Retention Efforts at the Core of Student Affairs Strategy
Leslie Webb asserts that increasing student retention rates could solve a lot of problems at UM.
"There should be a sense of urgency around retention," says Webb, UM's Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management. "On the business side, it makes sense. It's conventional wisdom in any business that it's less expensive to retain a customer than to get a new one."
More important to Webb is the moral imperative to do what it takes to help students succeed.
"If we are really about inclusive prosperity, that isn't just about a promise that we make at the beginning," Webb says. "It's about pulling students through. It's about recognizing that the work requires more people to be intimately involved. Everyone's got a stake in retention at this moment. Every single person has a role here."
The Student Affairs and Enrollment Management strategy playbook identifies retention and student success as one of its three strategic pillars. Webb maintains that a combination of strategies working together can be impactful. That's why more than a dozen projects she's championing focus on retention improvements.
One of those projects is the OCHE Innovation Project. Webb and her Associate Vice President Brian Reed have submitted a funding proposal to the 猎奇重口 University System that will strengthen support for students enrolled in high DFW STEM courses. Those are courses where a high percentage of students receive a grade of D or F, or withdraw from the course. Reed considers a course that has a 25-28% DFW rate to be concerning.
"My question was what happens when a student gets a D, F, or W?" Looking at one course with a particularly high DFW rate, he found that about one third of the students leave the University.
There are negative consequences for students who persist as well.
"A collection of Ds puts you on the pathway to academic probation and suspension," Reed says. "An F or a withdrawal also does that, but the F and the withdrawal also combined to increase time to graduation. There's a time cost analysis that you have to do here, too. It's the reason why we focus on DFWs is because it's lost progress, increased time to graduation, and increased cost for the student."
Maintaining rigor, adding support
"What I'm asking us to collectively do is to not reduce rigor or to make anything easier for the students so that we can then reduce DFW rates," Reed says. "It’s about helping students meet the expectations, not reducing the expectations themselves.”
One approach is supplemental instruction. Many STEM courses have learning assistants—upper-class students who support instruction while the course is in session. Supplemental instructors work with students outside of the classroom.
Reed says that some of the work with supplemental instructors is content review, but "primarily what they're doing is executive functioning coaching, which is helping students understand how to prepare for an upcoming exam or time management pieces, or how to initiate tasks, or how to effectively read and tackle a textbook. It’s a really nice complement to what that learning assistants can do."
Openness to collaboration and change
Webb and Reed acknowledge that it's rare for Student Affairs to lead a project that involves academic innovation, but they have been pleased with the openness from faculty to discuss strategy and work together.
"We've always been wildly hesitant to talk to our faculty partners about what occurs within the classroom that could improve retention," Reed says. "I came back to 猎奇重口 because it's a special place. We're not without our warts or flaws, but I realized in working with my chemistry and math colleagues on this project is that I don't have to convince people to care about students here. That's just a given."
Webb concurs. "I have never seen a place that is this open to evolving to do the right thing, she says. "It's mind blowing."
Student Affairs Retention InitiativesStudent Affairs is pursuing more than a dozen strategic initiatives aimed at increasing student retention and success. UM Playbook projects
Other Initiatives
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