation of data analytics in an organization, engaging the internal stakeholders of a university as well as deliberately developing an internal communications plan holds the potential to increase the likelihood of the successful implementation of data analytics.

Jerry Haywood, Jr., Fort Valley State University

The goal of this study was to examine the experience of African American males (AAM) who did not achieve academic success in their first year of college at a predominately White institution (PWI) in Southwestern Georgia. This study used a qualitative case study design to investigate the experience held by this target group. The qualitative case study approach was selected because it provided the researcher with the ideal means to focus on discovery and insight from the perspective of participants with the data produced being in the voice and experience of the participants. The outcome of this study points to three themes related to the first-year experience of this target group: (a) Engaging with Others, (b) Lack of Support and (c) Unprepared for Transition. The results of the study suggest that AAM have a strong desire to feel culturally connected and included within the campus environment. Additionally, the study points to the need of an established support system with the institution as well as with family and friends. This study advances the literature on AAM at PWIs and provides some insight on the experience of the academically unsuccessful AAM during the first year.

James Yard, Delaware Valley College

Introductory courses in mathematics pose significant challenges to many college freshmen and often become critical barriers to student success and persistence in math and science-related majors. Supplemental Instruction (SI) has an impressive record of improving student outcomes in academically challenging courses such as these, but for those concerned with retention, it also has an important limitation: participation is voluntary. By leaving participation to the discretion of students, SI reaches only a portion of them and self-selects a population that is generally more motivated than average. This is particularly true in freshman-level classes. Many freshmen enter college with unrealistic expectations of success, and many simply do not anticipate the level of rigor involved in their courses. In short, most freshmen simply don’t know what they don’t know. In order to address these concerns, Delaware Valley College initiated a program of mandatory Supplemental Instruction in Calculus beginning in the fall semester of 2012. This presentation describes the process of implementing mandatory SI, and evaluates its effectiveness, showing that mandatory SI dramatically improved student retention and performance in Calculus.

Christopher Romano, Ramapo College of New Jersey

Joseph Connell, Ramapo College of New Jersey With increased competition and calls for outcomes to drive state funding, a strong focus on student success has emerged within the field of Enrollment Management (EM). Integrating research with data-driven decision-making, Ramapo restructured its EM division to break down silos and reframe institutional issues around students’ best interests. In doing so, the offices of First-Year Experience, Academic Advisement and Testing were merged into one unit – Student Success – and a campus-wide academic advisement plan was developed through a faculty and staff led Advisement Council. Using Ramapo as a case-study, this presentation will explore altering institutional culture through the lens of student success to guide changes in the areas of advisement, first year experience and retention. Comparing pre- and post- data of retention rates, advisement visits, student engagement (from the National Survey of Student Engagement) and first semester student survey impressions over a four-year period, Ramapo will reflect on its successes, missteps, next steps and bigger picture takeaways about culture and organization change that can help inform or guide other institutions in their practices.

Carina Beck, Montana State University

Tonya Lauriski-Karriker, Montana State University Jacob Jenks, Montana State University Erin McCormick, Montana State University ChampChange is an engagement incentive program for all undergraduate students at Montana State University in Bozeman (MSU). Using technology and user interface (card scan and biometric reader stations) provided by the campus ID card office and our own in-house IT development, students are able to amass points for participating in a broad range of events and services. Last year, MSU recorded nearly 350,000 student engagements on campus. Through our data capture methods we observed a strong association between engagement and first-year, full-time student retention. The program is critical to supporting student success for at least two reasons. ChampChange leverages extrinsic rewards to encourage student participation on campus. As students accumulate points they have the opportunity to bid on prizes ranging in value from t-shirts to tuition credit. Second, the program provides a data capture opportunity, where a record of engagement and non-engagement patterns for all undergraduate students is recorded. From this effort we are able to develop models to determine who might be at risk for departure. In this presentation, we will describe the incentive and data capture program in detail including goals and challenges and examine the relationship between student engagement measured by ChampChange and retention at MSU.

Agnes Tracy Gottlieb, Seton Hall University

Established in 1987, Freshman Studies at Seton Hall University has three major components: peer counseling, academic advising and a mandatory college study skills course. The program has evolved over the decades in response to changes in technology, student preparedness and pedagogy to include many forward-thinking features that enhance student engagement and retention. This presentation explores some of the lessons learned along the way in creating a robust advising program that benefits all incoming students.

Sunny Moon, California State University-Fullerton

Edward Sullivan, California State University-Fullerton Student retention and timely graduation are important topics under discussion on a campus-, system-, and nation-wide basis. California State University, Fullerton, focused on enhancing student success to improve student persistence and graduation rates and to narrow achievement gaps for underrepresented students as an institutional priority. The present study investigated the effectiveness of high-impact educational practices on student learning outcomes at the program and course levels. Supplemental Instruction is a peer-facilitated review session that takes place in a comfortable collaborative learning setting in which students can openly discuss lecture materials with an instructional leader and with their peers. The instruction has been implemented in bottleneck science courses and has raised course success and course grades, thereby narrowing the achievement gap. The Freshman Program provides a community of students, faculty, and professional staff to assist first-year students to make a smooth transition from high school into college and to make the most of the college experience. They create their own small academic and social community environment, within the larger university setting. Analysis of longitudinal data indicated the positive effects of the Freshman Program on achievement of underrepresented students.

Ernest Nolan, Madonna University

Jim O''Neill, Madonna University Connie Tingson-Gatuz, Madonna University Christine Benson, Madonna University Madonna University has evolved a coordinated institution-wide effort to improve student retention rates and persistence to graduation by creating synergies among diverse initiatives: a five-year Title III project that coalesced and refined a number of retention efforts that had been initiated in the prior ten years; the initiation of a new planning cycle, '"Leading the Way with 20/20 Vision,'" that identifies pathways for continued institutional growth; and the development of a Comprehensive Student Retention Plan (CSRP), which will provide a framework for the Quality Initiative required by reaffirmation of accreditation through the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association.

Jon Steven Antalvari, Kent State University

In 2010, Kent State University implemented a policy that requires all undecided students to be in a degree granting major by the time they reach 45 credit hours. The impetus for the policy was institutional data showing students in degree granting majors were being retained at a higher rate. Kent State University welcomes 600+ incoming freshmen each year as “Exploratory,” a program for undeclared students that has been successfully expanding since 1994. The Exploration Plan was designed to enrich the freshman experience for undecided students and to expedite a shift into a degree-granting program within the first three semesters. The Exploration Plan has six components. Students become engaged in the Plan at the point of admission as Exploratory, when they are required to select one of thirteen university-wide concentration areas to explore first. Linked courses based on that concentration, in addition to a career exploration focus in the First Year Experience Course, the use of the Career Maturity Inventory and a newly-developed career navigation course series are all components of the Plan. Multiple required advising sessions add to the intrusive, high touch nature of the Plan. Although limited institutional data is available at the writing of this paper, literature on the topic of intrusive academic advising/career interventions support the goals of the Exploration Plan at Kent State University. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the success of the implementation of the Exploration Plan at Kent State University.

David Kalsbeek, DePaul University

The 4 Ps for student retention is a construct for reframing the retention discussion in a way that enables institutional improvement by challenging some conventional wisdom and prevailing perspectives that have characterized retention strategy for years. This framework proposes that a strategic approach to retention starts with attention to the profile of the students who are admitted, focuses on ways the university can facilitate their progress toward degree completion, improves the process of navigating a complex institution and ensures that all students’ experiences in and out of the classroom fulfill the promise of the university. Examples from DePaul University will be shared to demonstrate how student retention outcomes were improved when framed by the 4 Ps of student retention. Key measures will be proposed for institutions to consider in evaluating their own retention outcomes based on a 4 P framework.

Loralyn Taylor, Paul Smith''s College

Virginia McAleese, Paul Smith''s College Recognizing that Early Alerts during the semester may be too late, Paul Smith’s College focused on even earlier identification and intervention with first year students, utilizing predictive modeling and the College Student Inventory (CSI) to identify students who may be at risk. Use of the CSI risk factors was very predictive. Students identified as having five or six risk factors out of six had a 267% increase in withdraw rate, a 179% increase in probation rate, a 49% decrease in good standing and a 42% decrease in average first semester GPA . First time student results are compared to the 3 year average prior to start of the support program and include: an increase in average term GPA of 12%, 15% increase in the percent in good standing, 24% decrease in D and 33% decrease in F final grades, 25% decrease in the percentage of students with at least one D or F grade. After two years, we have demonstrated a 23% increase in associate degree completion in 100% of time. Our student success program has returned over $2 million in increased net student revenue in two years on an investment of less than $250,000.

Carla Cortes, DePaul University

David Kalsbeek, DePaul University Many campuses either bracket off admission from their retention efforts, focusing on “playing the hand you are dealt,” or they focus simplistically on becoming more selective in admission via higher test scores. An enrollment management perspective embraces the admission process as a lever in improving retention and completion outcomes while also improving diversity and access. Three approaches will be presented: (1) The use of non-cognitive variables in college admission challenges prevailing assumptions and recognizes student strengths that predict retention better than traditional admission criteria. (2) A rigorous high school curriculum is the best preparation for success in college; for example, Chicago’s experiment with the International Baccalaureate Programme in non-selective urban schools has improved college access and attainment. (3) Test-optional policies minimize the importance of standardized tests while elevating the importance of prior academic success in the admission review. Each of these three approaches can influence retention and degree completion without relying on traditional measures of admission selectivity.

