Retention Programs Win National Award

As Printed in The Hartford Courant - July 05, 2006

By: Grace E. Merritt

STORRS -- The University of Connecticut's campaign to keep students from dropping out or transferring from the Storrs campus has paid off in a big way: The university has won a national award for its student retention rates. The campaign, which raised the retention rate as of 2004 to 92 percent for freshmen overall and to 93 percent for minority freshmen, won the Outstanding Retention Program Award from the Educational Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization. The award recognizes outstanding programs that focus on retaining students, especially those who historically are at risk for dropping out or transferring, such as low-income and first-generation students and students of color at a predominantly white campus.

Paying attention to students is particularly important at large research-intensive institutions, which often are multibillion-dollar businesses where research can overshadow teaching and students can get lost in the shuffle, said Watson Scott Swail, president of the institute, which has offices in Virginia Beach, Va., Toronto and Australia. "The issue of keeping students in school is difficult and challenging on any campus, even more challenging at a larger institution that has so many balls in the air. We found it quite impressive," Swail said.

UConn's freshman retention rate at Storrs rose from 86 percent in 1998 to 92 percent in 2004. The minority freshman retention rate on the Storrs campus rose from 88 percent to 93 percent during the same period, said M. Dolan Evanovich, UConn's vice provost for enrollment management. UConn's overall retention rate is lower at its five branches, where the rate rose from 71 percent to 79 percent between 1998 and 2004. The minority retention rate during the same period at the branches rose from 71 percent to 78 percent. The retention rate is the percentage of freshmen who return to the university the next year.

UConn's rates are not among the very best in the country, which generally hover in the high 90s, Swail said, but the institute was impressed by UConn's progress and is holding that up as a model for other schools. The university has been working quietly on undergraduate retention rates for years. Five years ago, it appointed a 25-member committee to look at retention and graduation rates. The group came up with about a dozen strategies aimed at helping students adjust to college life and helping struggling students, Evanovich said.

Among the many initiatives, UConn offers a course called the Freshman Year Experience that is designed to help new students with time management, study skills and navigating the campus. "It's like UConn 101. It covers time management, study skills, how to use the library and things like how to deal with people different from you and how to live in a residence hall," Evanovich said. The university also doubled the number of academic advisers to 14, matched out-of-state students with mentors and added more core, required courses. It has also set up an early-warning system to raise a red flag when a student gets a D or an F in a course and tries to help those students find study groups. "That has been really key to identifying students early on in the process," Evanovich said.

UConn also calls students who voluntarily leave UConn to find out why. All of this is geared toward making sure the student stays on after the freshman year and goes on to graduate. "When you recruit a student to attend your university, you want to see students be successful. Also want to make sure students can graduate," Evanovich said. Retention rates are important not only to help students succeed, but they help polish the university's reputation, because those rates are factored into the university's ranking in the annual U.S. News & World Report best-schools reports. It also makes sense on the business end for the university to protect the investment made to recruit the student in the first place. It costs UConn $680 to recruit a student, Evanovich said.