A Cash-Strapped University Bet on Student Success — and Grew

When the University of Rhode Island hit a first-year retention record this year, Dean Libutti, a vice provost, drove to Allie’s Donuts, a North Kingstown institution, and ordered a doughnut cake in the shape of an 86.

Technically, the retention rate was 85.9, but that would require an extra doughnut digit and decimal, and URI is a frugal place, still recovering from the severe budget cuts it sustained during the Great Recession. Eighty-six was close enough, Libutti decided. He joked that he would cut a tiny piece off the cake before serving it to the student-success team.

These days, the University of Rhode Island has a lot to celebrate. In the decade since state appropriators slashed its budget by $26 million over three years, the university has increased its enrollment by 9 percent, raised its on-time graduation rate by double digits, and cut its racial-achievement gap in half. Those gains have translated into millions of dollars in tuition revenue that the university has used to hire dozens of new faculty members.

This fall, URI was chosen as one of three finalists for the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities degree-completion award.

Getting to this point wasn’t easy: It required a major investment in financial aid and student support, close attention to data, and a fundamental shift in the way the university allocates its limited resources. Not every change was popular, especially at first.

And URI isn’t out of the woods yet. State appropriations remain below fiscal 2007 levels, and some segments of students still aren’t meeting the university’s retention targets. Enrollment challenges loom, with the state’s supply of high-school graduates set to shrink significantly in the coming decade.

Still, URI’s ability to significantly improve student outcomes in the midst of a budget crisis carries lessons for other cash-strapped states. By doubling down on student success during tough times, the university has been able to retain many more of its students and more than recoup its investment in aid. For every percentage-point percent increase in retention, the university gains more than $2 million in tuition revenue.

“We figured out that if we could build a model based on student success, we could make it work,” Libutti said. “We weren’t going to be a victim of the economy.”

On the conference table in Libutti’s office sits a bowl of pink and red Starbursts and mints. Sugar, Libutti explained, “gets you through a lot of tough conversations.”

At URI, those tough conversations began in 2008, when the recession hit, and lawmakers slashed $7.5 million from the university’s budget. The next year, lawmakers cut another $12.7 million. Then, in 2010, another $5.4 million.

“We were in panic mode,” recalled Libutti, who became the vice provost for enrollment management in 2010. Faculty and administrators were asking, “How are we going to survive?”

One option was to cut spending on student aid. But Libutti, who had spent a decade at URI doing student-success work, knew that would only cause more students to drop out. Families who had lost jobs in the recession were already struggling to cover tuition, and retention rates were falling. Fewer than 40 percent of students were graduating on time.

So Libutti suggested the opposite: a multimillion-dollar investment in student aid.

To get his idea approved, Libutti needed the support of both the president’s team and the newly formed Strategic Budget & Planning Council, which was charged with reviewing all new spending requests and making recommendations to the president.

The panels demanded data, so Libutti built a predictive model that divided students into target populations and forecast gains in enrollment, credit accumulation, and retention for each group. He showed how more aid would lead to better results for underperforming students, and more tuition revenue for the college.

Still, the plan was a tough sell. Some faculty and administrators weren’t convinced it would work; others thought the money could be better spent elsewhere. It took Libutti seven appearances before the panels to get the first $7 million approved.

Around the same time, Donald DeHayes, the provost, was working on a controversial plan that would free up resources for financial aid and other urgent needs.

Historically, the university had allowed individual colleges to retain any money resulting from faculty departures. That approach provided some stability for the colleges but made it difficult to move money around when student tastes or institutional priorities changed.

Under DeHayes’s plan, colleges would have to compete for the money. The provost and deans would evaluate each department’s request at the spring-budget hearings and award the money to colleges that were experiencing enrollment growth or could make the case for a new program with market potential.

As President David Dooley describes it, “we went from using precedent and tradition to make decisions, to using data.”

“If you wanted to find money, you had to look for it elsewhere, because the new money wasn’t there,” he said.

Not surprisingly, some on the faculty weren’t happy with the change. “The first few years, we mostly moved money around,” recalled DeHayes. “These were lean times. Everyone was feeling the pinch.”

But once retention began to climb, and “we started seeing revenue we could reinvest,” the resistance softened, DeHayes said. Over the past five years, URI has allocated almost $30 million through the “strategic reallocation process.”

Looking back, DeHayes believes the university’s growth has come not in spite of the budget crisis, but because of it.

“It gave us cover to operate differently,” he said.

The early days, however, were nerve-racking. Libutti’s predictive model wasn’t perfect, and the 2010 cohort was smaller than expected. It took some tinkering to get the financial-aid formula right, DeHayes said.

Libutti, who was new to the vice provost job, felt the pressure. “What if it doesn’t work?” he worried.

Libutti knew it would take more than money to raise graduation rates, so he created a campuswide student-success team that began mining the data to determine why students weren’t finishing their degrees.

When the data showed that some were dropping out because they owed the college money and couldn’t register for classes, the team decided to lift “holds” on students who owed less than $1,000 and to offer aid to students with greater amounts of debt, to bring them below that cutoff.

