As the fall semester gets underway and higher education institutions welcome a new freshman class, university officials already have their eyes on graduation. Their goal is to make sure every student who comes to campus in September stays with them through their entire college journey.
In the current higher education climate, student retention is more important than ever. With colleges facing tough economic decisions that require an increased focus on all revenue streams, one surefire way to improve the bottom line is to hold on to students who are already enrolled in your school. A predicted dip in enrollment in the coming years also complicates matters. Data is an important part of the retention process. Here’s how schools can prepare for the upcoming enrollment cliff by using the data at their disposal.
The importance of student retention
To put it bluntly, schools have a financial interest in their students. If a student leaves school, that means the school is not collecting tuition from that student, and it may also mean that the school is actually spending more money working to fill the vacated spot. For students, the decision to not continue their education can be costly as well. No student wants to build up debt from education loans and leave school before graduating.
There is another way of looking at this that isn’t just dollars and cents. The best possible advertisement for a school is a student having a positive experience there. Whether that’s academically or socially, or in the best-case scenario in all aspects of a student’s time in school, one of the most significant factors for a student deciding to attend a school is seeing someone like them succeeding there. And once that student gets to campus, their happiness is what will determine if they stay.
What makes students stay
Data may not be able to measure happiness, but it can get you a pretty good idea. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported a 76.5 percent persistence rate, using data from students who entered college in fall 2022. Persistence is categorized as the share of students who stayed in college from freshman to sophomore year, while retention measures those students who stayed at the same institution. The number is up from 75.7 percent the previous year. The increase is notable because changes in persistence and retention rates are usually smaller than that. Students cited social factors such as feeling like they belonged at their college, participation in an extra-curricular activity, and having a friend on campus as reasons they were more likely to return the next year.
Orientation sessions held early on play a big role in how prepared students are for success in those social aspects. There is academic data as well. Schools can monitor student performance and class attendance so they know when they might need to intervene to set a student up for success. Colleges and universities are also always assessing administrative elements to make sure they’re not restrictive to students, such as payment plans or registration procedures.
The importance of predictive data
All of this is complicated by the impending enrollment cliff. Even higher education institutions that don’t rely on data for much of their decision-making have had their eye on one predictive element for a while: the number of high school graduates in America will peak sometime in the next few years. When the declining birth rate from 18 years ago is combined with factors like rising tuition and evolving opinions about higher education and its role in finding a job, that increases the pressure on schools to keep the students they have.
For many schools, that means less reacting to issues once they happen and becoming more proactive based on the data they gather. Schools can use the performance of previous students to assess current students. They can set up alerts, for instance, that let an advisor know if students have not attended a certain number of classes or if they haven’t logged into a learning management system. Advisors can then check in and set up plans that allow students to make up any assignments before it’s too late. The hope is that these steps will prevent a student from getting to a point where the academic hole is too big to climb out of. Occasional health and wellness surveys can help provide the same predictive data regarding a student’s emotional well-being, and keep counselors aware of any students who might need someone to reach out.
In the same way that every aspect of a student’s time at school can impact their decision to remain there, retention impacts many different parts of a school’s administration. While a particular department may be using the data to assess students, another office could be using the retention data to meet state regulations. The nature of a higher education setting is that there is never a shortage of information – but it is coming from all departments, and those departments could be running on different technology. It is important that the analytics solution a school uses is able to integrate data from disparate sources so that everyone is looking at the same information in real-time. That’s one way to help operations run more smoothly, and the ability to have actionable data instantly could be the factor that helps keep a student enrolled.
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