Early in the winter term, I wrote about the usefulness of tracking term-to-term retention. This approach is particularly valuable in evaluating and improving our efforts with first-year students, since they are the ones most susceptible to the challenges of transitioning to college and for whom many of our retention programs are designed. Now that we have final enrollment numbers for the spring term, let’s have a look at our term-to-term retention rates over the last five years and see if our increased student success efforts might be showing up in the numbers.

Here are the last five years of fall-to-winter retention rates for the first-year cohort.

• 2011 – 94.1%
• 2012 – 95.6%
• 2013 – 97.0%
• 2014 – 95.9%
• 2015 – 96.6%

As you can see, we’ve improve by 2.5 percentage points over the last five years. This turns out to be real money, since a 2.5% increase in the number of first-year students returning for the winter term means that we retained an additional 17 students and added roughly $84,000 in revenue (assuming we use 3-year averages for the incoming class and the first-year net tuition revenue per term: 675 students and $4940, respectively).

But one of the difficult issues with retention is that success is sometimes fleeting. In other words, retaining a student for one additional term might just delay the inevitable. Furthermore, in the case of first-year term-to-term retention the fall-to-winter retention rates can be deceiving because we don’t impose academic suspensions on first-year students after the fall term. Thus students who are in serious academic trouble might just hang on for one more term even though there is little reason to think that they might turn things around. Likewise, students who are struggling to find a niche at Augustana may begrudgingly come back for one more term even though they are virtually sure that this place isn’t the right fit. With that in mind, looking at our fall-to-spring retention rates would give us a more meaningful first glimpse at the degree to which our retention efforts are translating into a sustained impact. If the fall-to-winter retention rates are nothing more than a mirage, then the fall-to-spring retention rates would remain unchanged over the same five year period. Conversely, if our efforts are bearing real fruit then the fall-to-spring retention rates ought to reflect a similar trend of improvement.

Here are the last five years of fall-to-spring retention rates for the first-year cohort.

• 2011 – 92.1%
• 2012 – 93.1%
• 2013 – 93.3%
• 2014 – 93.5%
• 2015 – 94.1%

As you can see, it appears that the improving fall-to-winter retention rate largely carries through to the spring term. That translates into more real money: approximately $69,100 in additional spring term revenue. Overall, that’s about $153,000 that we wouldn’t have seen in this year’s revenue column had we not improve our term-to-term retention rates among first-year students.

Certainly this doesn’t mean that we should rest on our laurels. Even though retaining a student to the second year gets them over the biggest hump in terms of the likelihood of departure, it still seems to me like small consolation if that student doesn’t ultimately graduate from Augustana. However, especially facing the financial challenges that the state of Illinois has dumped in our lap, we ought to pat each other on the back for a moment and take some credit for our work to help first-year students succeed at Augustana. The data suggests that our hard work is paying off.

Make it a good day,

Mark