How Do You Retain Community-College Students? Jill Biden Has a Dissertation for That.

What the presidency of Joseph R. Biden means for community colleges, which have been battered by declining enrollments during the pandemic, remains unclear. But advocates of the sector are excited that one of their own, Jill Biden, will serve as First Lady, a powerful symbolic perch that has been used to promote projects like literacy and healthy eating.

Looking at the future First Lady’s doctoral dissertation makes one thing clear: She is well versed in the language of student success. In fact, Biden, who was an English and writing instructor at Delaware Technical Community College when her husband was elected vice president and became an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College when she moved to Washington, used that 2006 dissertation to argue for retention strategies that have since become increasingly popular at colleges that serve vulnerable students.

For the University of Delaware dissertation, titled “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs,” Biden mined the literature about student success and conducted her own surveys of Delaware Tech students.

Here are four elements the 130-page study says are key to success.

1. Deep advising relationships.
Advisers must not only schedule students for their classes but also undertake the more difficult and time-consuming job of taking a personal interest in their students, Biden writes. This personalized approach, in advising and relations with students throughout the college, has gained traction in recent years. At Odessa College, in West Texas, administrators started asking faculty in 2011 to call all their students by name and to make personal connections — even just a quick hallway conversation — with each one. Course drop rates plummeted.

Biden surveyed “pre-tech” students — what Delaware Technical calls developmental learners — and found that 60 out of 167 had never met with an academic adviser. “The fact that 35 percent of Pre Tech college students had never seen their adviser was a problem itself,” Biden wrote. “Almost 18 percent of these students were the first in their families to attend college.”

2. Faculty mentoring programs. Biden writes that these go “hand in hand” with improved advising. The success of students often depends on how well they integrate into the campus, and a faculty mentor could help. Minority and first-generation students could especially benefit from mentoring, Biden writes, because a lack of diversity on college campuses means those students often feel alienated.

In a survey of pre-tech students, Biden found that 65 percent indicated that a mentor would help them achieve their goals at Delaware Tech.

(A request seeking comment from Delaware Tech was instead forwarded to Biden’s office, which could not immediately be reached).

3. Mental-health services. Biden’s dissertation contains more personal moments, such as when she interviews former students of hers who dropped out. She writes about Ashley, a student who lived through a suicide attempt and struggled academically. The passage underscores Biden’s greater theme that colleges need to be more aggressive in guiding their most vulnerable students through higher education.

“If Ashley had talked to a psychologist at Del Tech, or even to a counselor, she might have been made to see that Delaware Tech was not the right place for her,” Biden writes. “She just kept signing up for classes and then failing these classes for a myriad of reasons. She was emotionally fragile and could not possibly have handled the stress of attending school.”

Having counselors available is central to student success, Biden writes. Community-college students tend to juggle many responsibilities, such as work and caring for children and family members. They’re also less prepared for college and have the added stress of acquiring remedial skills while taking classes.

Five years prior, Biden wrote, Delaware Tech had a part-time psychologist, “but his contract was not renewed due to budgetary constraints.” It’s a familiar story at community colleges, which have struggled to meet the needs of their students as the demand for mental-health resources has increased significantly in the years since Biden’s dissertation.

4. More deliberate thought to students’ pathways. Biden often gets into the weeds of academic policies, sometimes informed by her time as a writing instructor. For example, she suggested that vocational schools switch to teaching students to write papers in the APA format, which is more often used in technology and the sciences, rather than the MLA format, which is used in the arts and humanities.

“This example is one of many,” Biden writes, “that portrays how public education puts community college students at a disadvantage — cohesive, transitional efforts should be made by both the high schools and Delaware Tech to close the gaps and create a bridge to higher education.”

One challenge Biden will have as she advocates for the sector: a day job. The First Lady will continue to teach English at Northern Virginia Community College, even while living in the White House.