I’ve been planning to write about retaining men for several weeks. I had it all planned out. I’d chart the number of times in the past five years that male retention rates have lagged behind female retention rates, suggest that this might be an issue for us to address, clap my hands together, and publish the post. Then I looked closer at the numbers behind those pesky percentages and thought, “Now this will make for an interesting conversation.”

But first, let’s get the simple stuff out of the way. Here are the differences in retention rates for men and women over the last five years.

It looks like a gap has emerged in the last four years, right? Just in case you’re wondering (especially if you looked more carefully at all five years listed in the table), “emerged” isn’t really the most accurate word choice. It looks like the 2013 cohort was more of an anomaly than anything else since the 2012 cohort experienced the starkest gap in male vs. female retention of any in the past five years. Looking back over the three years prior to the start of this table, this gap reappears within the 2011, 2010, and 2009 cohorts.

But in looking more closely at the number of men and women who enrolled at Augustana in each of those classes, an interesting pattern appears that adds a least one layer of complexity to this conversation. Here are the numbers of enrolled and retained men and women in each of the last five years.

Do you see what I see?  Look at the largest and smallest numbers of men enrolled and the largest and smallest numbers of men retained. In both cases, we are talking about a difference of about 20 male students (for enrolled men: 304 in 2016 for a high and 285 in 2015 for a low; for retained men, 253 in 2016 for a high and 232 in 2012 for a low). No matter the total enrollment in a given first-year class, these numbers seem pretty consistent. By contrast, look at the largest and smallest numbers of women enrolled and retained. The differences between the high and the low of either enrolled or retained women are much greater – by almost a factor of five.

So what does it mean when we put these retention rate gaps and the actual numbers of men and women enrolled/retained into the same conversation? For me, this exercise is an almost perfect example of how quantitative data that is supposed to reveal deep and incontrovertible truth can actually do exactly the opposite. Data just isn’t clean, ever.

Situating these data within the larger conversation about male and female rates of educational attainment, our own findings begin to make some sense. Nationally, the educational attainment gap between men and women starts long before college. Men (boys) finish high school at lower rates than women. Men go to college at lower rates than women. Men stay in college at lower rates than women. And men graduate from college at lower rates than women. So when the size of our first-year class goes up, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the increase in numbers is explained by a disproportionate increase in women.

Finally, we have long known (and should also regularly remind ourselves) that retention rates are a proxy for something more important: student success. And student success is an outcome of student engagement in the parts of the college experience that we know help students grow and learn. On this score, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that we ought to focus more of our effort on male students. I wrote about one such example last fall when we examined some differences between men and women in their approaches toward social responsibility and volunteering rates. A few years back, I wrote about another troubling finding involving a sense of belonging on campus among Black and Hispanic men.

I hope we can dig deeper into this question over the next several weeks.  I’ll do some more digging into our own student data and share what I find. Maybe you’ve got some suggestions about where I might look?

Make it a good day,

Mark

This is a massively busy week at Augie. We had a packed house of high school students visiting on Monday (I’ve never seen the cafeteria so full of people ever!), the Board of Trustees will gather on campus for meetings on Thursday and Friday, and hundreds of alumni and family will arrive for Homecoming over the weekend. With all of this hustle and bustle, you probably wouldn’t have noticed three unassuming researchers from the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) quietly talking to faculty, staff, and students on Monday and Tuesday. They were on campus to find out more about our interfaith programs, experiences, and emphasis over the past several years.

Apparently, we are doing something right when it comes to improving interfaith understanding at Augustana. Back in the fall of 2015, our first-year cohort joined college freshmen from 122 colleges and universities around the country to participate in a 4-year study of interfaith understanding development. The study was designed to collect data from those students at the beginning of the first year, during the fall of the second year, and in the spring of the fourth year. In addition to charting the ways in which these students changed during college, the study was also constructed to identify the experiences and environments that influence this change.

As the research team examined the differences between the first-year and second-year data, an intriguing pattern began to emerge. Across the entire study, students didn’t change very much. This wasn’t so much of a surprise, really, since the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education had found the same thing. However, unlike students across the entire study, Augustana students consistently demonstrated improvement on most of the measures in the study. This growth was particularly noticeable in areas like appreciative knowledge of different worldviews, appreciative attitudes toward different belief systems, and global citizenship. Although the effect sizes weren’t huge, a consistent pattern of subtle but noticeable growth suggested that something good might be happening at Augustana.