Andy Person, Mercy College

Bill Martinov, Mercy College Elizabeth Holcombe, Mercy College Bogdana Vladescu, Mercy College Mercy College, a federally-designated Hispanic Serving Institution, created the revolutionary PACT (Personalized Achievement Contract) model as a solution to the urgent national need for improved student success in higher education, particularly among low income, minority, and first generation students. Through a “single point of contact” approach, Mercy College uses cross-trained professional mentors in a highly personal method to student success that is customized to each student’s goals, integrated from pre-enrollment through college, and focused on persistence to degree and a career. First year retention rates show that PACT students persist towards a college degree at much higher rates than Non-PACT students. On average, PACT first-year students persist at 15% higher rates since the inception of the PACT model. External validation includes PACT recognition as a “Best Practice” for retention and career services by the National Association of Colleges and Employers; a “feature innovation” by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U;); and a shared example of innovation in higher education by the American Council on Education (ACE) to the White House in 2010.

Leroy Hamilton, Norfolk State University

Kyshawn Smith, Norfolk State University The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of a summer bridge program in fostering academic success and retention at a mid-sized, urban, historically black college/university (HBCU). Using quantitative data from samples of first year students participating in the program and qualitative data from administrators coordinating the program’s structure and activities, findings from this study revealed the summer bridge program displays some success in enhancing academic success via grade point average. Student retention is also higher among program participants when compared to the university’s general population of first year students. Strategies for how program administrators attempt to stimulate these trends through interactions with students are also revealed.

Jennifer Cannon, University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville

Blake Cannon, University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville Retention is a hot topic at colleges today, especially on the community college level. Retention rates on average are very low across the country, and the government is considering ways to combat this issue. In some places state funding will be based partly on the graduation and success of students, and accrediting bodies are looking more closely at this performance measure as well. Community colleges in rural areas, like the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville (UACCB), have the extra challenge of a high percentage of students coming to school academically underprepared, with a low socioeconomic status, and first generation; a triad for student attrition. To address retention concerns, UACCB’s campus leaders created a three-prong approach that was supported by the institution’s Higher Learning Commission Pathways Project and Title III grant. This paper will detail the development and implementation of mandatory orientation, intrusive advising, and an early alert system as tools to increase student engagement and support of all students at the institution.

Jesse Edwards, Florida A&M; University

Christy Chatmon, Florida A&M; University Mark Howse, Florida A&M; University Serena Roberts, Florida A&M; University Since summer 2004, the chemistry faculty at a large Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) has been working to improve student pass rates in General Chemistry (CHM 1045). In an early work during fall 2005 and fall 2006, the pass rates for CHM 1045 were 32% and 30% respectively. In this previous work, several interventions were initiated and the results analyzed. The intervention that had the most dramatic result was the use of SAT/ACT mathematics scores in combination with an American Chemical Society Placement Test. Students who were appropriately placed had an 80% passing rate for CHM 1045. Also, student study habits, extracurricular activities, preparation, and apprehension toward science were correlated to student performance. The correlation showed that science fears and motivational factors, as well as lack of math preparation, were strong deterrents to good performance in General Chemistry. Students in CHM 1045 in 2012 showed that the correlations in the first study remain relevant. Also, curriculum changes in the CHM 1020 course aimed to increase learning gains of students by focusing on less material showed significant correlation to improved exam performance in the subsequent CHM 1045 course. Also, exam averages for exam 1 in CHM 1045 increased by over 30% compared to previous recent administrations.

Samuel Lopez, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Cynthia Wolf Johnson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte In August of 2010, The Education Trust published a two-part report in their online publication entitled Big Gaps, Small Gaps. In this report, UNC Charlotte was identified as one of eleven institutions to have eliminated the graduation gap between both the Hispanic and Black student populations and their Caucasian peers. The collaborative efforts that led to this outcome have been embraced and endorsed at the highest levels of the University for over two decades and have proven to benefit the student body as a whole. Most notable is the University’s goal of improving retention and time-to-degree rates for underrepresented students by easing the transition to higher education (summer bridge program of 25 years) and providing academic support and enrichment to meet the unique needs of underrepresented students (a peer mentoring program for first year students, and a program designed to support students in the STEM disciplines). Institutional data indicate students participating in the University’s summer bridge program over the last 10 years have been retained at the one- and two-year levels at a rate of 8-12% higher than non-participating students. Additionally, their six year graduation rate is consistently higher than non-participating student populations. This presentation will include an overview of program development, highlight retention and graduation data for the various programs, and demonstrate how increased funding resulted from data driven outcomes.

Nick Capo, Illinois College

The economic downturn has intensified the political focus on college tuition costs, but from a student-retention standpoint, we should not overlook textbook costs. In recent years, Illinois College has achieved record first-to-third-semester retention and persistence-to-graduation rates by focusing relentlessly on improving student academic performance. Each semester, however, a sizable cohort still fails courses, so the college has been seeking ways to improve these students’ performances. Internal analysis of causes primarily has focused on preparation and personal variables, but this webinar will advance an argument about the role of textbook possession and access. A preliminary investigation revealed that many students either cannot afford or are choosing not to purchase their textbooks and often are experiencing academic failure. This problem appears to be worsening as the effects of the financial crisis linger, and the college has been simultaneously gathering data about the problem’s scope and testing various responses.

David Patterson, Washington University in St. Louis

K. H. Ahuna, Medaille College C. G. Tinnesz, University at Buffalo C. VanZile-Tamsen, University at Buffalo A big challenge facing colleges and university programs across the U.S. is retaining students to graduation. This is especially the case for Native American students, who have had one of the highest dropout rates over the past several decades. Using data from a large university that implemented a self-regulated learning course for undergraduates, academic success was measured for students who participated with a specific focus of Native American student outcomes. The analyses in this study are based on data for cohorts entering freshmen from fall 2000 through fall 2010 with a sample of 29,319 students, 4,681 (16.0%) of whom successfully completed the SRL course. Results show that the completers are more likely to be retained with specific retention benefits and overall academic success of Native American completers.

Holly Ayers, Ozarka College

Brandy Gore, Ozarka College Ozarka College is a rural community college, enrolling a large percentage of low-income and underprepared students. Our reality as an open enrollment, public institution of higher education involves navigating through shrinking resources, enrollment growth, and an ever-increasing emphasis on student retention and completion. The Arkansas Developmental Education Initiative and a statewide consortium grant from the Department of Labor have provided a strong foundation and impetus for Arkansas community colleges to embark on a drastic redesign of developmental education. With a goal of improving retention and achievement rates and reducing time and cost to completion, Ozarka College is utilizing best practice principles to integrate and modularize our developmental reading, writing, and mathematics sequence. This presentation will explore how Ozarka College is creating an environment that supports acceleration of developmental education through best practice, continued research, and policy development. Highlighted topics will include seminal research used to support the redesign efforts as well as curricular redesign components, preliminary data, and next steps in the redesign process.

Elizabeth Coghill, East Carolina University

Jayne Geissler, East Carolina University Beginning Fall 2008, an innovative centralized tutoring center at East Carolina University (ECU) began serving students. With the establishment of the Pirate Tutoring Center (PTC), the campus shifted from a decentralized tutoring model where tutoring was maintained within departments to a centralized tutoring center. Soliciting faculty support and administrative funding for the PTC required a focused, proactive campaign. Securing a central location, recruiting and training student tutors, identifying course needs and hiring adequate staff were critical in developing an effective center. In the four years since its opening, the PTC has grown from serving 1,282 students/year to serving over 5,000 students/year. Numbers of volunteer tutors have grown from 90/year to 368/year. Assessment of course pass rates of PTC tutees has indicated that students are receiving quality tutoring, and the university community has endorsed and supported the PTC. This paper chronicles the emerging tutoring center, its four-year growth and the unique volunteer-based model. Tutor and tutee perceptions of the tutoring center services are addressed.

Sarah Collins, University of North Texas

Dale Tampke, University of North Texas As a result of the increasing cost of college attendance, access and success programs for students from low income families are emerging in postsecondary institutions across the country. These programs strategically leverage academic support services and financial aid to increase rates of academic attainment achieved by low-income students. This paper summarizes the efficacy of such a program to facilitate academic success and retention in the first year at a large emerging research university in Texas.

Clint McElroy, Central Piedmont Community College

This study was conducted to determine the impact of the Central Piedmont Community College Title III-developed faculty training program on the variety of teaching methods employed by faculty members who were teaching developmental reading and/or English courses at CPCC. The CPCC faculty training program addressed in the study was implemented as part of an ongoing five year project funded by the United States Department of Education''s Title III Improving Institutions grant program. Randomly selected students were surveyed to determine whether faculty members who completed the training program were more likely to use 28 specific teaching methods than faculty members who had not yet participated. Instructors who had completed the training were found to use 21 methods more frequently, while seven other methods were used with similar frequency by both groups. There were eight teaching methods for which the results were deemed statistically significant for both years of the study. All of these methods were used more frequently by faculty members who had completed the training program. This study not only validates the efficacy of the faculty training program being assessed, it also provides a model for other colleges and universities to use in assessing the efficacy of faculty training programs.

