Guiding Student Choice to Promote Persistence
Tools, technologies, and policies that support retention and timely completion
Colin Koproske, Managing Director, Research Development
In this study, we profile innovative tools, technologies, and policies that institutions have used to improve student retention and completion rates.
Colleges and universities often have hundreds of rules, policies, organizational structures, and curricular requirements that hinder student persistence and completion. If institutions were to remove every obstacle to graduation, however, they would sacrifice the comprehensiveness and rigor that a postsecondary degree signifies.
Each exemplifying the idea that smarter institutional design can prevent a significant share of student problems that might otherwise require advisor intervention, and that it can do so without any sacrifice to rigor or curricular breadth.
Seemingly small student choices can derail long-term plans—what’s the solution?
By exploring institutional “choice architecture,” academic leaders can make large strides in addressing attrition. Behavioral economists have shown the impact that relatively minor changes to policies or incentives can have on societal outcomes; allowing employees to opt out of retirement plans rather than asking them to opt in, for example, tends to result in much higher plan enrollment.
It is difficult to identify the root cause of every non-completing student’s eventual withdrawal, but in many cases, the cumulative impact of seemingly minor logistical or academic choices adds up to severe consequences. Behind the academic symptoms surfaced by an early-alert system (several missed classes, poor midterm grades) are underlying problems relating to labyrinthine support services, delayed degree progress, and cumbersome graduation requirements.
By applying lessons from behavioral economics, including “nudging” students to better decisions through subtle cues, a student-centered university can retain and graduate many more students though relatively minor alterations to its structure and service portfolio.
Leverage technology to scale basic advisement
In this approach to assisting students with logistical issues, registration, financial aid, housing, health services, and other administrative concerns, the only way to improve service quality is to invest in additional staff, most of whom will be too busy with transactions to spend substantial time advising students in need.
Practice 1: One-Stop Service Portal
Once students arrive on campus, successfully navigating through the maze of forms, deadlines, activities, and requirements associated with matriculation poses the largest initial challenge. Even registering for courses can leave students tired, confused, and frustrated. To lessen the burden associated with these transactions and eliminate the contribution of campus bureaucracy to student attrition, institutions are increasingly redesigning student services with simplicity in mind.
Practice 2: Financial Aid Tutorial
The complexity of funding and payment in higher education causes distress even among students with little to no financial hardship. Too many students make critical errors in applying for federal or institutional aid, become frustrated along the way, or are unaware of the availability of various funding sources.
Colleges and universities should take immediate action to maximize student awareness and utilization of financial resources, beginning with the creation of web-based, self-service tools that significantly reduce uncertainty and error with minimal one-on-one staff time.
Practice 3: Personalized Status Alerts
Even the best-designed student service portals serve only those students who seek them out. Further, their usefulness is limited by the extent to which users are able to locate the information pertinent to their particular situation, whether academic, financial, logistical, medical, or personal.
Practice 4: Preemptive Resilience Exercise
To address this gap in student confidence, the University of Texas at Austin allowed psychology faculty to construct a pre-orientation exercise designed to encourage resilience among high-risk students. Their hypothesis, motivated by research on the importance of self-improvement and belonging in personal success, was that introducing students to the concept of intellectual and social growth prior to their arrival on campus would increase their likelihood of completing their first set of courses.
Prevent delays in degree progress
As it becomes more difficult to address the need for new revenues by enrolling additional new students and more apparent that upper-division students constitute a surprisingly large share of non-completers, campus leaders must devote greater attention to supporting students through the entirety of their academic careers. Learn three practices that can help you reach this goal.
Practice 5: Course Load Campaigns
Unsurprisingly, students who take on larger course loads each term tend to graduate more quickly and more often than students who take fewer courses or enroll part-time. Institutional leaders commonly fear that demanding additional coursework from students with less aptitude or more constraining circumstances will only worsen their chances at success, however.
Practice 6: Multi-Term Registration
Lighter course loads tend to correlate not only with delayed progress toward a degree, but with higher rates of attrition as well. When students see enrollment at a university as one of many competing demands on their time, rather than their primary occupation, they are far more likely to shift from part-time enrollment to a temporary or even permanent withdrawal from college.
Practice 7: Withdrawal Survey Module
There are good reasons to withdraw from a course—when genuinely overwhelmed by its difficulty, erroneously enrolled in the wrong section, or very likely to receive a failing grade, for example. But many students withdraw from courses or leave college entirely for reasons that might have been questioned and remedied in a simple advising conversation.
Reduce the costs of deviation
Students who deviate from their intended plan often pay an unnecessarily high price for failure. No amount of investment and planning will prevent every misstep, but students should not face a choice between error-proof planning and attrition. Institutions should establish curricular “safety net” policies to address common difficulties that are known to lead to withdrawal and non-completion.
Practice 8: Withdrawal Redirect Courses
When students withdraw from one or more courses, they risk a change to their enrollment status that could endanger their financial aid eligibility, make it difficult to catch up in new classes, and put them on a longer path to graduation.
Practice 9: Pre-Professional Macro Majors
Nearly every campus has one or more academic programs that have more applicants than their capacity or selectivity can accommodate. Nursing is the most well-known example of these so-called “impacted” majors, though many arts and performance fields fall into this pattern as well. Students who matriculate with the intention of entering these programs often struggle to recover when denied admission, leading them to transfer to an institution that might afford them a second chance, or to another field less aligned with their interests and prior coursework.
Practice 10: Multidisciplinary Completion Program
While the previous practice (Pre-professional Macro Majors) helps reroute students set on an overly narrow path, it is equally important to address the obstacles faced by students with an overly broad accumulation of credits. Students who have earned nearly enough credits to graduate but lack many of the upper-division requirements in their particular major often find themselves stuck between an unanticipated additional year of enrollment (and its accompanying expenses) or simply withdrawing from attendance.
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