However, using some fancy statistical tricks to generate an asterisk or two (denoting statistical significance) doesn’t necessarily help us much in practical terms. Knowing that something happened doesn’t tell us how we might replicate it or how we might do it even better. This is where the qualitative ninjas need to go to work and talk to people (something us quant nerds haven’t quite figured out how to do yet). Guided by the number-crunching, the real gems of knowledge are more likely to be unearthed through focus groups and interviews where researchers can delve deep into the experiences and observations of folks on the ground.

So what did our visiting team of researchers find? They hope to have a report of their findings for us in several months. So far all I could glean from them is that Augustana is a pretty campus with A LOT of steps.

But there is a set of responses from the second-year survey data that that might point in a direction worth contemplating. There is a wonderfully titled grouping of items called “Provocative Encounters with Worldview Diversity,” from which the responses to three statements seem to set our students’ experience apart from students across the entire study as well as students at institutions with a similar Carnegie Classification (Baccalaureate institutions – arts and sciences). In each case, we see a difference in the proportion of students who responded “all the time” or “frequently.”

1. In the past year, how often have you had class discussions that challenged you to rethink your assumptions about another worldview?
   1. Augustana students: 51%
   2. Baccalaureate institutions: 43%
   3. All institutions in the study: 33%
2. In the past year, how often have you felt challenged to rethink your assumptions about another worldview after someone explained their worldview to you?
   1. Augustana students: 44%
   2. Baccalaureate institutions: 34%
   3. All institutions in the study: 27%
3. In the past year, how often have you had a discussion with someone of another worldview that had a positive influence on your perceptions of that worldview?
   1. Augustana students: 48%
   2. Baccalaureate institutions: 45%
   3. All institutions in the study: 38%

In the past several years, there is no question that we have been trying to create these kinds of interactions through Symposium Day, Sustained Dialogue, course offerings, a variety of co-curricular programs, and increased diversity among our student body. Some of the thinking behind these efforts dates back six or seven years when we could see from our Wabash National Study Data and our prior NSSE data that our students reported relatively fewer serious conversations with people who differed from them in race/ethnicity and/or beliefs/values. Since a host of prior research has found that these kinds of serious conversations across difference are key to developing intercultural competence (a skill that certainly includes interfaith understanding), it made a lot of sense for us to refine what we do so that we might improve our students’ gains on the college’s learning outcomes.

The response to the items above suggests to me that the conditions we are trying to create are indeed coming together. Maybe, just maybe, we have successfully designed elements of the Augustana experience that are producing the learning that we aspire to produce.

It will be very interesting to see what the research team ultimately reports back to us. But for now, I think it’s worth noting that there seems to be early evidence that we have implemented intentionally designed experiences that very well might be significantly impacting our students’ growth.

How about that?!

Make it a good day,

Mark

One of the best parts of my job is teaming up with others on campus to help us all get better at doing what we do. Over the past seven years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with almost every academic department or student life office on projects that have genuinely improved the student experience. But if I had to choose, I think my favorite partnership is the annual student learning assessment initiative that combines the thoughtfulness (and sheer intellectual muscle) of the Assessment for Improvement Committee with the longitudinal outcome data (and nerdy statistical meticulousness) from the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.

For those of you who don’t know about this project already, the annual student learning assessment initiative starts anew every summer – although it takes about four years before any of you see the results. First, the IR office chooses a previously validated survey instrument that aligns with one of Augustana’s three broad categories of learning outcomes. Second, we give this survey to the incoming first-year class just before the fall term starts. Third, when these students finish their senior year we include the same set of questions in the senior survey, giving us a before-and-after set of data for the whole cohort. Fourth, after linking all of that data with freshman and senior survey data, admissions data, course-taking data, and student readiness survey results, we explore both the nature of that cohort’s change on the chosen outcome as well as the experiences or other characteristics that might predict positive or negative change on that outcome.

The most recent graduating cohort (spring, 2017), provided their first round of data in the fall of 2013. Since we had already started assessment cycles of intrapersonal conviction growth (the 2011 cohort) and interpersonal maturity growth (the 2012 cohort), it was time to turn our attention to intellectual sophistication (the category that includes disciplinary knowledge, critical thinking and information literacy, and quantitative literacy). After exploring several possible assessment instruments, we selected an 18-item survey called The Need for Cognition Scale. This instrument tries to get at the degree to which the respondent is interested in thinking about complicated or difficult problems or ideas. Since the Need for Cognition Scale had been utilized by the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, they had already produced an extensive review of the ways in which this instrument correlated with aspects of intellectual sophistication as we had defined it. And since this instrument is short (18 questions) and cheap (free), we felt very comfortable putting it to work for us.