Gerard LaVarnway, Norwich University

Cathy Frey, Norwich University We apply a classification and regression algorithm in an effort to successfully predict if a student will or will not graduate. Specifically, the CART (Classification and Regression Trees) algorithm was applied to university retention data. CART is a nonparametric approach to classification and regression problems. It is a very robust method of performing classification. CART has several features that make it attractive over more traditional methods. Traditional methods of dealing with this problem often lack flexibility. Observations for example, are often assumed to be normally distributed. Traditional methods typically cannot deal with observations that contain categorical data or missing data in a natural way. CART analysis often makes progress on high dimensional data sets when other methods do not. The flexible nonparametric approach of CART will be discussed. The classification rules appear in the form of binary trees, which are easy to understand and interpret. Such decision tools may prove useful to colleges and universities trying to improve their retention challenges. CART techniques have been applied to several years of data from a small private undergraduate institution. Academic program specific models for predicting graduation indicate the potential to improve graduation rates by an average of twenty percent across the academic programs investigated. The CART regression algorithm will also be discussed as a useful tool for identifying students at risk.

Holly Helterhoff, Lawrence Technological University

To Be Provided

Jacob Pleitz, University of Oklahoma

Robert Terry, University of Oklahoma Nicole Campbell, University of Oklahoma Our institution, like many, is interested in better understanding factors that affect first-year retention, and ways to capitalize on that understanding to bolster our student retention and success. The current research sought to use existing institutional data in more advanced ways to model predicted probabilities of retention and demonstrate the effect of various factors on that probability. Academic admissions criteria for n=6552 students across three cohorts were regressed onto probability of retention into the sophomore year. Predicted probabilities of retention from a logistic regression using ACT scores and high school GPA were used to designate three separate groups of students—those who demonstrated little risk for withdrawal, those who demonstrated maximum risk for withdrawal, and those students who fell in between these two groups. Supplementary contributing factors were added into the regression model allowing us to examine the impact of these factors on students’ overall risk of withdrawal. This research facilitates a better understanding of how additional characteristics outside of academic qualifications may be used to re-evaluate students’ prior probabilities for success. Implications include earlier, more accurate prediction of risk, and the ability to allocate more specific intervention resources to higher risk students.

Serena Roberts, Florida A&M;

Gita Pitter, Florida A&M; The use of assessment results to improve student performance in the classroom has become a widespread expectation in higher education over the past two decades. However, many faculty members are still uncertain of the way to improve student performance when assessment results do not meet expectations. This presentation provides a checklist of issues to explore in order to improve student performance, and thus retention, through programmatic changes based on assessment results. The checklist will be illuminated by discussions of an institution’s intensive work in attempting to increase student success in barrier courses with high failure rates, particularly science and mathematics.

Kim Sousa-Peoples, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Kristen Christman, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Jessica Quattrucci, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Retention is a campus-wide responsibility. In our current budget climate, it is now more important than ever to cultivate new partnerships and develop creative strategies to address student needs. Essential to the survival of programs, services, and personnel is the ability to demonstrate effectiveness in improving retention rates. As a result of changes to the UNC system funding model and the organizational restructuring of academic and student affairs, two distinct, yet related committees have emerged—the Retention SWOT Team and the First Year Task Force—both charged with the tasks of identifying students at risk for attrition and making recommendations for best practices for first year retention as well as four and six-year graduation rates. Here we discuss the work of these two groups.

Sharon Wright, University of Dayton

Students may share reasons for leaving an institution with a variety of faculty or staff on campus, or nobody at all. To streamline data collection, and ensure no student leaves without at least one administrator reaching out to help, a private, medium-size institution in the Midwest looks for possible indicators that a student may not be returning from the registrar’s office. Communication is initiated with students who have requested a transcript, or not registered for a subsequent term. This presentation addresses how reports may be set up to find target populations, communication with students, student response rates and results, and how this information may be used for data analysis and possible intervention.

Fiona Brantley, Kennesaw State University

Ralph Rascati, Kennesaw State University The Supplemental Instruction (SI) program at Kennesaw State University was piloted in spring 2006 as one of the initiatives aimed at improving retention, progression and graduation (RPG) rates. This program is an academic support program that targets historically difficult courses. It utilizes a non-remedial, collaborative approach to learning that increases student performance and retention by offering peer-led, regularly scheduled, out-of-class review sessions. SI allows the various constituencies on campus to come together to help our students succeed. This presentation will share details regarding the program’s growth, successes, challenges and evaluation as we continue to impact student performance and retention.

Erika Gillette, Sierra Nevada College

Henry Conover, Sierra Nevada College Lynn Gillette, Sierra Nevada College The financial repercussions of losing a student due to academic failure are significant, both for the student and the campus. This webinar will present our peer mentoring program for academically at-risk students that has raised retention rates for these at-risk students by 21% and GPAs for the same students by an average of 26%. We have made significant changes to retain more students that were otherwise at a high risk for academic disqualification. Over four semesters, we have collected a consistent set of data on the percentage of our students who 1) returned to good standing, 2) improved their GPA but still continued on probation, and 3) were academically disqualified, and 4) other relevant data that will be presented. In addition to the tremendous difference the program makes in students'' academic performance, it has also yielded over $4 million in retained revenue, with a 3,053% return on the costs of the program. The webinar will also present updated data from the 2012-2013 year.

Cynthia Demetriou, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

The earliest studies of undergraduate retention in the United States occurred in the 1930s and focused on what was referred to at the time as student mortality: the failure of students to graduate (Berger & Lyon, 2005). Historically higher education research has had an eye toward pathology with a focus on repairing students’ problems (Shushok & Hulme, 2006). To this end, much research exists on why students fail to persist as opposed to why they succeed. Strength-based approaches to the study of undergraduate retention involve studying successful students. Studying what is right with students may illuminate new aspects of successful student experiences which can in turn be applied to supporting all students. This paper will provide a brief historical overview of undergraduate retention followed by factors commonly related to undergraduate retention. Finally, an overview of the recent application of motivational theories to understand undergraduate retention including attribution theory, expectancy theory, goal setting theory, self-efficacy beliefs, academic self-concept, motivational orientations and optimism will be provided. Considerations for the future of motivational theories in undergraduate retention will be discussed with particular emphasis on the value of strength-based approaches to study and practice.

Pat Skinner, Gaston College

Silvia Patricia Rios Husain, Gaston College Don Ammons, Gaston College Over the last few years, a college-wide approach to retention has been created at Gaston College. The main concept was the development of a Student Success Center that would house an Early Alert System, Student-Centered Professional Development Training, Enrichment Opportunities (Learn for Life), academic related student development credit courses (ACA), Student Success Seminars (non-credit), and other initiatives in career planning, academic assistance and academic advising. Unfortunately, there was no funding to implement the proposal, but the programs were conceptualized as “jets lined up on a tarmac” ready to take off when funding was secured. All efforts have culminated in the development of a Persistence and Retention Department focused on student success.

Bill Eberle, Tennessee Technological University

Doug Talbert, Tennessee Technological University At most universities, administrators and counselors are trying to devise sound methodologies to help increase student retention rates. Due to the vast amount of student data that is available, sorting through the data to extract useful knowledge is a daunting task. However, the data may be helpful in predicting future student trends – particularly as it relates to retention. In this webinar, we present several data mining and machine learning techniques that can be used to predict future enrollment. In initial experiments, we applied these techniques to the retention of Computer Science students – a major that historically has significant turnover in the first year of study. While traditional methods may focus on known issues with retention, we emphasize the importance of factors that may only be noticeable through the application of data mining. The goal is to determine which newly enrolled students should be targeted as retention risks. If these students can be identified early in their academic career, this approach may help increase retention rates not only within a specific department, but across an entire university.

Julie Noble, ACT, Inc.

Justine Radunzel, ACT, Inc. The CSRDE – ACT College Outcomes Research Partnership included over 30 CSRDE member institutions in a longitudinal study of college outcomes for 2002, 2003, and 2004 entering freshmen. In this presentation we summarize the final results from the partnership. Based on data for over 100,000 students from participating institutions, we examine annual retention to the same institution, annual cumulative GPA, progress to degree, and degree completion within six years. Five sets of college readiness indicators are used as predictors, alone and in combination: high school mathematics and science coursework taken, high school GPA, taking/not taking the core curriculum (four years of English and three years each of math, social studies, and science), and meeting the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks. College outcomes are also examined by race/ethnicity, gender, and family income. Multiple statistical methods are used, including hierarchical modeling, discrete-time survival analysis, and descriptive analyses. Results are disaggregated for two-year and four-year institutions. This presentation will conclude with a discussion of the importance of college readiness and its implications for college success. We also discuss the goals and procedures for the next CSRDE – ACT College Outcomes Research Partnership. Come and learn more about the partnership and the benefits of participation.

Holly Ayers, Ozarka College

Since the establishment of community colleges as significant contributors to higher education in the United States, the proportion of part-time faculty, in relation to full-time faculty has consistently increased (AFT, 2002; AAUP, 2003; Ellison, 2002). According to the National Center on Educational Statistics (2005), the percentage of part-time faculty in higher education institutions has nearly tripled in the last twenty years. However, few two-year institutions have addressed the need for comprehensive policies that support effective employment procedures, professional development requirements, and integration efforts. Two-year colleges face an overwhelming challenge in developing part-time faculty as an institutional advantage rather than a last minute alternative. Concerns regarding the growing use of part time faculty have been widely studied and analyzed. However, virtually all existing research supports the assertion that part time faculty are as equipped to assist community colleges and students in reaching their academic outcomes when hired, retained, and supported as a viable workforce demographic (Gappa & Leslie, 1993; Levinson, 2005; Wagoner, Metcalfe, & Olaore, 2005). This webinar will address the need for a more relevant and timely exploration of strategies that support part-time faculty and their role in student success and retention.

