Keep
students hooked
on your
school
by Karen West
etention has moved from discus-
The retention stakes are high for stu-
dents and employers. Lifetime income
is affected by success in college. Highly
R
sions in academic circles to the pages
paid positions require skills often ob-
of the New York Times and the Wall
tained in college. Yet degree completion
in the U.S. has slipped while the com-
Street Journal. President Obama and
petitive global push for higher education
intensifies.
the Gates Foundation are two of the
The retention stakes are even greater
among colleges and universities. The
motivating forces. Yet retention is not
core mission of colleges and universities
is to educate and graduate students—
a new American preoccupation. For
and then send their grads out into the
world as proud and accomplished school
more than 30 years, college and university administrators, consultants and
ambassadors, unofficial recruiters and
noteworthy alumni contributors. The
analysts have tracked, queried and studied students who drop-out or stop-
lost revenue resulting from a freshman
dropout at a four-year private campus
out prior to earning degrees.
can exceed $50,000 a year. Lost students
in significant numbers can result in pub-
lished mission failure and diminished
reputations. Parents, prospective stu-
dents, career employees and the federal
government all take note.
Everything has changed but the results
But thirty years of measuring and la-
menting retention results have, in aggre-
gate, resulted in minimal improvement.
The most recently published retention
figures are characterized as “bleak.” For
example, just 20 percent of two-year and
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