In Search of the Holy Grail of Student Retention

As featured on  www.careereducationreview.net
By John King, Ed.D., Independent Education Consultant

Throughout my long career in public, not-for-profit and for-profit education, academics have been searching for that one magical tool or process that will ensure student retention, learning and ultimately graduation and employment in a career. In reality however, that magical tool or process is as mythical as the Holy Grail itself. There is no one single tool that will ensure that students persist and learn…it takes an assortment of coordinated tools, processes and people to build a successful student retention program. 

Over the years I have watched many schools and organizations focus on front-loading new student starts as a way to maintain positive enrollment levels. Less effort was expended on keeping those enrolled students in school once they started. As a result, education in general has taken a reputation beating for poor outcomes when it comes to stop, drop and completion rates. Fiscally, it costs more to continually attract and enroll students than it does to implement processes that will keep students continually in school. This has probably helped add to the increase in tuition costs over the years. 

When I finally got to a position of authority where I could impact positive student persistence and graduation I focused my team on developing a comprehensive program that would keep students in school, learning, graduating and be more competitive in the job market. We took a hard look at five years of our data to determine when, where and why we lost students in the education process. We found out that students who were stopping or dropping out rarely did it for academic reasons and that they did so within the first 120 days of starting school. We also found that those campuses whose administration and faculty fully engaged students in the learning process had the best outcomes in attendance, persistence, student achievement, student attitude and satisfaction and completion and employment. For example, on these campuses faculty actively mentored and coached their students beyond classroom instruction, and administrators regularly walked the halls interacting with students not only for discipline but also for encouragement and support. Classes were fun and engaging, faculty and administrators accessible and present and the facilities were clean and up-to-date. These campuses also modeled and demanded professionalism from their students.