When the data showed that many students weren’t taking enough credits in their first and second years, the university launched a credit-completion campaign, complete with T-shirts that read, “Take 5, Finish in 4.” It created maps that showed students which classes they’d need to take each semester to graduate on time. It added a three-week mini-semester over winter break and more online summer courses, so students who were short on credits could catch up.

To prevent credit loss when students switched majors, the Faculty Senate overhauled the general-education curriculum so that all its courses counted toward all majors.

And when the data revealed that students who participated in hands-on learning and met with advisers early in their college careers were more likely to persist, URI expanded experiential learning and created a pool of “professional advisers” for freshmen and sophomores, freeing faculty members to focus their advising on upperclassman.

Meanwhile, the university continued to invest in student aid, providing a total of $24 million in additional support over four years.

The efforts worked. Between 2008 and 2018, the share of first-year students earning 30 credits rose from 46 to 76 percent. First-year retention shot up by almost 9 percentage points, as did the six-year graduation rate. Today, more than half of students graduate in four years, up from 38 percent a decade ago.

Most impressive is the fact that URI has managed to cut its racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps significantly, even as the campus has grown more diverse. In 2012, Pell recipients were 13 percentage points less likely to graduate in six years than their peers without Pell grants; today, they’re only 9 percentage points less likely. The gap between white students and students of color has shrunk even more, from 19 percentage points to 7.

David Bergeron, who serves on the Strategic Budget & Planning Council, attributes these improvements to a cultural shift at his alma mater.

“When I was a student, the attitude was sink or swim,” recalled Bergeron, a longtime former official at the U.S. Department of Education. “That’s not the attitude today. It’s, ‘We’re here to provide you with what you need to be successful.’”

These days, “everyone views student success as their job,” he continued. “They understand that there’s a connection between student success and being financially viable.”

Of course, the college’s recovery can’t be attributed entirely to increased retention. URI had to make some difficult cuts, too, including eliminating four sports teams and phasing out older faculty members and staff. Sixteen faculty members and 21 staff members and administrators left under a retirement incentive offered in 2012.

The college has also enrolled more out-of-state students, increasing their share by 10 percentage points since 2010. Out-of-state students, who pay more than twice as much in tuition and fees as in-state students — $31,686 vs $14,566 — now make up just under half of all students at URI.

And like public colleges in many states, URI has raised its tuition — by 44 percent in the decade between 2008 and 2018, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Only eight states increased their average tuition by larger dollar amounts during that time period.

But the increase in financial aid that Libutti secured helped offset that hike, and the cuts to faculty have been more than made up in the past five years, as URI has used its new revenue to hire 63 new faculty members, 45 of them on the tenure track. Eight of the staff positions were eliminated, in part to control costs, DeHayes said.

“We’ve tried to restrain the growth of university administration,” he said. “Let’s focus our resources where it matters most to students.”

Today, a little over a decade after the start of the Great Recession, URI has a balanced budget and has begun to build a contingency fund to buffer the institution against future crises and to finance short-term strategic investments. It recently withdrew $8 million from the fund to pay for a new welcome center.

But the university remains a lean place. It spends $316 on instruction for each credit hour, while its peers spend $573. Libutti attributes the difference to URI’s slightly smaller share of full-time faculty, and their larger teaching loads.

The university has to be frugal. Rhode Island ranks 39th among states in appropriations per full-time equivalent, and state spending remains almost a million dollars below where it was in fiscal 2007, when adjusted for inflation. Dooley said he expects his university to remain “a resource-constrained place for the foreseeable future.”

For next year, URI is seeking a 2.6-percent tuition hike. A memo from Rhode Island’s acting commissioner of postsecondary education says the increase is needed to meet the governor’s “ambitious attainment goal” of having 70 percent of residents with a degree or certificate by 2025.

Meanwhile, enrollment challenges are coming. In Rhode Island, the number of high-school graduates is expected to fall by 1,500 students, or 14 percent. There’s still progress to be made on retention, too. Low-income students and students of color continue to lag behind their peers, as do undeclared students, who have a retention rate of 75 percent.

This year, URI started requiring undeclared freshmen to take a psychometric assessment that is shared with their advisers, so they can tailor their approach to helping them choose a major. Next year, it will name the first cohort of “student-success fellows” — faculty and staff members tasked with tackling a trend, such as growing Hispanic enrollment.

Dooley’s advice to other colleges trying to improve student outcomes in the midst of a budget crisis is this: Have patience.

“The hardest part of student success is having the discipline to stick to it,” said Dooley. “These things take time. Progress is incremental; you have to stay the course.”

And that celebratory doughnut cake? Libutti said no one complained that it was off by a fraction of a percentage point. Still, he did grab a blob of frosting when he was presenting it, to make a point.

“Every student matters, and two more students retained is all it takes to get to 86,” he said. “There are real students behind retention rates — and this can be forgotten.”

Correction (12/17/2019, 1:04 p.m.): This article originally misstated a comparison of graduation rates. In 2012, Pell Grant recipients were 13 percentage points less likely to graduate in six years than were their non-Pell peers, not than their white peers. The article has been updated to reflect this.

Audrey Williams June contributed to this article.

Kelly Field is a Boston-based freelance writer and former Chronicle staff member who focuses on issues of student success and equity.