Fast forward four years and, after some serious number crunching, we have some interesting findings to share!

Below I’ve included the average scores from the 2013 cohort when they took the Need for Cognition Scale in the fall of their first year and in the spring of their fourth year. Keep in mind that scores on this scale range from 1 to 5.

The difference between the two scores is statistically significant, meaning that we can confidently claim that our students are becoming more interested in thinking about complicated or difficult problems or ideas.

For comparison purposes, it’s useful to triangulate these results against Augustana’s participation in the Wabash National Study between 2008 and 2012. Amazingly, that sample of students produced remarkably similar scores. In the fall of 2008, they logged a pre-test mean score of 3.43. Four years later, they registered a post-test mean score of 3.63. Furthermore, the Wabash National Study overall results suggest that students at other small liberal arts colleges made similar gains over the course of four years.

It’s one thing to look at the overall scores, but the proverbial devil is always in the details. So we’ve made it a standard practice to test for differences on any outcome (e.g., critical thinking, intercultural competence) or perception of experience (e.g., sense of belonging on campus, quality of advising guidance, etc.) by race/ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status, first-generation status, and pre-college academic preparation. This is where we’ve often found the real nuggets that have helped us identify paths to improvement.

Unlike last year’s study of intercultural competence, we found no statistically significant differences by race/ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status, or first-generation status in either where these different types of students scored when they started college or how much they had grown by the time they graduated. This was an encouraging finding because it suggests that the Augustana learning experience is equally influential for a variety of student types.

However, we did find some interesting differences among students who come to Augustana with different levels of pre-college preparation. These differences were almost identical no matter if we used our students ACT scores or high school GPA to measure pre-college academic preparation. Below you can see how those differences played out based upon incoming test score.

As you can see, all three groups of students grew similarly over four years. But the students entering with a bottom third ACT score started well behind the students who entered with a top third ACT score. Moreover, by the time this cohort graduated, the bottom third ACT student had not yet reached the entering scores of the top third ACT students (3.54 compared with 3.59).

So what should we make of these findings? First, I think it’s worth noting that once again we have evidence that on average our students grow on a key aspect of intellectual sophistication. This is worth celebrating. Furthermore, our student growth doesn’t appear to vary across several important demographic characteristics, suggesting that, on at least one learning metric, we seem to have achieved some outcome equity. And although there appear to be differences by pre-college academic preparation in where those students end up, the change from first-year to fourth-year across all three groups is almost identical. This suggests something that we might gloss over at first, namely that we seem to be accomplishing some degree of change equity. In other words, no matter where a student is when they arrive on campus, we are able to help them grow while they are here.

At the end of our presentation of this data last Friday afternoon, we asked everyone in attendance to hypothesize about the kinds of student experiences that might impact change on this outcome. Everyone wrote their hypotheses (some suggested only one idea while others, who shall yet remain nameless, suggested more than ten!) on a 4×6 card that we collected. Over the next several months, we will do everything we can to test each hypothesis and report back to the Augustana community what we found at our winter term presentation.

Oh, you say through teary eyes that you missed our presentation? Well, lucky for you (and us) we are still taking suggestions. So if you have any hypotheses, speculations, intuition, or just outright challenges that you want to suggest, bring it! You can post your ideas in the comments below or email me directly.

I can’t wait to start digging into the data to find what mysteries we might uncover! And look for our presentation of these tests as an upcoming winter term Friday Conversation.

Make it a good day,

Mark

This post started out as nothing more than a humble pie correction; something similar to what you might find at the bottom of the first page of your local newspaper (if you are lucky enough to still have a local newspaper). But as I continued to wrestle with what I was trying to say, I realized that this post wasn’t really about a correction at all. Instead, this post is about what happens when a changing student population simply outgrows the limits of the old labels you’ve been using to categorize them.

Last week, I told you about a stunningly high 89.8% retention rate for Augustana’s students of color, more than five percentage points higher than our retention rate for white students. During a meeting later in the week, one of my colleagues pointed out that the total number of students of color from which we had calculated this retention rate seemed high. Since this colleague happens to be in charge of our Admissions team, it seemed likely that he would know a thing or two about last year’s incoming class. At the same time, we’ve been calculating this retention rate in the same way for years, so it didn’t seem possible that we suddenly forgot how to run a pretty simple equation.

