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Special Feature
Setting Goals Is An Important Student-Retention
Step
Submitted by: Gene
Logan, USA Funds Services
Establishing clear goals is a key to successfully implementing a plan for
enhancing student retention on your campus.
Your priorities for bolstering student retention must have the support and
commitment from all campus constituents — especially those involved
in the development and delivery of retention strategies. The online guide “Solving
the Retention Puzzle” advises that retention goals should be informed
by your school’s persistence data and other campus-assessment data,
both quantitative and qualitative measures. Carefully examine all sources
of survey data, and consider input from faculty, staff, students and administrators
as you establish the following six student-retention goals:
- Institutional goals. The best-retaining institutions focus on the effectiveness
of campus-wide retention programs and services such as advising, quality
service and student tracking.
- Recruitment goals. The best-retaining institutions focus on recruiting
students who have the greatest opportunities to be successful, based
on past student performances.
- Persistence goals. The best-retaining institutions may choose
to focus on improving the success rates of all students or of specific
groups of
students, such as those in specific majors, athletes, minorities
or others.
- Student-outcomes goals. The best-retaining institutions focus
on improving the quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the
educational experience,
such as increasing the freshman grade-point average, successfully
placing students
in jobs related to their majors, and increasing the percentage
of students getting into the graduate programs of their choice.
- Course goals. The best-retaining institutions focus on improving
their students’ opportunities for success in individual courses by monitoring
the pass/fail rates for “killer” courses, making more tutors
available to support specific courses, and increasing the GPA course
by course.
- Student-satisfaction goals. The best-retaining institutions
focus on both expectations and levels of student satisfaction
with a goal
of reducing
the
size of the performance gap (the difference in student expectations
and level of satisfaction) for the entire student body or
specific groups of
students.
“Solving the Retention Puzzle” offers a retention-goal worksheet to complete
for each of the goals your campus establishes, and a sample worksheet to guide
the development of those goals.
The guide “Solving the Retention Puzzle” is at www.usafunds.org/financial_aid/debt_management/solving_retention_puzzle/index.html,
on the USA Funds® Web site. The feature provides guidance to postsecondary
institutions about enhancing persistence and graduation rates, thereby contributing
to lower student-loan default rates. USA Funds developed “Solving the
Retention Puzzle” in cooperation with Noel-Levitz, the nation’s
leading consultant to higher education on student retention.
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