It always seems like it takes way too long to get the 10th-day enrollment and retention numbers for the winter term. Of course, that is because the Thanksgiving holiday pushes the whole counting of days into the third week of the term and . . . you get the picture.  But now that we’ve got those numbers processed and verified, we’ve got some good news to share.

Have a look at the last four years of fall-to-winter term retention rates for students in the first-year cohort –

• 14/15 – 95.9%
• 15/16 – 96.8%
• 16/17 – 96.7%
• 17/18 – 97.4%

What do those numbers look like to you? Whatever you want to call it, it looks to me like something good. Right away, this improvement in the proportion of first-year students returning for the winter term equates to about $70,000 in net tuition revenue that we wouldn’t have seen had this retention rate remained the same over the last four years.

Although stumbling onto a positive outcome (albeit an intermediate one) in the midst of producing a regular campus report makes for a good day in the IR office, it gets a lot better when we can find a similar sequence of results in our student survey data. Because that is how we start to figure out which things that we are doing to help our students correlate with evidence of increased student success.

About six weeks into the fall term, first-year students are asked to complete a relatively short survey about their experiences so far. Since this survey is embedded into the training session that prepares these students to register for winter classes, the response rate is pretty high. The questions in the survey focus on the academic and social experiences that would help a student acclimate successfully. One of those items, added in 2013, asks about the degree to which students had access to grades or other feedback that allowed them to adjust their study habits or seek help as necessary. In previous years, we’ve found this item to correlate with students’ sense of how hard they work to meet academic expectations.

Below I’ve listed the proportion of first-year students who agree or strongly agree that they had access to the sufficient grades or feedback during their first term. Compare the way this data point changes over the last four years to the fall-to-winter retention rates I listed earlier.

• 14/15 – 39.6%
• 15/16 – 53.3%
• 16/17 – 56.4%
• 17/18 – 75.0%

Obviously, both of these data points trend in the same direction over the past four years. Moreover, both of these trends look similar in that they jump a lot between the 1st and 2nd year, remain relatively flat between the 2nd and 3rd year, and jump again between the 3rd and 4th year.

I can’t prove that improved early academic feedback is producing improved fall-to-winter term retention. The evidence that we have is correlational, not causal. But we know enough to know that an absence of feedback early in the term hurts those students who either need to be referred for additional academic work or need to be shocked into more accurately aligning their perceived academic ability with their actual academic ability. We began to emphasize this element of course design (i.e., creating mechanisms for providing early term feedback about academic performance) because other research on student success (as well as our own data) suggested that this might be a way to improve student persistence.

Ultimately, I think it’s fair to suggest that something we are doing more often may well be influencing our students’ experience. At the very least, it’s worth taking a moment to feel good about both of these trends. Both data points suggest that we are getting better at what we do.

Make it a good day,

Mark