Before I go any further, let’s get the “correction,” or maybe more precisely “clarification,” out of the way. Augustana’s first-to-second year retention rate for domestic students of color this year is 87.3%, about a point higher than the retention rate for domestic white students (86%). Still impressive, just not quite as flashy. Furthermore, our first-to-second year retention rate for international students is 88.4%, almost two percentage points higher than our overall first-to-second year retention rate of 86.5%. Again, this is an impressive retention rate among students who, in most cases, are also dealing with the extra hurdle of adapting to (if not learning outright) Midwestern English.

So what happened?

For a long time, Augustana has used the term “multicultural students” as a way of categorizing all students who aren’t white American citizens raised in the United States. Even though the term is dangerously vague, when almost 95% of Augustana’s enrollment was white domestic students (less than two decades ago) there was a reasonable logic to constructing this category. Just as categories can become too large to be useful, so too can categories become so small that they dissipate into a handful of individuals. And even the most caring organization finds it pretty difficult to explicitly focus itself on the difficulties of a few individuals.

Moreover, this categorization allowed us to construct a group large enough to quantify in the context of other larger demographic groups. For example, take one group of students from which 10 of 13 return for a second year and compare it with another group of students from which 200 of 260 return for a second year. Calculated as a proportion, both groups share the same retention rate. But in practice, the retention success for each group seems very different; one group lost very few students (3) while the other group lost a whole bunch (60). In the not so distant past when an Augustana first-year class would include maybe 20 domestic students of color and 5 international students (out of a class of about 600), grouping these students into the most precise race, ethnicity, and citizenship categories would almost guarantee that these individuals would appear as intriguing rarities or, worse yet, quaint novelties. Under these circumstances, it made a lot of sense to combine several smaller minority groups into one category large enough to 1) conceptualize as a group with broadly similar needs and challenges and 2) quantify in comparable terms to other distinct groups of Augustana students.

In no way am I arguing that the term “multicultural” was a perfect label. As our numbers of domestic students of color increased, the term grew uncomfortably vague. Equally problematic, some inferred that we considered the totality of white students to be a monoculture or that we considered all multicultural students to be overflowing with culture and heritage. Both of these inferences weren’t necessarily accurate, but as with all labels, seemingly small imperfections can morph into glaring weaknesses when the landscape changes.

Fast forward fifteen years. Entering the 2017-18 academic year, our proportion of “multicultural students” has increased by over 400%, and the combination of domestic students of color and international students make up about 27% of our total enrollment – roughly 710 students. Specifically, we now enroll enough African-American students, Hispanic students, and international students to quantitatively analyze their experiences separately. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should prioritize one method of research (quantitative) over another (qualitative). I am arguing, however, that we are better able to gather evidence that will inform genuine improvement when we have both methods at our disposal.

After a conversation with another colleague who is a staunch advocate for African-American students, I resolved to begin using the term “students of color” instead of multicultural students. Although it’s taken some work, I’m making slow progress. I was proud of myself last week when I used the term “students of color” in this blog without skipping a beat.

Alas, you know the story from there. Although I had used an arguably more appropriate term for domestic students of color in last week’s post, I had not thought through the full implications of shifting away from an older framework for conceptualizing difference within our student body. Clearly, one cannot simply replace the term “multicultural students” with “students of color” and expect the new term to adequately include international students. At the same time, although the term “multicultural” implies an air of globalism, it could understandably be perceived to gloss over important domestic issues of race and inequality. If we are going to continue to enroll larger numbers across multiple dimensions of difference, we will have to adopt a more complex way of articulating the totality of that difference.

Mind you, I’m not just talking about counting students more precisely from each specific racial and ethnic category – we’ve been doing that as long as we’ve been reporting institutional census data to the federal government. I guess I’m thinking about finding new ways to conceptualize difference across all of its variations so that we can adopt language that better matches our reality.

I’d like to propose that all of us help each other shift to a terminology that better represents the array of diversity that we’ve worked so hard to achieve, and continue to work so hard to sustain. I know I’ve got plenty to learn (e.g., when do I use the term “Hispanic” and when do I use the term “Latinx”?), and I’m looking forward to learning with you.

And yes, I’ll be sure to reconfigure our calculations in the future. Frankly, that is the easy part. Moreover, I’ll be sure to reconceptualize the way I think about student demographics. We’ve crossed a threshold into a new dimension of diversity within our own student body. Now it’s time for the ways that we quantify, convey, and conceptualize that diversity to catch up.