Dale Tampke, University of North Texas

Many campuses have turned to surveying students to identify psycho-social factors the literature suggests have predictive value in retention modeling. Students typically complete a survey prior to the first day of classes, often during orientation. The survey results inform development of selection criteria used to target students for early intervention, usually in the initial weeks of the students’ first term of enrollment. This presentation describes the development and implementation of an at-risk intervention strategy with first-time-in-college students at a large, public university in the Southwest. Students were selected based on a predictive model; follow-up focused on psycho-social factors indicated by students’ survey responses. The presentation first reviews literature on psycho-social factor surveying and predictive retention modeling. It includes the methodology supporting the development of a predictive model and an intervention plan based on the model. The second section details the intervention and the training for staff delivering the intervention. It includes examples of training materials and describes the assessment plan. The presentation wraps up with a description of the intervention’s outcomes, including relationships between successful intervention and student success as measured by GPA and academic standing.

Joshua Eyer, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Cynthia Wolf Johnson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte The challenges of “transfer shock” and transfer student retention are well established, but effective solutions to transfer students’ academic success are slower to emerge. The webinar will focus on a psychology course implemented to assist the transition of new transfers to a university. Using information from a literature review and informal interviews, a second-year course for psychology majors was revised to a transfer-only course, integrating content on academic skill deficits, disconnection, and misconceptions common to transfer students. Comparative data were collected through an institutional survey, Evaluating Academic Success Effectively (EASE), administered to all first-semester students. The course produced mixed results. Although there was no increase in transfer student retention, the data showed a significant positive influence on academic performance. Specifically, it fostered a higher first semester GPA and earned-hours ratio, and students were more likely to be in good academic standing despite having a higher number of risk factors and a higher percentage of midterm unsatisfactory grade notices than the general transfer population. This webinar will describe how academic courses can be successfully modified to include information that improves transfer students’ academic success.

Bernice Duffy Johnson, North Carolina Central University

Participants will observe how re-purposing of a university unit can lead to student success. Participants will be able to follow a process of student success strategies designed to increase retention and graduation rates. The cooperation of diverse units across the university makes for a successful working model. The University College Model focuses intentionally, consistently, and qualitatively on academic advising, academic excellence and support, mentoring, nurturing, socialization, personal, civic, and social responsibility, and accountability during the freshman and sophomore years. Initiatives include contracts, writing samples, early warning and mid-term reports, engagement sessions, tutorials, success plans, and the transition plan. The Comprehensive Academic Success Enhancement (CASE) Model works with all students from recruitment and matriculation to graduation and beyond. Phase one of the CASE program was implemented to work in a complementary manner to the University College’s two-year initiatives. Intentional, consistent interventions at the junior and senior level are put in place to enhance the students’ ability to analyze and solve real world problems. The CASE program focus is multidisciplinary and activities are directed to ensure student graduation, allow for student maturity, self directed learning, and effective decision making.

Michele Cuomo, Queensboro Community College

Eduardo Marti, Queensboro Community College Susan Curtis, Queensboro Community College Victor Fichera, Queensboro Community College The Freshman Academies, a full scale initiative at Queensborough Community College were launched in Fall 2009. Their design and implementation represents a strengthening of the College''s commitment to student success with a three-fold focus on: Providing a more coordinated student services and academic undergraduate experience; Improving retention and graduation rates; and Building students'' commitment to their future education and lifelong careers. Queensborough accomplished the planning and implementation of the Freshman Academies through close collaboration between the college''s academic departments and student services across an eight-year period. Academic components of the Academies are developed and coordinated by Faculty Coordinators in consultation with their respective department chairs. Academic support is complemented via a streamlining of student support services, which are provided by Freshmen Coordinators who work within the Office of Student Affairs. Faculty and administrators also worked with an external evaluation consultant to design a rigorous assessment protocol for the Academies. In addition to extensive surveys and reports from the Freshman Coordinators, this protocol calls for the use of specialized rubrics designed to measure student learning outcomes. Projected student gains include higher course success and completion rates, higher term GPAs, and higher persistence and graduation rates.

Julie Bryant, Noel-Levitz, Inc.

In a 2009 study, four-year private, public and two-year institutions indicated that conducting satisfaction assessments is an effective method to impact retention (69% - 81%) but a smaller percentage of these same schools indicated that they effectively use the data to make changes (58% - 75%). This session will outline the critical steps in conducting a regular assessment of student satisfaction and the best approaches for using these data for action planning. Successful campuses are tying satisfaction survey results to accreditation criteria and strategic planning efforts and suggestions will be provided for these activities, along with recommendations for implementing new initiatives and establishing communication plans. Institutions will identify how to approach their own satisfaction assessments for a more data-driven decision making approach. Individuals will learn how to: involve people from across campus in data review, establish metrics to monitor the quality of student life and learning, and align campus priorities. Campuses will walk away with a clear outline to evaluate their own process to turn satisfaction data into action. Campuses that are successfully assessing student satisfaction and taking action with the results are indicating that they are seeing improved retention on campus.

Laurie Schreiner, Azusa Pacific University

Despite a widespread belief that there is a relationship between student satisfaction and retention, there has been surprisingly little research empirically linking the two. This study of 27,816 students at 65 four-year private and public institutions found that student satisfaction levels are significantly predictive of persistence to the following year. Logistic regression analyses were conducted separately for each class level, highlighting the specific areas of satisfaction that have the strongest impact on retention for each class of students. Students’ demographic characteristics and features of the institution were control variables; scale scores on the Student Satisfaction Inventory were the predictor variables. Student persistence to the following year was the criterion variable. This presentation will focus on how institutions can use the results of this study to inform their own decision-making and refine programs and services to target the unique needs of students at each class level.

Cynthia Calhoun, Southwest Tennessee Community College

A peer mentoring pilot program funded by a $50,000 access and diversity grant from the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) was developed to implement the peer mentoring program Project SUCCEED: Student’s United for Classmates: Commitment, Empowerment, and Educational Development. The presentation will discuss the benchmarks and strategies designed to reduce the failure rates of the college’s most vulnerable students; those enrolled in Developmental Studies courses. Using quantitative and qualitative data to examine the retention behaviors of both peer mentors and mentees, implications relating to which group benefitted most will be presented. Challenges, outcomes and recommendations from the pilot will also be discussed.

Jeffrey Anderson, Saint Leo University

Three characteristics distinguish adult, online higher education programs: reaching previously unserved students, high growth rates, and low retention and completion rates. This case study describes one university’s action-research approach to tackling the challenge of low term-to-term retention among online students. Three developments fostered the action-research approach to improving the success of online students: leadership focused on student success; an assessment function dedicated to supporting internal clients; and program leaders who value empirical results and work to apply them. Retention related changes, informed by the action-research, are presented to foster interaction about challenges and benefits of collaboration between research and program administration in improving retention of students in online programs.

Nick Capo, Illinois College

Elizabeth Tobin, Illinois College Our title is only partially hyperbolical. For 2005–2006, Illinois College achieved first-year student retention of 71.1%; for 2008–2009, our rate was 83.1%. In 2009–2010, we achieved our highest-ever fall-to-spring retention rate (95.6%), our highest-ever sophomore retention rate (up 6.7%), and a record first-year retention rate (85.8%). Because Illinois College achieved these gains with a very modest initial funding investment, we have thought about why we are succeeding. Our success resulted from a complex mixture of elements, all unified by one primary goal: improving student academic performance. Unpacking our title, we first assert the crucial importance of seven types of data (preparation data, early performance data, midterm grades, NSSE surveys, faculty advisor assessment data, retention rates, and quality-of-persistence cohort analysis). Second, we emphasize the importance of grounding your initiatives on the strong national research. Finally, leaders within the administration and faculty must have the permission and will to implement dramatic changes to preexisting operating patterns. An institution willing to track these types of data, pursue a comprehensive strategy, change whatever interferes with student success, and reinforce promising initiatives with new funding sources, we believe, can rapidly improve student academic success and retention. This webinar presentation is intended for administrators, faculty members, and staff members who are directly working to improve student retention or studying the causes of student attrition.

James Sconing, ACT, Inc.

We empirically evaluate the academic readiness of students attending the nation’s 2-year community and technical colleges using test results of over 1.5 million students who took the COMPASS placement test, which allows us to concord to the ACT “College Readiness Benchmarks” in English, Mathematics, and Reading. The relationship between readiness and retention to the second year is investigated for a subset of students who indicated that a degree was their initial goal. We use the national clearing house data to track students and to evaluate the percentage and defining characteristics of students who persisted to the second year. Based upon these results, we offer suggestions for the better identification of at-risk students and appropriate interventions to increase student retention. We emphasize effective course placement and diagnostics, monitoring student risk and behavior in the classroom, and building an institutional agenda for student success. We conclude by highlighting student readiness and risk factors when building accountability models.

Charles Harrington, University of North Carolina-Pembroke

Billie Hunt, University of North Carolina-Pembroke A significant gap exists in the educational achievement levels of American Indian students and the general student population despite gains attained in various avenues of education reform. A college education is a significant driver in the socioeconomic advancement of American Indian communities. Numerous factors impact the admission, persistence and timely graduation of American Indian students from institutions of higher education. This issue has a direct correlation to the significantly low numbers of doctorally-prepared American Indian faculty in academia.

