THE ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT REVIEW - College Board



THE ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT REVIEWVolume 24, Issue 3Spring 2009Editor: Don HosslerAssociate Editor: Chad ChristensenIndiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and PlanningStudent persistence and graduation have become more prominent issues in the efforts of enrollment managers to garner greater tuition revenues and higher rankings for their institutions in U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges. As accountability measures, persistence and graduation are also drawing more attention, with state appropriation formulas linking funding increases to increases in graduation rates and with federal policy makers placing greater emphasis on these dimensions of the accountability movement. While the ideal measures of success in postsecondary education might be students’ college learning and post-graduation career performance, the costs and complexities of developing these measures consistently return us to more indirect yet still defensible measures of success—persistence and graduation rates. To shed further light on these key concerns for enrollment managers, this issue of the Enrollment Management Review includes a short essay on student persistence and highlights recent research and trend reports on student persistence and success. Student PersistenceFor more than 30 years, institutional and public policy makers have focused on increasing student persistence, yet college completion rates have remained fairly constant over that time. Indeed, as a recent ACT report demonstrates, student persistence and graduation rates have not changed much in more than 20 years. While some policy analysts hail these figures as indicating success in enabling more students to attend college, most public policy makers and researchers point to them as negative indicators of institutional effectiveness. As colleges and universities experience tightening fiscal constraints and growing pressure to demonstrate effectiveness, along with the ever-present imperative of cultivating institutional prestige, the concern among institutional and public policy makers about student persistence is becoming more acute.? The most urgent concern, however, is that too many students who enroll in postsecondary education - and who often accrue debt to do so - do not graduate and thus cannot experience the economic and social benefits of a college degree.Despite all the attention given to student persistence over recent decades, we know very little about the extent to which institutions match their rhetorical dedication to student success with commitments in campus resources, policies, and practices designed to increase student persistence. Increasingly, policy analysts are pointing out that the retention literature has drawn too narrowly on theories that link student departure to the characteristics and behaviors of students, thus obscuring the role of institutions and institutional practitioners. A modicum of research has been published on specific programmatic interventions such as supplemental instruction, developmental education, orientation programs, and first-year seminars. Unfortunately, however, there has been relatively little research on how specific institutional policies and practices affect student persistence within specific contexts. Estella Bensimon, Don Hossler, Edward St. John, and Vincent Tinto are among the scholars in higher education who have called for more campus-level research on students’ postsecondary experiences and on the effects of campus policies and practices on student persistence. Although the recent studies of student persistence trends, policies, and practices discussed below do help to illuminate the complexities of student persistence in general, the need remains for colleges and universities to learn the impact of their own policies and practices on their own students’ persistence. Patton, Morelon, Whitehead, and Hossler (2006) as well as Braxton and colleagues (2004), in studies discussed in past issues of the Enrollment Management Review, have demonstrated that too few campus-level empirical/evaluation studies of retention programs have been conducted and that too little attention has been given to the impact of campus programs on reducing student attrition and increasing graduation. New research by the Indiana University Project on Academic Success (), funded by Lumina Foundation for Education and the College Board, is revealing that many colleges devote very little in programmatic and financial resources to enhancing student persistence, success, and graduation. These findings raise critical questions: Were postsecondary institutions to spend just half as much money and effort toward retaining and graduating students as in recruiting students, would their graduation rates improve? What would happen to student success rates if campus policy makers focused as much effort on graduating students as on fundraising? These emergent questions merit the intense consideration of enrollment managers as well as education researchers in the coming months and years. Thus, in addition to the reviews of recent studies and reports on persistence and graduation below, we are also calling for more research in those areas—particularly research that is campus based. Too much about the institution’s role in student persistence remains unknown and is still unexamined.Calcagno, J. C., & Long, B. T. (2008, July). The Impact of Postsecondary Remediation Using a Regression Discontinuity Approach: Addressing Endogenous Sorting and Noncompliance (NBER Working Paper No. 14194). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Available online at students entering colleges in Florida who do not meet SAT or ACT score requirements must take a standardized test called the Florida College Entry-Level Placement Test (CPT). Students who do not pass this test are required to take remedial coursework in math and/or English composition. To study the efficacy of remedial education at Florida community colleges, the researchers used a data set of nearly 100,000 first-time Florida community college students who attended college between 1997 and 2000. Focusing on students that needed remedial education and those who barely tested out of this requirement, the study set out to determine whether students who completed remedial education in math and English composition were more likely to persist at the community college than their counterparts who tested out of it. Moreover, the authors investigated if remedial education increased year-to-year persistence or acted as a barrier to degree completion by adding additional course requirements.The results of the survey suggest that although remediation is beneficial in aiding early persistence in college, it does not seem to lead to higher graduation rates for these students. Thus, the authors question whether remedial education in its current form is worthwhile. However, they also point out that, if such efforts do increase early persistence, colleges may have opportunities to capture students with other programs and interventions that may lead to degree completion.Although this study focuses on community colleges, many other institution types also offer remedial education. Enrollment professionals can use this article in several ways. First, it is a reminder that campus enrollment and retention professionals have to be thoughtful in how they consider the efficacy of their retention efforts. As we emphasize in the opening essay of this issue of the Enrollment Management Review, there is a great need for good evaluation of campus-based retention efforts. Finally, this study helps enrollment professionals focus on the efficacy of remedial courses at their own institutions and to determine