As we tumble down the back side of the fall term, I know that the potential value of a long and involved blog post drops like a stone in the face of the ten things that have to be solved right now(!).  So I’m gonna just roll out one big-picture data point and let you mull it over when you get a chance to breathe.

Remember that economic collapse that wrecked the economy and scared the pants off of tuition dependent college like us?  Yeah, sorry – not the best way to start the week.  Although there are a few reasons to think that the American economy might be slowly pulling out of its nose dive, we all know that the ripple effects haven’t abated much.

I’ve been trolling our three years of senior survey data lately to look for trends that might be worth noting (see last week’s post on a couple of general education items).  This morning one set of numbers really jumped out at me; the increasing proportion of our students who qualify for Pell Grants – a group of students who almost certainly wouldn’t be at Augustana if it weren’t for need-based financial aid from the federal government and the state of Illinois through the MAP grant program.

The table below shows the increase in this aspect of our student population over the past three classes.  I’ve included the actual numbers in parentheses to add some perspective.

You can see that over a relatively short period of time, we’ve roughly doubled the proportion of students who receive Pell Grants (and therefore also received MAP Grants from the state of Illinois).  If you look closely, you can see a hint of this lower socioeconomic status on retention and graduation, since the proportion of these students shrinks over the course of four years.

Just in case you were wondering, 26.2% of our student body (655/2500) of our current overall student body is receiving a Pell Grant.  And among our newest class of freshmen, 28.1% are receiving Pell Grants.

The headline of this blog referred to the stereotype that we like to throw around about our students coming from the Chicago suburbs.  Sometimes I hear that stereotype dressed up with healthy dose of wealth, homogeneity, and entitlement.  I’m not trying to suggest that those students don’t exist at Augustana.  Of course they do.  But the thing about these numbers that hit me was this:

• We have a trend in our data that suggests a growing proportion (now over a quarter of our student body) of our students that, at least on one critical dimension, don’t conform to that stereotype.
• Are we adapting our expectations and interactions with our students to match what we know about from whence they come?

Make it a good day,

Mark

Despite a genuine commitment to a liberal arts mission, at times it seems easier said than done. On one hand, public fretting (some of it well founded) about unemployed and apparently unemployable college graduates has made some suggest that a college education should focus more of its coursework on preparation for a specific career. On the other hand, the proliferation of knowledge and sub-disciplines within many academic fields translates into more knowledge that faculty often believe (sometimes rightly) need to be added to the range of concepts covered within a particular major. Both of these tangible pressures bolster the argument for expanding the footprint of the major. By comparison, the counter-arguments for maintaining a robust general education program tend to be more abstract and sadly, rarely stand a chance.

Two trends (one macro and one micro) highlight the declining clout of general education. First, the number of U.S. colleges classified as liberal arts colleges has dropped substantially in the last several decades (from 212 to 130). Most of this change involves institutions that expanded their educational offerings into more vocational and pre-professional programs. Closer to home, the proportion of Augustana students who earn at least two majors continues to increase (over 45% of graduates in 2014). In the case of Augustana students, our double majors don’t stay in college longer than everyone else, they just concentrate more of the credits they earn in specific areas.

During last year’s conversations about the relative impact of general education and potential improvements that could be made, some seemed to suggest that our general education program was not in need of revisions. One of the questions posed was whether or not our senior survey data might provide evidence to inform this conversation. Now that we have a third year of senior survey findings, I thought it might be useful to explore the responses to the survey’s general education items and look for any patterns or hints of trends. I’m not sure that the findings below provide definitive answers, but I hope they will further inform the discussion and direction of the general education conversation at Augustana.

The Augustana Senior Survey includes six questions intended to assess the nature of students’ experiences in their non-major or general education courses. Interestingly, the lowest average response score over the last three years came from the 2014 seniors on five of the six questions. Further analysis indicated that the drop from highest to lowest score was statistically significant for four of those questions. They are listed in the table below.

I fully admit that three years of data is not nearly enough to make predictive claims or produce some sort of smoking gun. However, it is enough data to begin triangulating these findings with others (everything from observational to rigorously quantitative data) and look for evidence of multiple findings moving in the same direction. This can be a particularly effective way to identify early “shadows” in the data and give us time to consider their implications in a less reactive environment.

It would be entirely reasonable to expect some fluctuation on average response scores for individual items across multiple years. But it struck me as curious that the responses to so many of the general education items – questions that I think represent the way that we imagine our general education courses functioning at a liberal arts college – moved together in a negative direction.

What might explain this phenomenon? Is it a function of our students feeling an increased pressure to focus on career preparation? Could it be a function of our own subtle leanings toward areas of our own expertise? Or could it be that we lack a clear sense of exactly how our general education requirements link together to form the kind of integrated breadth of understanding that would ultimately produce the ideal liberally educated student?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. But these findings did make me think again about our discussion of the role of general education and the degree to which we may need to revisit our commitment to 1) the role of general education and 2) the way we ensure that our general education program helps students develop all of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that we know are critical to their success after graduation.

