Only 4 in 10 of the first year students who start at EMU in a given year graduate from EMU in 6 years. This is far below the national average of nearly 56% for 4 year institutions. EMU has long had a low retention rate.
Being below average means you lose in a competative race, and higher education is very, very, very competative these days. Our ability to attract students is being hurt by our low retention rates – smart parents and high school counselors tell students to be wary of the schools that don’t have high graduation rates: The school must be doing something wrong to lose so many students, they figure. And they are right.
EMU’s graudation rate is below the state’s grauation rate for 4
year institutions; according to the wonderfully informative “Almanac Issue 2007-8″ of the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, August 31, 2007, p. 66, the statewide rate is 55.3%. Page 4 of the same publication reports that the national
graduation rate is 55.9% (just barely above the Michigan rate). So we are not looking good by either national or state averages, in terms of retention.
EMU does a great job, a superb job, educating students; but too many of the students we recruit don’t get the educational experience and college life experience they need to succeed and stay in college. EMU should and can do more for these students, who are, after all, the majority of our entering class, year after year.
Right now, we’re doing OK recruiting first year students, but over a quarter of them are gone before their 2nd year starts. Then we lose another 30% or more of them in the next couple of years. Our seniors really are survivors. All college graduates should be sucessful students of rigorous academic programs, and EMU should be able to produce more of these survivors!
The high attrition rate causes EMU to lose a fortune in revenue — if our retention rates were just close to the national average,
we’d be in a totally different fianancial situation. The problems that cause this high attrition rate also contribute signficantly to the stresses and anxieties that afflict so many first year students in college, so they should be addressed for the sake of our students’ well being. The low retention rate is also a huge public image problem, at least among the families that make the best informed college choices – and those are the families with typically good students who we and other schools are competing for.
And as the state’s number of high school graduates drops from about 116,000 in 2007-08 to about 106,600
in ten years, the competition for the first time in college students will become all the greater here in Michigan. Therefore, EMU will be hurting even more, financially, because at that point we will most likely be getting fewer first year students to enroll and still have low retention rates, causing a double whamy in revenues.
The retention and recruitment crisis is the most urgent, and almost totally neglected, strategic problem facing EMU over the next few years. It touches finance, public trust, institutional purpose, eduational quality, student satisfaction.
If we retained more students, we’d need more faculty to teach the upper level classes. EMU would need more staff in all kinds of areas, and make more money from the “auxilary” things on campus, like the food venders and Coke machines. With more upper level students, EMU’s academic profile would be improved, and we’d be contributing even more to the Michigan economy than we do now. Our first years would be getting a better handle on what college means and requires — and what it offers. We’d be a better university, and people could look at our performance and see we do a good job helping students earn and complete their degrees: That’s what good universities do. We do that, lots of great teaching and learning happens on this campus; but we should do it more thoroughly and for more of our students. Our performance now as measured by retention is below mediocre. This kind of subpar performance is precisely the kind of things that universities are increasingly being held accountable for.
The loss of first year students to the community colleges can be explained largely by their cheaper cost of attendance.
The failure to retain our upper level students is largely due to failures within Eastern Michigan as a university. We should do better. We can.
What do people think?
Mark, I agree that retention is a major problem at EMU. This is a serious problem at just about any University. It is a complicated problem to fix. In my opinion, what is driving a lot (not all) of the low retention is that students coming into the university (both high school and transfers from CC) are just not academically prepared. Universities need to do a better job at identifying these students and provide mandatory remedial courses that bring these students up to speed. While at EMU, I remember being amazed at the virtual lack of basic math skills of many of my students (like simple addition, multiplication and division). Furthermore, I am sure we can have a rather long discussion about their writing skills as well. This is another area in which most of these students need remedial courses. “Dumbing down” the course content in order to pass and retain more students will absolutely not be the answer. Such a response would further erode the academic quality and reputation of EMU.
I agree with you, FormerEMUer. But the statistics show that EMU is doing worse at retention than
most schools, so we need to try harder to improve, just to reach the level of average.
Academic skills building is essential, but that takes many forms, including but not limited to remedial courses.
I think reading skills are a huge problem too.
But i’d argue further that the biggest problem is that too many students just aren’t excited by their college education.
So they become disengaged, and they fail to focus and fail to achieve. Some of these kids have decent
academic skills, without corresponding curiousity. EMU’s large intro level classes do not adequately connect with or motivate those students.
Derek Bok’s OUR UNDERARCHIEVING COLLEGES, published last year, in my view notes some of the
underlying problems of higher ed that are relevant to the retention problem at Eastern.
And thanks for the comment, FormerEMUer! You are absolutely right that retention is a problem all over, just more extreme
at EMU.
In my field, “remedial” is kind of a bad term for all sorts of reasons that are probably not interesting to people who are not heavily invested in my field of composition and rhetoric. I don’t think what we need is “remedial” courses in the sense of courses that are just not as important as the “real courses,” and one of the reasons I think this is that introductory writing courses like first year composition (e.g., ENGL 120 and ENGL 121 at EMU) are as “real” a learning experience as any 300, 400, or 500 -level course.
Besides admitting more prepared students, I think the way that EMU ought to attempt to retain students includes doing things to make students feel invested in the school and community, extend more opportunities for support, and to make it part of the culture to see community and support. If students feel like a trip to some sort of tutoring session or student support center is a “punishment” or the result of them being “dumb” or something, then they won’t go. If students feel like (as I think they ought to) that making use of student support services is a part of what it means to be a college student and it is something that is “smart” to do since it will likely improve grades and performance in classes, then maybe they will go.