Jaclyn Cameron, DePaul University

Community colleges have been regarded as important stepping stones on the path to student success. The primarily general education curriculum along with the availability of pre-college level coursework offered at the community college provides a low cost, local opportunity to strengthen academic profiles. This research supports the argument that community college enrollment can be key to student success. The study will compare first time freshmen, admitted non-matriculated students who entered later as community college transfer students, and denied applicants who entered later as community college transfers. First, 4-, 6-, and 8-year graduation differences will be compared. Second, entering academic profile information (including high school GPA and ACT scores) of the groups will further distinguish differences in graduation rates. Lastly, the expected graduation rates of the transfers, based on if they had entered as freshmen, will be modeled from freshmen academic profiles, and compared to actual rates. Issues concerning time between first application and transfer entry, full versus part time enrollment, and number of hours transferred in will be related to the findings. This research has implications for strengthening support for community colleges, institutional partnerships, dual enrollment programs, and pre-entrance advising.

Philip Garcia, California State University Chancellor''s Office

This presentation will provide an examination of a system-wide remediation policy’s impact on promoting higher graduation rates across the California State University. To assess the efficacy of the policy, graduation rates for first-time undergraduates who were not proficient at entry (i.e., they had to take remediation classes) were compared to graduation rates for first-time undergraduates that were English or math proficient at entry (i.e., they did not have to take remediation classes). The all important assessment was identifying those students that successfully completed their remedial work. The assumption was that if students that gained proficiency by taking remedial courses earned degree at the same rate as students that were proficient at entry, then the policy would seem to be working as expected. Separate results were computed for those that needed remedial instruction in math, English, or both subjects.

Cathy Alexander, California Lutheran University

Maria Kohnke, California Lutheran University Angela Naginey, California Lutheran University California Lutheran University is intentionally taking a comprehensive approach to improving its graduation and retention rates as suggested by current retention literature. The resulting Retention Plan is one that addresses the current challenges and proposes solutions to address those challenges on a campus wide basis. The collaborative nature of this plan and goal includes all campus constituencies (faculty, staff and students) to identify, problem solve and implement solutions to the goal of retaining and graduating a well prepared and diverse student body. The first part of this presentation will review CLU''s undergraduate retention plan, the process followed and data used in the creation process. Assessing retention of graduate programs presents different challenges than with undergraduate retention. The remaining portion of the presentation focuses on the data gathering process for evaluating retention in graduate and adult programs.

Kathrynn Di Tommaso, Bronx Community College, CUNY

Attrition rates in programs for developmental students are often extremely high because students experience challenges beyond academic skills in their pursuit of higher education. Programs must be attentive to the ways in which non-cognitive variables (environmental and socio-affective factors) influence students'' experiences to better retain students. This presentation discusses a qualitative study conducted at a community college that investigated the importance of non-cognitive variables to a cohort of developmental writing students. Findings demonstrated that students associated increased engagement and a desire to remain in college with faculty members who cared about their lives, experiences, perspectives, and progress. However, the ways in which some students defined '"caring'" involved a desire for instructional practices that could actually hurt their educational success. These results indicate that faculty may need to change their definitions or help students redefine what it means to be a '"caring teacher'" for positive effects on retention to occur. Specific suggestions for positive teacher-student relationships, effective instructional methods, and future research are offered.

Elizabeth Child, Trinity Washington University

Cristina Parsons, Trinity Washington University This session discusses the use of curricular reform initiatives to improve first and second year student retention, using the experience of Trinity Washington University’s College of Arts and Sciences as the point of departure. Trinity’s CAS is a small, historic, Catholic liberal arts college in Washington, D.C. serving undergraduate women. Most of Trinity’s undergraduate women are first-generation college-goers and they present with widely disparate levels of college preparedness. Three years ago, Trinity implemented a new, highly structured, assessment-friendly General Education curriculum aimed at improving both learning outcomes and student retention. Linchpin components of this curricular reform include foundational skills courses, Learning Communities, mastery grading, and early alert data collection and management. Retention is a key indicator in institutional assessment of outcomes from this reform. Trinity’s outcomes data show that student retention has improved significantly while academic probations have decreased. These indicators suggest that Trinity is both retaining a higher percentage of students and preparing them better to succeed academically. In addition to being significant to Trinity, CAS’ strategies and results may be helpful to other institutions serving undergraduate students who present with significant risk factors.

Patricia Mulkeen, Austin Peay State University

Melissa Gomez, Austin Peay State University Academic success of students is measured regularly. Today, most higher education institutions determine the propensity for success in university-level course work in two ways: the ACT and SAT and high school GPA. While those indicators are important, many students are coming to public universities that serve unique populations based on the areas in which they are located. Students enroll full of enthusiasm and sure of their success. Yet, even those who would appear to be sufficiently prepared do not succeed. Austin Peay State University serves a population with characteristics of low income and low educational attainment. The majority of students receive some form of student financial aid; more than half enter with mathematics deficiencies and many with reading and writing deficiencies as well. In order to learn more about the relationship between non-cognitive factors and academic success, we now administer the TCI to incoming freshmen during orientation. The results have revealed that assumptions we often made simply were not true. This presentation will provide some insight into assessment needs in a very complex academic world.

Patrick Perry, California Community College Chancellor''s Office

This presentation will provide an in-depth update on the various efforts underway to measure the progress of students in two-year institutions, including post transfer metrics of students that have continued onward through the baccalaureate. Community Colleges have received a great emphasis on constructing meaningful baseline progress metrics, and now national efforts are attempting to set standards for progress and also create alternative measures of success unique to the two-year sector. A critical factor in creating meaningful rates is determining who at a community college campus is truly degree-seeking, and measuring similar students at each campus; confounding factors include levels of remediation upon entry, full-time status of students, and other socioeconomic factors out of the control of the campus.

Daniel Jones-White, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Peter Radcliffe, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Linda Lorenz, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities While the literature on postsecondary student success identifies important academic and social factors associated with student outcomes, one question that persists concerns the influence of financial aid. We use the National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker service to develop a more complete model of graduation, transfer success, or dropout. Multinomial regression techniques reveal that need aid appears to equalize the odds of success for receiving students, use of loan aid appears to encourage students to search out alternative institutions or drop out entirely, and merit aid appears to increase the likelihood of the receiving student remaining and graduating from their entry institution.

Susan Liebau, Michigan Technological University

Kerri Sleeman, Michigan Technological University Retention is a key part of institutional success. It is important for the university community to understand strengths and areas for improvement. The first step in gaining this understanding is a retention review. There are many variables that exist between institutions with regard to whether their retention is considered successful: type of institution, whether standard or effective retention is the focus, the specific populations they are seeking to retain, etc. A retention review provides an opportunity to look at overall retention and also focus on specific groups that have been historically successful or challenging, and utilize that information to develop a retention plan that encourages overall retention. According to Noel-Levitz (2005), prior to developing a retention plan, a number of steps must be taken, including a review of historical retention data, a review of retention data by program and various student characteristics, a comparison with available national retention data, a review of retention literature, and the identification of successful retention strategies already in place. This discussion will share the process of completing a retention review using current staffing and readily available data. Lessons learned from the authors experience will be shared. The web seminar will include time for questions and answers.

Jennifer Cannon, University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville

The focus of this webinar is starting retention efforts on a small campus with a limited budget. We know that to increase student success there are several broad strategies we need to follow. We need to engage students in the college experience and their education, promote peer-to-peer relationships, encourage faculty to student relationships, and help students set career goals. This webinar provides easy and innovative ideas to engage students and provide tutoring, career counseling, and other helpful services with a limited budget. It will include what has been learned and adopted from others such as Noel-Levitz, media searches, visits to other institutions and Ozarka TRiO and Career Pathways programs. The strategies in this presentation focus on helping students set and achieve career goals, working with other groups and individuals on your campus to provide things such as workshops, tutoring, and other forms of student engagement. Additional topics include a student success center, intrusive advising, and faculty, student and family newsletters. This presentation will provide practical solutions you can use on your campus immediately.

Mary Lou D''Allegro, Pennsylvania State University-Berks

Stefanie Kerns, Pennsylvania State University-Berks Data mining and statistical analyses at a less selective institution revealed that the relationships between parents’ education level and pre college, first year success indicators, and six year graduation are not linear. Specifically, students who report that either parent(s) or guardian(s) have an education level beyond a baccalaureate degree or do not report parent education level fair worse on some first semester and first year success indicators as well as some pre-college enrollment characteristics than those students whose parent(s) or guardian(s) have a baccalaureate degree. Several inferential statistics were employed. These statistical techniques as well as the results, implications, and interventions are the primary topic of the webinar.

Donna Allen, Southern Arkansas University

Sarah Jennings, Southern Arkansas University Shelly Whaley, Southern Arkansas University J Courson, Southern Arkansas University Sandra Smith, Southern Arkansas University BAM is a unique orientation program that encompasses much more than a typical orientation program. Backed by preliminary research findings, this new twist on a traditional orientation has proven successful. It follows a holistic approach to beginning the University experience. By offering appropriate sessions for specialized populations along with the services to enhance these sessions, individual needs are met. Specialized populations include beginning freshmen, transfer students, veterans, and nontraditional students. In addition to these specialized populations, the vital role of parents is embraced and addressed in both segmented and combined sessions. Academic expectations, transitions to college, utilizing a BAM Facebook group, housing, freshmen seminar, student activities, academic and developmental advising, financial aid, billing, technology, participation in a mentoring program (mentors attend program), and other areas of orientation are combined into one cohesive program. Services are provided for each group as part of the overall program such as child care for students with children, and evening sessions. Anecdotal and formal evaluations indicate a high level of satisfaction and increased comfort level as students begin their University experience. Participants will receive retention statistics, detailed program information, timeline and outline guide for implementation, as well as practical tips for day-to-day operation of the program.