Make it a good day,

Mark

In last week’s Delicious Ambiguity post we dove into the deep end of the data pool regarding retention and the complexity of the problem. Our institutional data shows that the factors shaping our student’s decisions to withdraw or persist are influenced by characteristics that students bring with them to college as well as experiences that they have during their first year. Moreover, it’s clear that addressing this issue requires “all hands on deck” if we are to make any demonstrable progress.

But knowing that information by itself leaves us far short of actually knowing what to do differently. For us to improve our retention rates we need to know which student experiences matter most in shaping their decision to persist. We need to identify specific experiences over which we have substantial and concrete influence. Information about more general experiences, even if they are specific to one aspect of the college experience, is not enough. For example, both of the items below predict our students’ general sense of belonging on campus.

• “My day to day experiences in my residence hall have helped me feel like I fit in at Augustana.”
• “I know that my Community Adviser (CA) cares about how I am doing at Augustana.”

Although both findings might appear interesting, the item addressing our CA’s impact on students’ sense of well-being is more specifically prescriptive, providing tangible guidance for designing the role of CAs as well as the way that we select, train, and assess their efforts.

Similarly, if we can collect and link granular experience data to bigger picture retention data, we will be more likely to glean specific direction from our data analyses that ultimately helps us improve retention. This was our big aspiration when we altered our freshman survey’s design last year, gathering more specific experience data about academic acclimation and social integration midway through the first year. After analyzing last year’s responses, I’m excited to share several specifically actionable findings that appear to increase the likelihood of persistence.

After last week’s examination of some retention trends involving race, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and pre-college preparation, we applied those findings to run some statistical models that combined data from our institutional data, our student readiness survey, and our mid-year freshman survey. All of the findings I share below hold true after taking into account race, gender, SES, pre-college preparation (ACT). We then added items from the freshman data that might influence retention above and beyond those four pre-college characteristics. In the end, two items produced statistically significant effects.

The first item producing a statistically significant positive effect on retention addressed a very specific aspect of the LSFY/Honors experience.

• My LSFY/Honors instructor helped me develop at least one specific way to be a more successful college student.

Just as so many other researchers have found previously, students often need guidance in figuring out how to successfully navigate college. This means so much more than just knowing how to react to trouble in a class or with a roommate. Instead, this means knowing how to take control of the experience in order to make the most of it in preparation for life next month, next term, or next year.  Our finding suggests that LSFY and Honors instructors who taught students at least one specific way to proactively engage college as a student actually contributed directly to student persistence. And this finding held regardless of incoming ACT score, suggesting that this kind of learning is valuable for all students no matter their pre-college academic preparation.  As LSFY continually explores ways to make that course more effective, this finding seems well worth incorporating into that discussion.

The second item that produced a statistically significant effect addressed a more general sense of social integration.

• I feel like I belong on campus.

Although this is interesting, we needed to dig further to come up with more concrete guidance toward future improvement. After peeling back another layer of the onion, we found that very kind of guidance.

This time, in addition to accounting for race, gender, SES, and ACT score, we decided to add comfort with social interaction to the mix. Interestingly, in the end comfort with social interaction still produced a statistically significant positive effect, suggesting that despite everything that we might do to influence students’ sense of belonging, more reserved students are likely to still feel less of a sense of belonging than more outgoing students at the midpoint of the first year. However, this effect appears to vanish by the end of the first year, supporting the contention that more reserved students may simply need more time to find their niche on campus.

Under these analytic conditions, we found granular experience guidance for faculty, both as instructors and as advisers, and for student affairs professionals that appear to influence student’s sense of belonging. The two items addressing faculty interactions with students were:

• My first year adviser made me feel like I could succeed at Augustana.
• How often have your instructors pointed out something you did well on an assignment or in class?

Again, these findings held even after accounting for incoming ACT score. In other words, regardless of a student’s academic “ability,” faculty communicating to students that they can succeed and pointing to something that they have done well appears to contribute to a student’s sense of belonging on campus. This doesn’t mean that faculty should pull punches or tell students that they are doing well when they are not. Instead, this suggests to me the faculty play a critical role in contributing to student’s belief that they can succeed and then finding positive reinforcement to show them the way.

We found two items predicting a sense of belonging on campus that provide some concrete guidance for working with students outside of class.

• Fall Connection provided the start I needed to succeed academically at Augustana.
• I know that my Community Adviser cares about how I am doing at Augustana.

Although the item addressing Fall Connection (now called Welcome Week) seems fairly general, I think it further emphasizes the importance of the changes introduced this year to increase the emphasis on academic preparation. Based on last year’s data (prior to this elevated academic emphasis), this aspect of Fall Connection mattered significantly. In addition, I am particularly intrigued by the nature of the CAs impact on students’ sense of belonging. This kind of guidance provides pretty clear direction in designing the nature of CAs conversations with students.