Of course, the problem here is that EMU (and a lot of universities, frankly) want it both ways. We want to admit students who are perhaps less than prepared, but we don’t necessarily want to spend the money it takes to keep them here. Witness, for example, the round of budget cuts and its impact on student support services like the writing center.
While I think most of us would agree with all that has been written so far (and I’d add that the Holman Learning Center appears to have a lot less money for SIs this year, which I find very unfortunate in terms of helping students “make it” here), one issue that I’ve seen with these sorts of debates is that there appears to be a lack of data. Which students are staying, and which are leaving? Are commuters more likely than on-campus students to leave (perhaps that lack of community is an issue, if so)? Is there a noticeable socio-economic slant? (perhaps the weak economy is driving this, if so)? Is there a correlation to high school GPA, standardized test scores, or grades during their first semester? (perhaps being under-prepared is an issue in this case)? What about students who elect to be part of special first year programs like the FIG and PASS programs? Do they fare better (or worse) than the “typical” freshman admit in terms of retention with similar backgrounds, who did not join these programs?
Of those who leave, where are they going? Are the moving on to other 4 year universities? Are they going to community college for a while? Are they just dropping out of college altogether?
I really have no idea what sort of data we have on retention issues. But without reference to some hard information, we are all stuck with mere speculation. We can’t tell which parts of any problem with retention are beyond our reach and which ones could be remedied by changes to how we do things here on campus. And in a climate of insufficient resources, it would be nice to know that whatever we do to improve the situation is actually targeted and not just a guess and a hope, however good that guess might be.
Greg Jones – you mentioned in another thread that you are on a university retention committee; are you aware of the existence of specific data on this topic? If so, is there anything you can share with us?
So EMU is 10-15% different than “average” (average isn’t a very informative number, as most of us know, just look at average vs. median for your test or course grades, especially for incoming students).
On top of that, what is the overall picture to which this number belongs?
For example, if EMU has set its admission standards such that say 10-30% of new students would not be admitted to most universities without time at a community college, then the first to second-year retention would have a couple interpretations.
If we are only 15% different from “average” in retention but have a 30% different (arguably at-risk) incoming population, than that implies that many of the at-risk students can pull it off- and that EMU can really help them do so.
If it’s the other way around, 15% of incoming students are at greater risk and EMU loses all of them, then that is a sign that additional, mandatory courses that revisit high school skills are needed– or that the admissions criteria need changed so that students can be better prepared elsewhere before wasting a lot of money on something that doesn’t work out for most in their situation.
A number like “average retention”, minus any matching context about the populations involved, really doesn’t seem useful to me.
Does anyone have additional numbers about student populations over time? I’m sure they exist.
Several quick thoughts on this:
The stat says “graduate in 6 years.” Many of our students work full time and do not graduate in six years. What if we, for instance, calculated how many graduate 10 years after they begin?
Also, I learned in a workshop on retention that a major reason many students leave school is not an academic one. Many can’t graduate because of overwhelming debt or other financial reasons.
Therefore, I am saddened when I see EMU hosting tables for credit card companies that give students free t-shirts when they fill out a form for a credit card.
HI All
EMU has chosen to have a retention problem. Until we admit
this, it will not change.
We did not “get one”, it did not “just happen”. We chose it.
We chose it with the budget decisions we continue to make.
We chose it with the admissions decisions we continue to make.
We chose it when we cancel required classes.
We chose it when departments can only offer required class every other YEAR.
We chose it when we cannot open additional sections because there are not enough faculty.
We chose it when we cancel classes 5 minutes before they start.
We chose it when the person in front of the class teaches the same class at WCC.
We chose it with the fee structure we have.
We chose it when we ignored the maintenance of our classrooms and dorms.
We chose it when we ignore the parking issues.
We chose it when we did not collect data on students to find out when they actually
do graduate (toomanyhandles and AWemu are right on target – it’s a stat that could
easily be contested with data if we chose to collect it).
In regards to the admissions issue, we choose to have a retention issue a
number of different ways every year:
1) obviously, admitting students who are not prepared,
but then we also
2) admitting students who know they are going to transfer (in my intro Physics
class I ask the students when they are planning to transfer on their Info forms, and
every semester roughly 1 in 3 says he/she plans on transferring – we are their stepping
stone – they count against our retention rate)
3) advising students to be part-time. A part-time student will have great difficult graduating in 6 years.
4) encouraging students to be commuters. A commuter student can always find another school that is closer and more convenient.
These are all choices we make. I could keep going because there are lots more. We got
what we wanted. It is that simple. Change the behavior and change the outcome.
I agree with Steve that “We want to admit students who are perhaps less than prepared, but we don’t necessarily want to spend the money it takes to keep them here,” and J. Physics sums up quite well many of the ways in which we could better support students over the long haul.
Many universities have a short-sighted approach to retention. Indeed, in any corporate environment, the focus is typically on attracting, if not deluding, the purchaser (enrollment), not on making that person truly satisfied with the product or transformed for the better by it (service). That is why the corporatization of the university is so damaging.
I am no economist (I wonder what one would say about this), but it seems to me that investment in classrooms, tutoring facilities, lab or studio spaces, and the like would quickly repay itself–not only drawing students to the university, but also keeping them here for the long term.
I am also curious what students themselves would say–what incites their peers to go elsewhere or where do they think those students go after leaving EMU?