Make it a good day,

Mark

When we included metrics and target numbers in the Augustana 2020 strategic plan, we made it clear to the world how we would measure our progress and our success. As we have posted subsequent updates about our efforts to implement this strategic plan, a closer look into those documents exposes some of the organizational challenges that can emerge when a goal that seemed little more than a pipe dream suddenly looks like it might just be within our grasp.

Last week we calculated our first-to-second year retention numbers for the cohort that entered in the fall of 2016. As many of you know, Augustana 2020 set a first-to-second year retention rate goal of 90%, a number that we’d never come close to before. In fact, colleges enrolling students similar to ours top out at retention rates in the upper 80s. But we decided to set a goal that would stretch us outside of this range. To come up with this goal, we asked ourselves, “What if the stars aligned with the sun and the moon and we retained every single student that finished the year in good academic standing?” Under those conditions, we might hit a 90% retention rate. A pipe dream? Maybe. But why set a goal if it doesn’t stretch us a little bit? So we stuck that number in the document and thought to ourselves, “This will be a good number to shoot for over the next five years.”

Last year (fall of 2016), we were a little stunned to find that we’d produced an overall first-to-second year retention rate of 88.9%. Sure, we had instituted a number of new initiatives, tweaked a few existing programs, and cranked up the volume on our prioritizing retention megaphone to eleven. But we weren’t supposed to have had so much success right away. To put this surprise in the context of real people, an 89% retention rate meant that we whiffed on a whopping seven students! SEVEN!!! Even if we had every retention trick in the book memorized, out of a class of 697, an 88.9% retention rate is awfully close to perfect.

So what do you do when you find yourself close to banging your head on a ceiling that you didn’t really ever expect to see up close? The fly-by-night thought leader tripe would probably answer with an emphatic, “Break through that ceiling!” (complete with an infomercial and a special deal on a book and a DVD). Thankfully, we’ve got enough good sense to be smarter than that. In reality, a situation like this can set the stage for a host of delicately dangerous delusions. For example, if we were to exceed that retention rate in the very next year we could foolishly convince ourselves into thinking that we’ve discovered the secret to perfect retention. Conversely, if our retention rate were to slip in the very next year we could start to think that our aspiration was always beyond our grasp and that we really ought to just stop trying to be something that we are not (cue the Disney movie theme song).

The way we’ve chosen to approach this potential challenge is to start with a clear understanding of all of the various retention rates of student subpopulations that make up the overall number. By examining and tracking these subgroups, we can make a lot more sense of whatever the next year’s retention rate turns out to be. We also need to remind ourselves that for an overall retention rate to hit our aspired goal, all of the subpopulation retention rates have to end up evenly distributed around that final number. And that has always been where the really tough challenges lie because retention rates for some student groups (e.g., low income, students of color, lower academic ability) have languished below other groups (e.g., more affluent, white students, higher academic ability) for a very long time.

With all that as a prelude, Let’s dive into the details that make up the retention rate of our 2016 cohort.

Overall, our first-to-second year retention rate this fall is 86.5%. No, it’s not as strong as last year’s 88.9% retention rate. Even though our three-year trend of 3-year retention rate averages continues to improve (84.7%, 86.0%, and 87.2% most recently), I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t just a little disappointed by the overall number. Yet, this sets up the perfect opportunity to examine our data more closely for evidence that might confirm or counter the narrative I described above.

As always, this is where things get genuinely interesting. Over the last few years, we’ve put additional effort into the quality of the experience we provide for our students of color. So we should expect to see improvement in our first-to-second year retention rate for these students. And in fact, we have seen improvement over the past four years as retention rates for these students have risen from 78.4% four years ago to 86.1% last year.

So it is particularly gratifying to report that the retention rate for students of color among the 2016 cohort increased again, this time to an impressive 89.8%! Amazingly, these students persisted at a rate almost five percentage points higher than white students.

That’s right.  Retention of first-year students of color from fall of 2016 to fall of 2017 was 89.8%, while the retention of white students over the same period was 85.6%.

Of course, there is clearly plenty of work for us yet to do in creating the ideal learning environment where, as a result, the maximal number of students succeed. And I don’t for a second think that everything is going to be unicorns and rainbows from here on out. But for a moment, I think it’s worth taking just a second to be proud of our success in improving the retention rate of our students of color.

Make it a good day,

Mark