All of these findings together simply confirm that we all play a significant role in shaping our students’ decision to persist at Augustana College. I hope we can find ways to further convert these findings into concrete action. As with so many other aspects of college students’ experience, it’s not what they do; it’s how they experience what they do.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Ok, so that headline might sound a little dramatic. Yet even on the most collegial of campuses, a serious conversation about retention rates – especially if that number has gone in the wrong direction over the last year or two – can quickly devolve into wave of finger pointing and rekindle a litany of old grudges.

We’ve all heard the off-handed comments. “If admissions would just recruit better,” “If faculty would just teach better,” “If student affairs would just help students fit in better,” “If financial aid would just award more money.” Lucky for me, all of these assertions are testable claims. And since we have the data . . . (cue maniacal laughter).

Yet using our data to find a culprit would fly in the face of everything that we are supposed to be about. We say that our students learn because of the holistic nature of the Augustana experience. And analyzing our student data by individual characteristics implies that our students are somehow one-dimensional robots. Most importantly, if we want to improve, then we have to assess with the specific intent of starting a conversation – not ending it. That means that we have to approach this question with the assumption that we are all critical contributors to retaining students.

This year’s first-to-second year retention rate isn’t great.  At 82.9%, it’s the lowest it’s been in five years. In the context of the Augustana 2020’s target retention rate of 90%, there is certainly reason for raised eyebrows. To understand what is going on underneath that overall number, it’s worth looking at our data in a way that mirrors the students’ interaction with Augustana up until they decide to stay or leave. So let’s organize these trends into two categories: students’ pre-college demographic traits and the students’ first year experiences.

Scholars of retention research generally point to five pre-college demographic traits that most powerfully impact retention: gender, race, socioeconomic status, academic preparation, and first generation status. Below is five-year trend data across these categories.

As you can see, our own data suggests a more complicated picture. Although nationally women persist at higher rates than men, our data flipped last year when persistence among men actually eclipsed persistence among women. Our retention rate for multicultural students (our euphemism for non-white students) has trended steadily downward, a fact made more pressing by a steady increase in the number of multicultural students. Although we haven’t tracked first-generation status for more than a few years, this retention rate has also dropped while the number of first generation students has increased. While our retention rate of Pell Grant recipients (those students with the highest need) has increased slightly, the retention rates of students who only qualified for loans has dropped steadily. At the same time, the retention rate of students from the highest socioeconomic status has dropped a bit.

Finally, academic preparation retention rates paint an interesting picture. The national data would suggest that our worst retention rates should be among those students who come from the lowest ACT quartile. At Augustana, those students’ retention rates are also lower and haven’t changed much. By contrast, the retention rates of students from each of the other three quartiles, although they are still higher than the lowest quartile, dropped substantially between 2012 and 2013. Interestingly, the retention rate of the students who applied test-optional has gone up almost 8 points over the past five years.

But students’ likelihood of persisting to their second year is not etched in stone before they start college. Another way to look at some of these trends is to examine the characteristics of the students who leave against those traits that might indicate an experience that differs from the mainstream in some important way – especially if we know that this difference in experience might affect the calculus by which the student determines whether it is worth the time, money, and emotional investment to stay. So as you look through this table, remember that these percentages are the proportion of departed students who fit each category.

Much of this data corroborates what we saw in the examination of retention rates by pre-college characteristics in the case of gender, race, socioeconomic status, first generation status, and academic preparation. However, one new trend adds some interesting nuance to the impact of the first year experience on retention. If we look at the proportion of departing students who are also in academic difficulty when they left, there is a clear differences of almost 20 percentage points among those who had less than a 2.5 GPA when they left. In other words, far fewer of our departing students are in a position where their grades might be the primary reason for their departure. This suggests to me that, if they aren’t departing because of grades, then there are other key elements of the first year experience that would be primary contributors to the decision to depart.

We aren’t going to answer the question of what is negatively impacting retention today. Even if we were to pinpoint a significant factor in a particular year, because the nature of each class differs, evidence from one year might be entirely useless the next. My point today is simply to highlight the degree to which all of us impact retention together.

I’d like to think that on some level we know that finger pointing is foolish. Yet in an environment where we are simultaneously immersed in our own silos and entirely dependent on the efforts of others (e.g., faculty don’t have a job if admissions doesn’t recruit anyone), it doesn’t seem all too surprising that such behavior (especially if budgets are under threat) might surface despite the best of intentions. So maybe if you hear someone grouse about retention rates and “rounding up the usual suspects,” you’ll remind them that we are in this together. If we fail to improve, it won’t be because someone didn’t do their job – it will be because we all didn’t pull together.

Make it a good day,

Mark