How can your college or university raise student retention rates? Tim Culver explains how data-informed planning and action can help you meet institutional goals. The University of Texas made news this week as it unveiled an ambitious plan to raise its four-year graduation rate by 20 points for its next class of entering freshmen.

It’s a strong move and in my opinion a correct one. My colleague Jim Hundrieser has written before about why raising standards for student completion would benefit both institutions and students. In their rationale for pushing this change, Texas cited lowering the overall cost of attending college for students (and lowering potential debt loads) as well as using institutional resources more efficiently. Graduating more students in four years requires less time and money for the institution, which in turn frees up more resources to keep graduating students in a more timely fashion.

It’s an ambitious plan and I hope that Texas succeeds. At the same time, having helped many campuses with the same ambition, it’s also quite a challenge. Where do you begin? The answer is data. Simply put, data are the lifeblood to successful student recruitment and retention. You cannot possibly hope to maximize enrollment yields and student completion rates without strong data analysis and planning.

Continued at: http://blog.noellevitz.com/2012/02/21/data-informed-steps-optimizing-college-student-retention/?utm_source=Strategies02232012&utm_campaign=optin&utm_medium=email

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• Retaining College Transfer Students: Analyzing New Data on a Growing Opportunity (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)
• 2011 Student Retention Practices Report (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit institutions account for the majority of enrollments in non-degree granting postsecondary schools. We describe the schools, students, and programs in the for-profit higher education sector, its phenomenal recent growth, and its relationship to the federal and state governments. Using the 2004 to 2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) longitudinal survey, we assess outcomes of a recent cohort of first-time undergraduates who attended for-profits relative to comparable students who attended community colleges or other public or private non-profit institutions. We find that relative to these other institutions, for-profits educate a larger fraction of minority, disadvantaged, and older students, and they have greater success at retaining students in their first year and getting them to complete short programs at the certificate and AA levels. But we also find that for-profit students end up with higher unemployment and “idleness” rates and lower earnings six years after entering programs than do comparable students from other schools, and that they have far greater student debt burdens and default rates on their student loans.

Continued at: http://capseecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ForProfit_Nimble-Critters_Feb-2012.pdf

The 2011 Student Retention Practices and Strategies Report indicates that while a large percentage of four-year public, four-year private, and two-year institutions are using satisfaction assessments to make changes to minimize attrition, a smaller percentage of these institutions feel that they are effective with actively using the data.

The struggle to effectively utilize the data on campuses is not uncommon. I have worked with institutions that are very diligent about surveying annually or every other year but do not use their assessment data as effectively as they would like. Furthermore, we have found that satisfaction actually may go down if you keep asking how satisfied students are but do nothing to respond to their feedback. “Data on the shelf” (or on your computer) have no power. The power comes when you use data to make improvements.

Continued at: http://blog.noellevitz.com/2012/02/15/turn-college-student-satisfaction-data-action-planning/?utm_source=Strategies02232012&utm_campaign=optin&utm_medium=email

Read the Report: https://www.noellevitz.com/papers-research-higher-education/2011/2011-student-retention-practices-report

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Next Wednesday (February 29), InternMatch will be hosting what it’s calling “the largest ever internship hangout” and the first of its kind on the Google+ platform. The startup is teaming up with 6 major companies for a day-long, streaming video event to help educate students about various elements of the internship process — from how to land an internship to how to turn an internship into a job offer.

That’s becoming an increasingly important skill as having a college degree is no guarantee that a student will find employment. (According to recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor, the unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds is 16.3% compared to 8.8% for all adults).  Internships aren’t a silver bullet to youth unemployment, of course, but landing an internship ups one’s chances at finding employment substantially — 70% of interns are actually offered jobs at the places they intern.

But finding and landing the right internship is easier said than done.

Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hack-higher-education/internship-hangout-google#ixzz1nAvQgXWS

American colleges and universities have historically charged the same tuition levels for all of their undergraduate majors (with the exception perhaps of laboratory fees). However, economists have long suggested that academic institutions might plausibly seek to charge different tuition levels for different majors based upon the cost of providing an education in each major and the income earning prospects that the major offers.1 Similarly, institutions might plausibly charge higher tuition levels for students who are further along in their programs, because the cost of educating advanced students (smaller classes) is often higher and because advanced students are more likely to complete their programs and thus to achieve the economic rewards from their programs. Faced with financial cutbacks, a growing number of public academic institutions are adopting differential tuitions by college or major, or by year of enrollment in the program.