what programs can be employed in conjunction with remedial coursework to help increase persistence on campus.Kuh, G. D., Cruce, T. M., Shoup, R., Kinzie, J., & Gonyea, R. M. (2008). Unmasking the Effects of Student Engagement on First-year College Grades and Persistence. The Journal of Higher Education, 79(5), 540-563.For several years practitioners and scholars have speculated that higher levels of student engagement might be expected to enhance student persistence and graduation. To explore the relationship between student behaviors, institutional practices, and conditions that foster student persistence, Kuh et al. examine data from 18 institutions that administered the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), as well as data from SAT and ACT student questionnaires. Using multivariate techniques to analyze the relationships between student persistence, first-year college GPA, and student engagement, the authors find a number of predictors of both higher GPAs and student persistence. Not surprisingly, they find that having a higher GPA during the first year of college increases a student’s odds of persisting—suggesting that helping first-year students earn better grades can increase student persistence. The authors also find that some family and student background characteristics influence GPA and persistence. Having a parent with a four-year degree, for example, has a positive impact, while coming from a low-income family has a negative impact. Students with better high school grades and higher standardized test scores, however, are less likely to persist. One plausible explanation for this counterintuitive finding is that these are high-ability students who transfer to institutions with more academically prepared students.Measures of student engagement positively influencing both student persistence and first-year GPA in this study include working less than 20 hours a week, having less unmet financial need, and being engaged in more co-curricular activity. Although higher levels of co-curricular activity have a negative impact on grades they do not have a negative impact on persistence.Because the NSSE survey was administered in the second semester, we cannot know how the students who left the college before taking the survey might have influenced the survey results—a limitation of this study. Another limitation, in the context of our introductory remarks, is that by aggregating data across 18 institutions the study does not provide insights into how these or the other variables might be influencing persistence on individual campuses. These institutions, like many others, appear to offer the standard array of retention programs, but the extent to which these programs are funded, organized, and staffed is unknown. Although this study suggests general linkages between a set of student behaviors and institutional policies and practices, enrollment managers on individual campuses need a much more specific understanding of the extent to which their campus-based efforts influence persistence and graduation. Morris, L. V., & Finnegan, C. L. (2008). Best Practices in Predicting and Encouraging Student Persistence and Achievement Online. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory, and Practice, 10(1), 55–64. Student persistence is a multifaceted topic that transcends office boundaries. Enrollment managers, academic advisors, senior administrators, faculty, and student affairs staff can affect student persistence. As is evident in the articles presented in this issue of the Enrollment Management Review, enrollment managers need to work with the multifarious functions of the university to help ensure student success. This article provides significant research on student persistence in online education and outlines best practices in engaging and retaining students in an online environment by surveying four research studies that have focused on this topic. With the growth in the use of distance technology, this timely article provides enrollment professionals with a brief synopsis of distance education and can help to inform campus discussions regarding persistence and retention at universities that utilize distance learning.Of all higher education institutions in the United States, 35 percent have made online education a significant part of their long-term plans. Moreover, the Sloan Foundation estimates that over 3.5 million students took at least one online education course in 2006, and the number has most likely risen since that time. Searching for best practices in online education to help increase persistence and retention, the authors discuss the findings of four surveys conducted at 35 institutions in Georgia that focused on 1) tracking student behavior and achievement online, 2) predicting student retention online, 3) student persistence and satisfaction in the online environment, and 4) faculty perspectives on teaching online. Through these surveys the authors define best practices for both faculty and students of online education. They find that orientation programs have an important role in online education in aiding student persistence and that many students who withdrew from the online courses felt confused and frustrated by the class. Moreover, the authors emphasize that faculty teaching via distance education be up to date on the best pedagogical methods for online learning and suggest that new online faculty work closely with a seasoned professional to help ensure that they are adequately engaging the students in the class. Williford, A. M., & Wadley, J. Y. (2008, fall). How Institutional Research Can Create and Synthesize Retention and Attrition Information. AIR Professional Files Online, No. 108. Tallahassee, FL: Association for Institutional Research. Available online at study synthesizes data from a myriad of sources to examine the impact of institutional research on retention and attrition. The findings provide salient insights into student engagement, student success, and how institutions can help increase persistence and retention on campus. More specifically, the study addresses how institutional research can aid efforts to increase retention.Ohio University has seen a marked increase in attrition over the past several years. In response to this and to determine the impact of student engagement on student persistence, the university’s Office of Institutional Research triangulated data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and a number of other campus data sets to look at differences in levels of engagement between currently enrolled students (“stayers”) and students who had withdrawn from the institution (“leavers”). In almost all aspects, stayers were found to be more engaged on campus. The authors aptly caution that students who had withdrawn from the institution may have felt unconnected to the university, which could have affected their responses. The survey responses indicated that 82 percent of the leavers were currently attending another institution. The most common reasons for leaving dealt directly with personal adjustment to the institution. Data such as this can help enrollment managers better identify why students are leaving and where they are going after withdrawing. If students are leaving to attend another institution, this information could help enrollment managers determine why competing schools may be more appealing to certain types of students.This article is particularly effective at showing the importance of institutional research and how it can increase the efficacy of enrollment management. The authors suggest ways to increase both institutional and student commitment, which can lead to higher retention. Clearly, retention is a group effort that applies to all parts of an institution. ................
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