Cynthia Wolf Johnson, University of North Carolina-Charlotte

Ted Elling, University of North Carolina-Charlotte Steve Coppola, University of North Carolina-Charlotte Carolyn Blattner, University of North Carolina-Charlotte Faced with a noticeable decrease in returning student enrollment, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte identified new transfers as the single largest attrition-prone population. Presenters will describe a process that identified barriers to the success and retention of the transfer student population. An inter-divisional working group was formed to research causes of transfer student attrition and to propose an integrated series of programs and services to address issues specific to this population. Sample outcomes included: identification of risk factors, development of data-informed decision-making processes, and increased student success and retention. Programs that were developed and reframed included: admissions, community college support, new student orientation, academic advising, University College to assist new and transitioning students, campus engagement, and career planning. Sample data collection and assessment methods included: real time evaluation of new student orientation, early analysis of social and academic engagement and program participation, academic achievement metrics, and retention. Presenters will share multiple lessons learned and how this process is being examined by the University of North Carolina system and its constituent campuses, of which this institution enrolls the largest number of transfer students.

Paula Yanish, Aims Community College

Marti Demarest, Aims Community College Aims Community College introduced a new program entitled Emerging Scholars in fall 2007 to serve underprepared students and improve retention rates for this population. Specifically, the program was established to assist incoming, degree/certificate-seeking students who placed into at least two levels of remediation (English/math, math/reading, reading/English) with adjustment to college issues and successfully transitioning to college-level courses. Contained within this paper is a description of the evolution of this program including national, state, and institutional trend data; the theoretical framework for the program; program elements; results; and implications for practice.

Fiona Bain-Greenwood, Seneca College

Many post-secondary institutions are recording increasing enrollment rates, yet, these rates mask a common struggle: the high number of students who drop-out of their program of study. At some Ontario community colleges, almost 50 percent of students who enroll do not persist until graduation. Research shows the many reasons why students drop out of higher education institutions, but few initiatives try to identify these students before they actually leave. Foundations for Success, a pilot project involving 2,000 randomly assigned participants sponsored by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation in partnership with Confederation College, Mohawk College, and Seneca College, aims to test whether case manager-facilitated access to a combination of academic support, career education, mentoring, and financial incentives will increase the likelihood that students perceived at-risk of dropping out of college will persist and successfully complete their studies. This paper will argue that students deemed at-risk of not completing their program of study are more likely to engage in student support services if these services are coupled with a case management approach and a financial incentive. Preliminary results after one semester indicate a grade point average differential of 11% of students in the two treatment groups in relation to the control group.

Bernadette Jungblut, University of Central Florida

Ronald Atwell, University of Central Florida DeLaine Priest, University of Central Florida Morgan Wang, University of Central Florida Data-mining and logistic regression techniques are used to predict the First Time in College students most likely to be at risk for retention failure. Using incoming students'' academic preparation and demographic characteristics, we predict and test their likely achievement gaps in terms of retention, probation status, and term GPA. Factors employed to make these predictions (based on a risk score generated for each incoming student) include the following: financial aid, scholarships, and grants; high school overall GPA, class rank, class size, and percentile; SAT total and component scores; ACT total and component scores; high school English, math, science, and social science units and GPA earned; ethnicity, gender, and intended university academic program/major. The results have been used to identify which students most need the Knight Success Program; to design that program; and to improve the retention and persistence of the program participants. Over the past four (4) years, we have reassessed this program''s performance and undertaken additional data analyses to inform decisions taken to improve the program''s design, implementation, and effectiveness.

Mark Fincher, University of Arkansas-Little Rock

Adult student retention is an issue of growing concern for many institutions. Adult retention differs from traditional retention much like traditional students differ from adult students. As the majority of student body growth comes from adult students, adult student retention management will become critical to the majority of colleges and universities.

David Mayes, Arkansas State University-Beebe

Retention of students on college campuses is becoming an increasingly important topic throughout higher education in the United States. This paper will present findings related to the success of student support services and programs in the retention of students at Arkansas State University-Beebe (ASUB). ASUB is a rural, two-year college with a student body of approximately 4,000, across each of its four campuses. While the composition of our student body is continuously changing, many of our students continue to be non-traditional students, first-generation students, and low-income students. This research will allow us to look at success rates of typical student services on the retention of these types of students. Areas to be addressed will include student organizations, residence halls, new student orientation, the learning center, guidance services, financial aid, admissions, and student support services. While it is widely accepted that these types of student programs are tied to student retention, it is important to continue to provide empirical evidence supporting this fact across a wide range of settings and student body compositions. This research will present ASUB’s efforts toward this goal.

Sarah Lang, Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis

Attrition from the biology major is a complex problem because biology is the most popular of the STEM disciplines and thus loses the greatest number of individuals. Using a sequential, explanatory, mixed methods design, this paper compared students who persisted in the major with students who left the major by examining how their college biology experiences figured into their persistence in or departure from the major. All participants entered The University of Texas at Austin as biology freshmen in the fall semesters of 2001 through 2004; 319 students responded to a questionnaire developed for the study; and 35 students participated in semi-structured life story interviews and homogenous focus groups. Findings of this study demonstrate: 1) Biology persisters did not actively decide to stay in the biology major; they chose not to leave; 2) Biology switchers did not leave biology due to preference for other disciplines; they left due to difficulties or dissatisfaction with aspects of the biology major, including their courses, faculty, and peers; and 3) Performance, particularly in introductory coursework, had a powerful, though differential effect on persistence, depending on how well participants performed in non-biology coursework or in comparison to their peers.

Peter Collier, Portland State University

Expertise development mentoring provides new students with useful information about “what to do in order to succeed at the university”, insights into the culture of higher education, and tips on how to become “more expert” students. Incorporating concepts from developmental advising, skill acquisition, and identity development, this form of mentoring goes beyond informing students about the range of support services available on campus, providing scripts for how to use specific campus resources appropriately as well as strategies for key campus interactions. In this paper we examine the effectiveness of this approach through a case study of a U.S. Department of Education FIPSE Program-funded intervention designed to improve first-generation student academic success and retention at Portland State University, the Students First Mentoring Project (SFMP). After describing the key elements of this intervention, along with the underlying conceptual model, we present three years (2005-2008) of program results to establish that the program positively impacts first-generation student’s academic performance and persistence. We conclude by discussing the implications of this successful expertise-development mentoring program for first generation students and the colleges and universities seeking to support these students.

Kristi Meyer, University of Texas-San Antonio

Jinny Case, University of Texas-San Antonio The University of Texas at San Antonio has spent the last twelve years developing a highly effective suite of retention programs targeting freshmen and sophomores. To extend the reach of these student success programs, the Graduation Initiative (GI) was created in 2007. Since then, the following has been accomplished: 1. GI Analysts assigned to specific colleges researched barriers to graduation and, along with college stakeholders, developed Graduation Improvement Plans specifically tailored to the barriers discovered. College staff, faculty, and GI analysts have worked together at implementing actions from these plans. 2. Staff of the Initiative also developed an institution-wide Graduation Improvement Plan, delivered to the Provost in July, 2008. The institutional plan incorporates the barriers shared across the colleges, as well as barriers only addressable at the institutional level. 3. In the Late Intervention program, GI Analysts have worked with seniors overdue for their four-year graduation, completing tailored progress plans with them and following their semester progress to five or six-year graduation. Program participants have graduated at significantly higher rates than similar non-participants. Additional student program services include outreach to rising sophomores, fiscal and time management training, and an effort to re-enroll stop-out students so they can complete their undergraduate degrees.

Trey Standish, North Carolina State University

Keeping students retained and moving them towards a successful outcome is a hard task made harder if the student is already home. At NC State, a statistical model has been developed to forecast the likelihood of a student returning for the second year based on demographic and performance information known after their first fall semester. The results are available at the beginning of the student''s spring semester giving academic support teams an entire semester to intervene. The forecast correctly predicts retention for 88% of new freshmen and a score is provided for all kinds of first-year students. The model is a logistic regression that identifies attributes correlated with student success to simultaneously identify retention bottlenecks and create a retention score that is equivalent to the likelihood a student is retained. Statistical knowledge is not required.

Emily Shaw, The College Board

Krista Mattern, The College Board This presentation will discuss two recent studies related to the validity of the SAT for predicting FYGPA as well as differential validity and prediction of the SAT by gender, race/ethnicity, and best language subgroups. The results showed that the changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how well the revised test predicts first-year college performance. Across all institutions, the recently added Writing section was the most highly predictive of the three individual SAT sections. As expected, the best combination of predictors of FYGPA was high school grade point average and SAT scores. There were similar patterns of differential validity and prediction by gender, race/ethnicity, and best language subgroups on the revised SAT as compared with previous research on older versions of the test. The correlations between SAT scores and FYGPA were smaller for African American and Hispanic students as compared to white students and slightly higher for females than for males. As for differential prediction, FYGPA was over-predicted for minority students but under-predicted for female students.

Jaclyn Cameron, DePaul University

Obtaining an affordable education is challenging for students because of increasing tuition and cost of living. Recently, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance (2006) estimated that up to 2.4 million low-to middle-income students would not obtain degrees due to financial barriers. The aim of the current project was to provide support for possible discussions about interventions, techniques, and programs to reduce instances of student drop-out due to financial burdens. The investigation started with students who had received a financial block from the university. Comparative analyses show large differences between financially blocked and non-blocked student demographics and retention. Blocked students in both samples tended to be urban, minority, part-time, and/or transfer students and had a lower rate of retention. The analysis then looked at seniors and focused on those in good academic standing who had failed to re-enroll after receiving a financial block from the university. A sub-sample of the senior students also was further investigated to discover if students were exhausting their financial aid limits. The discussion focuses on potential effects of financial aid on persistence and degree completion.

