Goals made to increase student retention
First-year, high-ability, international, ethnic-minority, transfer and Extension students are those being specifically targeted with retention goals at Utah State University, according to the June draft of retention goals and strategies.
The goals are part of a retention study done by Noel-Levitz, an enrollment management company hired by USU to assess its retention strategy.
“We are recruiting graduates, not just students,” said Brenda Williams, consultant with Noel-Levitz.
“Retention doesn’t mean lowering your standards, but it does mean looking at the type of student and tailoring activities to different groups that you have,” she said. “It’s making sure that what you offer matches what the students are looking for.”
One goal is to increase the retention of all first-year students an average of 2 percent a year for five years. For international and ethnic-minority students, that goal is 3 percent a year, according to the June draft.
One possible strategy for first-year retention deals with University Connections, formerly known as University Survival. Connections is in place now as an optional course taken by new students. If implemented, the strategy would require all incoming students to participate in the program, Williams said.
Another potential strategy for retaining first-year students is integrating them into the research process as soon as possible, she said.
The second pertains to the retention of high-ability students – first-year students with at least a 121 or higher admissions index or transfer students with at least a 3.5 first-term USU GPA. This goal is to increase their retention by an average of 3 percent a year for five years.
Joyce Kinkead, vice provost for Undergraduate Studies for Research, said, “Our high-ability students are actually at-risk. That is a sub-population that we want to focus on as a whole.”
The possible strategies for retaining high-ability students include creating a faculty mentoring program, offering a research fellowship upon entrance, and increasing special employment opportunities, such as library associates, research fellows and outreach fellows, according to the June draft.
Kinkead said the faculty mentoring program is something they are looking forward to.
“[Student-faculty mentoring] is one of the things that is very high on our list,” she said. “It has to be defined, though. What does that mean?”
Another goal in the June draft concerns graduation rates. It is to increase the six-year graduation rates of majority, international and ethnic-minority students an average of 1.5 percent a year for six years. Majority includes married students.
Kinkead said, “One of our sub-populations we’re concerned about is our married students. We had this assumption that child care and accessible classes may be priorities, but we don’t know.”
USU is unique because 50 percent of the students are married, Kinkead said.
The six-year graduation is used because most students take five or six years to graduate, Williams said.
The fourth goal in the June draft is to increase the retention of transfer students an average of 4 percent a year for the next five years.
Transfer students are those with 30 or more hours. Thirty-three to 40 percent of USU students are transfer students, according to the June draft.
Williams said possible strategies to increase transfer-student retention are to create an intent-to-transfer or dual-admission program between two-year feeder schools and USU, include transfer students in orientation programs, and develop more and have activities that engage students year-round, especially in the summer.
The final goal in the June draft regards the retention and graduation rates of Extension students. However, the percentage of increase and over how many years is not yet determined, however, Williams said.
“We want to know where students are taking classes,” Kinkead said. “It’s been hard for us to track students by location. One of our strategies is to develop a tracking system for them.”
The goals and strategies were developed after USU students took an 88-question survey including questions about academic advising, the climate of the campus and instructional effectiveness, among other things.
“It had questions about housing, meal services, parking – all of those things [faculty] don’t have to think of but are of utmost importance to students,” Williams said. “It is also an indicator of student satisfaction – how well we deliver what students need and want. If we say we deliver certain types of learning experiences, we do deliver them.”
The survey determined USU’s strengths and weaknesses.
“The purpose of this is to assess ourselves as an institution,” Kinkead said. “Our goal is to recruit students, retain them and graduate them, and we want to know if we’re doing anything to get in the way of that.”
Strengths include the content, instruction and variety of courses within a major, and knowledgeable academic advisors and faculty.
Kinkead said most of the strengths were academic-related.
“One of the real nice messages we’ve gotten is that academics is not a problem, she said.
Weaknesses include parking, the feeling of getting the “run-around” when looking for information on campus, registering for classes and student activity fees.
The next course of action is to circulate the enrollment master plan this fall to get feedback from students, faculty and staff. Assuming the input is positive, the plan will be launched in November, Kinkead said.
Williams said retention is the responsibility of the faculty.
“The faculty have probably the most important role in terms of retention,” she said. “Taking a moment to have a smile and give a little bit of extra attention makes all the difference.”
Williams said the purpose of the study and the plan is to make USU a better place for students.
“We want to give students the tools they need to survive before they find out they need them,” she said.
-kcartwright@cc.usu.edu