(posted on Tuesday, August 07, 2007)

School of Education professor continues study for College Board.

An Indiana University School of Education researcher is looking into what colleges and universities do to ensure students stay in school and graduate, an increasingly important marker for higher education accountability and much-scrutinized “best college” rankings. Don Hossler, professor of educational leadership and policy studies and director of the Project on Academic Success, said the College Board has renewed a funded project for the third year focusing on student persistence and graduation. Over three years, the non-profit organization has provided $850,000 for the College Board Pilot Study on Student Retention.

Hossler said most literature on student persistence and graduation focuses on the student experience, as did the first portion of the College Board study. Through the next portion of the project, Hossler said he hopes to develop a survey that can better determine what policies and practices work best for colleges trying to keep students in school and on track to matriculate.

“We know almost nothing about what colleges and universities do to organize themselves, what kind of policies and practices they put into place,” Hossler said. He noted that many universities cite retention as a priority, but devote very little resources or personnel to organizing or coordinating the task. A limited study of public and private four-year institutions in five states by the Project on Academic Success revealed the average of full-time employees on a campus devoted to retention was less than thirty percent. “Most of them have no budgetary authority,” he added. “Many of them have no policy-making authority.” Just under sixty percent of the campuses had a retention coordinator.

The need for investigating campus practices is important these days because, Hossler said, the retention rate is becoming a key ranking and policy-making tool. Aside from the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings, which gave retention rates up to 25% of weight in compiling final tallies for the most recent rankings, the federal government has moved towards using the numbers as an accountability measure. Hossler noted Congress failed to pass a bill in the last session that would have made retention rates a stronger factor. “A lot of assertions are out there about how important it is,” Hossler said, “yet the scant evidence that’s out there would raise some questions about its importance.”

While a vice-president or chancellor for retention isn’t likely at most campuses, Hossler said many could get the job done by having a coordinator. He said the task of retention calls upon many different aspects of a student’s campus experience. “It can be everything from advising, to adequacy of financial aid, to policies and practices around academic withdrawal,” he said. “I don’t think you can have a czar or czarina that just says ‘you will do this.’  But I do think you need someone who has a fair amount of their time is devoted to looking every year at ‘how are we doing?’”

After the College Board pilot study is done, Hossler said the organization intends to do a national survey of student experiences and best practices.

Media Outlets:  the following comments are available as mp3 files on the IU School of Education Website at:

http://education.indiana.edu/AudioFiles/tabid/6329/Default.aspx

Hossler says his previous study into how personnel is devoted to coordinating retention efforts reveals that most campuses don’t devote much:
“The average FTE on a campus devoted to retention and graduation is .29. Most of them have no budgetary authority.  Many of them have no policy-making authority. So you have this area, that’s got thirty years of research and attention and US News uses it as part of the calculations for ranking colleges, and the federal government is talking about using the graduation and retention rates as one accountability measure because everything else is so hard to measure. And institutions say we’re really focused on this is you ask them, and yet you have these nagging ‘we don’t know much about what they do.’ I think we’re actually the first study to look at this, and you get these really interesting findings like less than a third of an FTE actually devoted to it.”

A central coordinator for retention activities would be the best solution for most campuses, Hossler says:
“I’ve believed for many years that there should be someone who’s like a coordinator of retention activities, an associate-something, because it’s so multi-faceted. It can be everything from advising, to adequacy of financial aid, to policies and practices around academic withdrawal. I don’t think you can have a czar or czarina that just says ‘you will do this.’  But I do think you need someone who has a fair amount of their time is devoted to looking every year at ‘how are we doing?’”

Hossler says retention rates will continue to be important in higher education:
“There was a proposal that graduation rates be used as one of the primary accountability measures at the federal level. Those kinds of costs have always been—monetary ones have always been there. Those ones that we like to kind of—prestige and trust and perception of the public—those costs are going to keep going up for a while.”

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