Angela Byars-Winston, University of Wisconsin

This Webinar will present data from Year 1 of a theoretically-driven longitudinal study of African American, Latino/a, and underrepresented Asian American (e.g., southeast Asian) undergraduate STEM (i.e., engineering and biological/life science) students at a major research university. Using Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994; 2000), this research, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, examined the academic and career development experiences of targeted minority STEM students along with the influence of ethnic identity factors and perceptions of campus climate on their academic persistence. Unique findings emerged from the survey data regarding predictors of STEM interest formation and intentions to remain in STEM majors. Theoretical implications for understanding STEM retention, particularly for targeted students, and practical implications for interventions at multiple institutional levels will be considered.

Charles Harrington, University of North Carolina-Pembroke

Billie Hunt, University of North Carolina-Pembroke One important factor gaining attention in the retention literature involves consideration of the impact of increased utilization of part-time faculty and the degree to which this utilization impacts student retention. Are part-time faculty having an adverse impact on student retention, namely during the first year? Are colleges and universities recognizing and studying potential issues that may arise when incoming freshmen students are exposed to part-time instruction? This webinar will examine the results of current literature on the topic and provides suggestions on how institutions should approach this pervasive issue.

Julie Noble, ACT, Inc.

Justine Radunzel, ACT, Inc. The National Governor’s Association and the Commission on the Future of Higher Education advocate increased curricular alignment between postsecondary institutions and secondary schools to increase student readiness for college-level work. With increased alignment, students are more likely to be ready for college. If students are ready for college, dropout rates and the costs of remediation are reduced and more students persist and graduate from college. Using data for 200,000 students from over 100 institutions (including over 30 CSRDE institutions) we examine four longitudinal college outcomes: annual retention, annual cumulative GPA, progress to degree (earned credit hours), and degree completion. Five sets of college readiness indicators are used as predictors, alone and in combination: high school mathematics and science coursework taken, high school GPA, taking/not taking the ACT-recommended core curriculum (four years of English and three years each of math, social studies, and science), and meeting the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks. College outcomes are also examined by race/ethnicity, gender, and family income. Multiple statistical methods are used, including hierarchical modeling, discrete-time survival analysis, and descriptive analyses. Results are disaggregated for two-year and four-year institutions; separate aggregate results based on data from CSRDE participants are also presented. This presentation concludes with a discussion of the importance of college readiness, its implications for college success, and the use of readiness indicators and alternative statistical methods to identify students at risk for dropping out.

David Rehm, Mount St. Mary''s University

Mount St. Mary’s University (Emmitsburg, Maryland) has developed a comprehensive approach to address issues of student persistence. A significant part of this approach involves an “at-risk” group which meets regularly and tracks student performance within and across semesters. This group provides a number of levels of intervention available to every student and depends significantly on the strength of our Freshman Seminar program and our Learning Services Office. Our approach to retention is ‘catholic’ because it involves every area of the community and it demonstrates concern for every aspect of our students. In short, this support is ‘catholic’ because it demonstrates awareness of and concern for the whole person in the context of community.

Ronald Huesman, University of Minnesota

Tony Brown, University of Minnesota Giljae Lee, University of Minnesota John Kellogg, University of Minnesota Peter Radcliffe, University of Minnesota This presentation will focus on the main goal of our study which was to examine the relationship of student use of campus recreation facilities (CRF), persistence, and graduation rates at a large, public, Midwestern Carnegie Doctoral-extensive university. Tinto’s theory of student departure provides the conceptual framework and an extensive review of the literature on the relationship between academic performance and recreation facility use identified a set of critical explanatory variables. Although anecdotal evidence and studies of student perceptions support the contention that use of recreation facilities promotes social integration, thereby increasing the likelihood of persistence, few studies have employed actual CRF visit counts to quantify use. Since fall 2001, visit count data have been systematically collected each time a student visited a CRF. The linking of visitation data tied to unit record level student data is a unique component of this study. Maximum likelihood estimated models were used to identify which factors were related to persistence, and graduation for fall 2001 entering freshmen.

Sharon Aiken-Wisniewski, University of Utah

The University of Utah is a large, urban research extensive university with a headcount enrollment of over 28,000 students, with almost 23,000 undergraduates. However, the majority of enrolled undergraduates enter the university as transfer students, and the number is growing. In 2002-2003 the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs organized the first-ever Undergraduate Transfer Student Task Force and charged it with examining “issues relating to transfer student success, and to advise the Senior Vice President on ‘best practice’ pertaining [specifically] to the retention of new undergraduate transfer students.” This presentation will detail the establishment and activities of the University of Utah Transfer Center and the subsequent increases in new undergraduate transfer student retention that have taken place since the Center’s inception.

Elizabeth Herr, Noel-Levitz

Tim Culver, Noel-Levitz In 2006 over 97,000 students responded to the College Student Inventory.TM This report reveals the attitudes and motivations of first-year students nationally at the beginning of their undergraduate experience. Over 95 percent of first-year students bring with them a strong desire to complete their education when they first arrive at college, yet only half of them are likely to accomplish their goal. Additionally, students differ strongly in their attitudes and motivations by age, race, and gender. This paper will focus on the general results revealed in the survey and highlight differences between men and women, different ethnic groups, and non-traditional students.

Patti Beck, Dakota State University

Keith Bundy, Dakota State University Isn’t the time to intervene with struggling students at a point before it’s too late for them to save the class? Getting these students “on our radar screen” early, and providing them with information and encouragement at the time the problems occur can make the difference! This session will describe a web-based student referral system developed at Dakota State University, and used by our instructors, academic advisors, and staff to identify students encountering barriers to their academic success. The capabilities of the on-line system for instructors, academic advisors, and program administrators will be demonstrated, along with a description of our process, including information regarding interventions attempted, academic tools provided to students, and outcomes we’ve observed.

Michael Cogan, University of St. Thomas

This study explored the outcome of academically dismissed students reinstated the semester following academic dismissal at a medium-size Midwestern University. Logistic regression was utilized to identify predictors that may be utilized to assist academic administrators in making decisions regarding future reinstatement activities. The overall model correctly classified 73.7 percent of the subjects in the sample. In addition, a combination of six factors accounted for 32.5 percent of the total variance in academic status; however, 19.2 percent of the variance was accounted for by a single factor (term of dismissal quality point status). These results indicate the need for careful consideration regarding this little known measure available to higher education academic administrators. This model should be considered for replication by institutions to identify factors affecting student success.

Vivia Fowler, Wesleyan College

Christy Henry, Wesleyan College Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College Peer tutoring and mentoring are effective—and cost-effective—means of providing academic instruction and intervention for students who need motivation and assistance with study skills, writing, and individual coursework. But how can we select and train the best students for these important roles? And how can we keep up with their schedules and appointments for the purpose of organization, efficiency and assessment? What are the most successful means of convincing students that their services are helpful? And how can we compensate and appreciate the work they do? This session will begin with a presentation by the Director of the Academic Center and the Dean of Wesleyan College, describing peer tutoring and mentoring initiatives at a small, liberal arts women’s college.

William Knight, Bowling Green State University

This presentation provides a comprehensive array of student success initiatives that reflect the efforts of many “key players” campus-wide at Bowling Green State University. On a large and complex campus such as BGSU, it is only possible to achieve desired levels of student success by focusing on multiple initiatives. Building student success requires a diversity of efforts consistent with the diverse student body that BGSU serves. The presentation highlights an array of initiatives that includes BGSU’s various learning communities, first year programs, course-based programs, and programs designed to meet the needs of students with specific attributes. The session offers background on efforts to employ institutionally funded student financial aid to attract and retain targeted student groups with increasing emphasis on student access. This work describes the University’s development of an early warning system centered on the use of feedback from the “New Student Transition Questionnaire” and mid-term progress reports. The presentation includes various initiatives supported by the Ohio Board of Regents Success Challenge Program and includes discussion of evaluation, assessment, and planning support and outcomes, particularly those provided by the Office of Institutional Research. Various organizational changes and enhancements between academic and student affairs are addressed in the context of the University’s Strategic Enrollment Management structure. Discussion includes attention to key task forces and standing groups. Finally, the presentation concludes by conceptualizing the spectrum of student success efforts in BGSU’s Falcon Compact.

Worth Pickering, Old Dominion University

Identifying and intervening with at-risk freshmen early in their academic careers is critical for their success. Researchers at Old Dominion University developed the Transition to College Inventory (TCI) to identify freshmen who, in spite of good high school GPA and SAT scores, are at-risk for academic difficulty and subsequent attrition. The goal of the TCI is to use an index to identify at-risk students before the semester begins and treat them before they encounter academic difficulty. The TCI Index is an accumulation of specific issues that researchers and assessment staff use to identify low, above average, and high risk students. Academic affairs and student affairs staff and faculty in advising and counseling use the TCI Advising Profile to treat individual students. Tracking studies comparing the high risk group to the low risk group revealed significantly higher academic difficulty rates (42% vs. 18%) and attrition rates (36% vs. 20%) for high risk students after their freshman year and significantly lower six-year graduation rates (32% vs. 50%). The presentation will review the development and use of the TCI and discuss treating at-risk students using sample TCI Advising Profiles.