Continued at: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/upload/2011CHERISurveyFinal0212.pdf

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The lifetime wage premium that accompanies a college degree has long been the best selling point for colleges trying to attract students. The marketing pitch went something like this: Don’t worry how much you spend on our degree, we all know that getting a college credential is worth it.

Of course, not all colleges or majors are created equal. And it’s nearly impossible for consumers to get any information about how much a graduate in a specific major from a particular university earns. That’s probably one of the best measures of the return on investment in higher education, but, as with so many other tools that would allow consumers to make bottom-line comparisons, colleges are loath to share such information. In the absence of data, it’s easier for colleges to sell the dream of higher education at any cost.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2012/02/20/taking-some-of-the-guesswork-out-of-the-value-of-college-question/

Energized by his fellow adjunct professors who had gathered for a national meeting last month in Washington, D.C., Joshua A. Boldt flew home to Athens, Ga., opened his laptop, and created a Google document.

On his personal blog, the 32-year-old writing instructor implored colleagues to contribute to the publicly editable spreadsheet, detailing their pay per course and other working conditions, noting their institutions and departments. The goal of the crowdsourcing project, Mr. Boldt said, was to praise universities that treat adjunct professors well and “out” those institutions that do not.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/Accidental-Activist-Collects/130854/

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Consider this dilemma: The Obama administration, the Lumina Foundation, and numerous state governors have set goals for increasing sharply the proportion of college graduates (or at least the proportion of people with some form of postsecondary training) by 2020-25, while for more than a decade, state-government support for higher education has been diminishing, leading to ever-higher tuition charges and escalating student debt.

The federal government lacks effective tools to change this contradictory financial context because penalizing colleges by threatening to withhold student aid harms only students. That leaves “jawboning” as the main (and ineffectual) recourse. The most recent administration proposal, to redirect campus-based aid (Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, Federal Work-Study, and Perkins Loans) to colleges that moderate tuition, is a classic case of trying to wag the dog, as the dollar amounts are too small to offset gains from tuition increases. So what to do?

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/National-Goals-for-College/130858/

While the United States is still among the top five most educated nations internationally, it has slipped to fifteenth in terms of the rate of college completion for Americans aged twenty-four to thirty-five. This unhappy development so at odds with our history of international leadership both in college-going and in world-class postsecondary institutions has rightly been taken as a wake-up call. With vigorous leadership from policy centers and major philanthropies, educators now are intensely focused on reversing this downward trend. Completion and productivity initiatives are cascading, and new performance incentives for improved degree production are being unveiled in one state system after another.

Our nation s future does indeed depend on developing all Americans talents to the fullest extent possible, and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) has been strongly committed to that goal since we first launched our Greater Expectations initiative (the forerunner of our current Liberal Education and America s Promise, or LEAP, endeavors) over a decade ago. In the opening pages of the 2002 Greater Expectations report, we noted the evidence that college has become a revolving door for entirely too many students, at high cost to their hopes for the future and to society s need for a well-educated citizenry. In that spirit, we have welcomed the intensified focus on student success and completion, which AACU s board of directors embraced in an official statement released in 2010.

Continued at #1154: http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/postings.php

Read the entire article:  http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation

Over the past two decades in the United States, there has been a new wave of criticism of higher education. Much of it has condemned the rise of “academic capitalism” and the corporatization of the university; a substantial wing has focused on the deteriorating conditions of academic labor; and some of it has pointed out the problems of students and their escalating debt. A good deal of this new work comes from literary and cultural critics, although it also includes those from education, history, sociology, and labor studies. This wave constitutes what Heather Steffen, a graduate student in literary and cultural studies with whom I have worked at Carnegie Mellon University, and I think is an emerging field of “critical university studies.”

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/An-Emerging-Field-Deconstructs/130791/