With all the talk of a shrinking high school student population, changing demographics within that population, and the increasing number of college students who take courses online or transfer on a whim, it’s hard not to feel like the sky is about to come crashing down on higher education institutions like ours. Although I have no idea how to gauge the “threat level” given all of the external changes that are happening simultaneously (what ever happened to our good ol’ color-coded threat barometer from Homeland Security?), if you listen hard enough you can hear the entire system creaking and groaning like an old ship in tumultuous water. So even if it’s not the beginning of a fiery apocalypse, surviving all of this stuff isn’t necessarily a foregone conclusion and survival is not the same as coming out no worse for wear.

Yet in the midst of all this high anxiety, it’s easy to get so caught up in the fear of the unknown that we forget to notice moments worth celebrating. A big part of navigating change is keeping a balanced frame of mind and paying attention to evidence that we might be moving in the right direction. With this in mind, today I’d like to point to one number that is worth smiling about.

86.1%.  That is the proportion of the 2014 cohort of freshmen who returned for their second year at Augustana.  For short, we call that our retention rate.

The reason why that number is worth celebrating is that over the last few years we’ve been retaining somewhere between 85.1% and 82.9% of freshmen to the second year.

There are certainly several reasons to keep this party to a dull roar. Retention rates fluctuate, and even though we have instituted several good programs to help different types of students find a niche and succeed, managing the decision-making patterns of 19-year-olds is not a precise exercise. But today, it is worth noting that our retention rate of first-to-second year students is higher than it has been in three years.

That is worth letting yourself smile for a moment. It’s even worth going to someone on campus who works with first year students – LSFY instructors, 100 and 200 level course instructors, first-year advisers, financial aid administrators, learning commons administrators, librarians, residence life staff, coaches, and student life administrators (you get the idea at this point . . . there are a lot of people who influence the lives of first-year students) – and congratulate them. If you are one of the many who play a role in first-year students’ lives, take moment to smile and be proud of your effort.

Make it a good day,

Mark