Jon Young, Fayetteville State University

The CHEER Program was established at Fayetteville State University in the summer of 2002 to 1) strengthen participants’ academic readiness for the first year, 2) help students adjust to university life and expectations, and 3) foster the development of habits essential to academic success. Since 2002, the CHEER Program has undergone significant transformations based on evaluations of the previous years. The number of participants has grown from eleven in 2002 to 152 in 2007. Non-credit experiences have been replaced with credit-bearing courses, to include, in 2007 three hours of English, three hours of mathematics, and one hour in physical education. While the program was originally non-residential, in 2007 the program required all students to live on campus as a means of increasing the amount of time students would devote to academic support, supervised study, and co-curricular activities. Since the inception of the program, CHEER participants have regularly outperformed their non-CHEER counterparts in terms of retention rates, hours earned, and GPAs, even though CHEER participants typically have lower high school GPAs and SAT scores than other students. The CHEER Program provides strong evidence that highly structured programs of instruction and academic support have a profoundly positive impact on the college readiness of students who would otherwise be at risk of attrition. FSU’s CHEER Program also suggests two important limitations. First, a summer bridge program should not be seen as the single solution for improving retention. Summer bridge programs must be aligned with various support programs for first year students. Second, a summer bridge is not appropriate for all students. Campuses must strive to identify students who are not so well prepared that the bridge program is not necessary and those whose preparation is inadequate to the rigor and speed of the program.

Angela Long, Northwest Christian College

While working as a part-time employee at a rural Oregon community college during the 2001-02 academic year, I was assigned the job of collating data that pertained to the number of students who had been administered the General Educational Development Tests from the preceding 5-year period. As the numbers taken from the students’ files were being tallied, I was surprised to discover that the overwhelming bulk of this particular GED population became '"dropouts'" after having been enrolled for two terms or less. As a consequence, I wondered: Was this figure of 44 percent an anomaly, being entirely atypical of what was happening at other community colleges? Thereafter, I met with strategic employees of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the American Council on Education (ACE)—trained researchers who could offer me advice and guidance regarding the most practical methodologies for collecting GED persistence data on a nationwide basis. One year later, I was able to garner and publish significant data relating to the attrition and retention of nontraditional GED students at community colleges nationwide. This first of its kind national study has shown several significant findings relating to the attrition patterns of a cohort of GED students as compared to a similar cohort of High School Diploma Holders. Specifically, (1) GED students who persist after one year of postsecondary studies are as academically capable and successful as their counterpart equivalent, high school diploma holders, and (2) unless community college officials take proactive approaches to retaining GED students at the outset of their first term of college, it is likely that half will drop out shortly after being matriculated, thus resulting in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition revenues. The critical underlying factor shown is early intervention to allow for success within the first year. My presentation will conclude with a discussion on my chapter 5 findings entitled: '"Five Factors for Improving Student Retention,'" specifically with reference to non-traditional students at community colleges.

Mark Poisel, University of Central Florida

The University of Central Florida, a metropolitan university with approximately 45,000 students, is the seventh largest university in the US. Nearly 80% of the 6,000 transfer students who enroll each year transfer from six regional community colleges. The Transfer and Transition Services office has built strong networks for transfer student success, involving collaboration across academic departments and across institutions. This presentation explores the university’s successful efforts to establish successful partnerships to ensure that transfer students are academically prepared, have a smooth transition, and make progress toward graduation. The presentation will review factors that impact the retention and graduation rates of UCF students who transfer from the regional community colleges, and will show that the extensive programming and outreach at the preparation stage positively affect retention and graduation rates of transfer students. Programs like GradTrack at Valencia Community College, Co-Advisement at Seminole Community College, and presentations to student success classes at all six community colleges promote academic preparation, the foundation for successful transfer, retention, and progress to graduation. A key factor for TTS in creating effective programming and improving retention rates lies in the strong network of collaborative relationships with the community colleges and within the university.

Lynne Tronsdal, University of Arizona

Glenda Wilkes, University of Arizona This presentation will update the reader on the University of Arizona''s Strategic Retention Master Plan, the CSRDE Best Practices award winner for 2005. What have we learned so far? Where have we stayed the course? Where have we changed directions? How has data continued to drive the process? The presentation will show how our initial efforts informed and led to a restructuring of University College, why the restructuring was necessary, and what we hope to do differently through this restructuring that will impact students'' journey to graduation.

Steve Robbins, ACT, Inc

We address critical reasons students stay in college via research with four- and two-year schools. Our models incorporate academic performance, motivation, social constructs, and background characteristics to predict third-year enrollment status. Findings from the four-year sample suggest that (1) academic performance has large effects on likelihood of retention and transfer, (2) motivation and pre-collegiate academic preparation have indirect effects on retention and transfer, and (3) motivation and social connection have direct effects on retention, and (4) SES is predictive of transfer. Findings from the two-year sample suggest that (1) pre-collegiate academic preparation is the strongest predictor of all outcomes, (2) motivation distinguishes retained and graduating students from other outcomes, (3) social connection has effects only for those students transferring to 4-year institutions, and (4) SES has effects on all outcomes. The central role of academic preparation and success is discussed, as well as practical implications. We use a case study of a four-year university that is systematically identifying and intervening with at-risk, first-year students to highlight our recommendations.

Kevin Pollock, West Shore Community College

Utilizing a team approach, faculty and staff at West Shore Community College have created an intrusive mentoring program and increased the success of at-risk students in developmental classes. The basis for the intrusive mentoring model, based on detailed research, combined elements of supplemental instruction and intrusive advising with the needs of students and can be a model utilized by small institutions and community colleges. Tied to the College’s accreditation and strategic plan, a project was created to increase the success of at-risk students. Instead of identifying individual at-risk students, the team utilized a supplemental instruction model “D,F,W” report that identified at-risk courses. Data showed that students in the college’s developmental math and English classes had very low success rates, with nearly forty percent of the students not receiving a grade of “C” or higher. Based on research, mentors attempted to assist students learn the norms of the campus culture, find a niche, connect to the college, and most importantly, learn how and where to seek help. Data collection from such areas as student and mentor surveys, success in subsequent courses, and mentored and non-mentored student comparisons have allowed for upgrades and expansion of the program and increases in student success.

Vivia Fowler, Wesleyan College

The success of Columbia College''s First-Year Student Success Team (FYSST) hinges on the cooperation of faculty and staff from Student Affairs and Academic Affairs. To ensure that every first-year student can be as successful as she wants to be, FYSST meets every other week to monitor the progress of first-year students, focusing particularly on attendance in first-year courses. The team depends on input and intervention from peer mentors such as Orientation Leaders, Resident Academic Advisors, and Student Engagement Mentors; Faculty Advisors; and selected faculty who teach typical first-year classes. Envisioned to address the needs of first-time, first-year students, the program simultaneously benefits transfer students who enroll in entry-level courses and first-year seminars. The program has been credited with increasing fall-to-spring persistence of students--especially those who struggled academically during their first semester--and increasing the fall-to-fall persistence of first-year students. The purpose of this presentation is to outline the procedures and interventions of the team''s attendance monitoring initiative and describe the results of our efforts.

Jen Beck, Texas State University-San Marcos

Susan Thompson, Texas State University-San Marcos PAWS Preview is a one and one-half day “just-in-time” orientation experience held before the first day of classes each semester serving approximately 3,200 new freshmen and freshman-transfer students in the fall and 300 students in the spring. Students attend required sessions on diversity, college note taking, computer use, library use, and alcohol education; receive e-mail accounts and learn campus computer resources; meet their University Seminar instructors and classmates; participate in a student organizations and an on-campus job fairs; attend presentations on student services; and have opportunities to socialize, learn campus traditions, and become familiar with facilities, activities, and campus culture. This program is a collaborative effort involving several university divisions. Success of PAWS Preview is measured and demonstrated through monitoring participation rates and program evaluation. In addition, outcomes assessment based on retention and GPA data, and student self-reports on follow-up surveys are conducted throughout the second semester.

Rob Stirton, Schoolcraft College

Datatel Colleague, SunGuard SCT Banner, PeopleSoft, etc. represent a college’s ‘transactional’ database; it maintains all the data relevant to college functions and student academic records. As such, it is constantly updated with new data. Thus, it is not designed to recreate history. Frozen Files capture a ‘snapshot’ of specific data elements in select files across each and every semester. As the name implies, Frozen Files are stored outside of transactional databases. They allow institutions to study student intent (admission/prospect) to performance (end-of-semester) each and every semester. The system narrows the concept of retention from fall to fall to within a semester. This presentation will provide a complete example system including files, data elements, reports, and how it is being used to improve campus projects, processes, policies, and procedures.

Sylvia Terry, University of Virginia

“Now that I am here, where is everybody?” This question is not uncommon. When arriving on a college campus for the first time, a freshman may feel isolated, lonely and as if no one cares. This is especially true for the African-American student who may be attending a predominantly white institution. Tradition, a seeming lack of sensitivity and concern may be off-putting as the student attempts to negotiate his college environment. Without support, he may simply choose to leave. At the University of Virginia, there are several initiatives contributing to its having among the highest African-American graduation rates nation wide, over 85%. This is especially significant in light of the institution’s past history of slavery and segregation. Perhaps one of its most important retention efforts is its Office of African-American Affairs’ Peer Advisor Program. Drawing upon the principles of retention, its work is to help provide an environment which is welcoming and supportive of new students. This presentation will explain the program’s philosophy and structure (an outgrowth and extension of the admissions process), its practices and procedures (Peer Advisor outreach, programming, the director’s role, “the Raising the Bar” study initiative, and technology), the program’s effectiveness (for first-year students) and benefits (for the Peer Advisors themselves.)