There is much nonsense -- and precious little sense -- in campus discussions of student retention. Three common misconceptions pose serious roadblocks to progress on this important issue.
The first and perhaps the most widespread is that the primary objective of student-retention programs is to keep students in college and, parenthetically, to keep their tuition money coming in.
Although this assumption seems quite sensible on the surface, it in fact represents a serious misunderstanding of the essential purpose of retention efforts. Although keeping students in college is a natural byproduct of a successful operation, such programs focus first and foremost on ways to insure that all students, not just some, have an opportunity to learn as much as possible while they are in college, regardless of whether they decide to stay or leave.
A second misconception, which typically follows as a corollary of the first, is that retention is primarily the responsibility of student-affairs staffs, whose work puts them in direct contact with students outside the classroom. As a faculty member recently told me: “Our job is to teach, not to retain students who shouldn’t be in our classrooms in the first place. Let the people in student affairs worry about student retention. That’s their job.”
Of course the student-affairs staff frequently does have primary responsibility for retention programs. But that reflects less the necessary order of things than the unwillingness of faculty members to become involved in retention efforts. Student-affairs staffs take the responsibility because no one else is willing to.
That is regrettable, because faculty members’ involvement is critical to the success of retention programs. It is nonsensical for them to act as though their interactions with students inside and outside the classroom are somehow unrelated to students’ decisions to stay or leave. The research in this regard could not be clearer. Over the past 15 years, the most consistent finding has been that positive interaction with faculty members has a direct bearing on whether students persist to earn a degree.
Regardless of type of institution or type of student, the finding is the same: The more faculty members interact with and become engaged with students, the more likely the students are to stay in college. Equally important is the associated finding that links student learning to student retention. Studies show that the students who report rewarding contacts with faculty members are also the ones who make the greatest gains in learning and are the most likely to complete their degrees.
The simple yet frequently overlooked truth is that faculty members, not the student-affairs staff, are the primary educational agents of an institution. It is on their efforts that effective retention programs ultimately hinge. Regardless of how well the student-affairs office does its part, the success of retention programs will always be limited when the faculty is not equally involved.
The third misconception is that retention efforts are aimed at enabling students who do not belong in college to stay there. This rests on the false assumption that most students leave college because they are unable to cope with its academic demands. By extension, it also erroneously assumes that the primary task of student-retention programs is remediation.
The fact is that academic failure accounts for only a third of student attrition nationally. It is but one of a number of reasons that students leave college; the others have little if anything to do with maintaining adequate grades.
That does not mean that effective retention programs do not concern themselves with remediation. They do; but their success is rooted in an understanding that retention and academic performance are both influenced by the broader academic and social context in which students find themselves. Effective retention programs provide not only academic but also social support.
They concern themselves with establishing personal bonds and affiliations between new and older students and between new students and faculty and staff members. They stress personal contact and integration of students into the educational community as much as they stress remediation.
On racially and socially diverse campuses, this third misconception sometimes reflects rarely stated, but often strongly held, beliefs about the abilities and motivations of minority students. “Those students” are often thought to be sure to fail without “those programs.”
While it is true that minority retention programs generally are more heavily invested in remedial efforts than are other programs -- a logical outgrowth of the regrettable association in our society between minority status and educational underpreparation -- their ultimate success lies less in remediation than in their recognition of the importance of supportive social and intellectual climates for minority students. To be blunt, they recognize that racism and the associated stereotypes that label and stigmatize minorities, regardless of their ability, are still widespread on college campuses. Thus such programs recognize the particular importance of creating a supportive climate if disadvantaged students are to be encouraged to stay in college.
Unfortunately, all of the varied misconceptions about student retention persist because too many faculty and staff members are not willing to change and are not willing to recognize that a commitment to the education of all, not just some, of their students requires more than simply repeating the behaviors of the past.
Effective retention programs are not add-on efforts to help keep students enrolled who otherwise would leave; nor is remediation their only objective. At their best, they are attempts to restructure the character and quality of a student’s educational experience in college. They seek to provide the essentials of an effective education by establishing a real community in which students and faculty and staff members are all equally involved in the learning process. Effective retention programs thus are often the best education that colleges and universities have to offer.
Vincent Tinto is director of the cultural foundations of education program at Syracuse University.