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Student retention is a massive issue in higher education, with the 1st year drop out rates for community colleges at 65% and 39% for traditional 4-year schools.
The core reason for this issue is not the lack of school staff and leadership wanting to mitigate student retention and share responsibility for tackling it. I found it very much the opposite that staff and faculty are fanatical about helping students succeed. Remember, as a school, it is very much your job, especially if you are in Admissions and Marketing, to have an enrollment succeed and graduate, as you have purveyed the institution as the best fit for that individual enrollment. The real challenge is that schools and staff don't know what they don't know, and those who do know do not have a conduit to share this information to bring the institution’s capabilities to resolve the issue.
I spent roughly a decade working for a career school with both ground and online programs that catered to adult learners from lower-income backgrounds. This challenge around retention was not a monthly or quarterly conversation battle but rather a daily battle on how the institution could figure this chronic problem out. This school, like other career schools, also had another unique challenge which is they must have at least 70% of their students employed in a position within several months of them graduating. Then to add to further complexity, we educated in 46 states around the country in both urban and rural markets.
The challenges the school faced from retention and graduate job placement led me to explore how leveraging a 1940’s psychology theory named after Abraham Maslow, known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, could be leveraged to help identify questions that could be asked of new students at the time of enrollment and throughout the school year to determine if they had any academic, student life, and job placement barriers that increased their likelihood of dropping out or struggling with obtaining employment after school.
Before going further, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is used to study how humans intrinsically partake in behavioral motivation. Maslow used the terms "physiological", "safety", "belonging and love", "social needs" or "esteem", "self-actualization," and "transcendence" to describe the pattern through which human needs and motivations generally move.
Based on the theory for motivation to arise at the next stage, each prior stage must be satisfied by an individual. The hierarchy has been used to explain how effort and motivation are correlated in the context of human behavior. Each of these individual levels contains a certain amount of internal sensation that must be met in order for an individual to complete their hierarchy. The goal in Maslow's hierarchy is to attain the level or stage of self-actualization.
In short, if your student population has any lower order deficiency needs, they are unlikely to be able to retain at your institution or succeed in finding and holding a job post-graduation. Schools with this knowledge should make their best effort to ensure their enrollment learning environment is sound and stable. Example environmental barriers faced by lower-income learners include unstable housing, access to the internet to complete school work, non-reliable transportation to get to class, externships or job interviews, and funds to support their household expenses. Traditional residential schools face some of the same issues, but they can differ to include dormmate and classmate conflicts, DEI issues on campus, lack of dietary and nutrition options available at food halls based on students' nutritional or religious requirements.
Anyone of these barriers could derail a successful student. In the adult learner space, we often would find students that drop out return to a low-paying hourly work in lieu of finishing their degree, preventing them from having a more lucrative and stable career. This is a terrible outcome for the learners as they or their families have taken on debt, and for adult learners, this would be another chapter of failed attempts to escape a life living paycheck to paycheck, and for younger learners, the start of a potential downward spiral.
Now comes the part of finding out what information your institution captures to help identify barriers and challenges your enrollment population face. If your school has an electronic new student survey assessment, this is great! You should be able to explore this data to see if you are able to gain insights. You should contrast students that retained vs those that dropped to determine if there are any clear differences. This might require joining data from your Student Information System and LMS to create segmentations. Segmentations might be by program, lead channel, age, gender, household income, home address related to school, financial aid packaging/scholarships, GPA, attendance, etc.
Don’t worry if you are not a “data person” the goal here is to see if you can garner some insights. Often your initial insights can be acted upon to provide some quick wins, which can help obtain more resources to support your efforts.
Unfortunately, it is likely your institution isn’t asking direct questions about student or academic barriers, so you might have to explore areas where a student might disclose these barriers. If that is the case, go to your front-line team and staff responsible for handling students that are unenrolling and interview them to see what they hear most often.
Now it is likely your school is like nearly less than half of public colleges that do not use an incoming student assessment to identify student’s needs per Ruffalo Noel Levitz. If this is your reality, I would engage with your front-line teams, as mentioned above, to see if they have anecdotes of student challenges. You might also explore if your organization has institutional and/or program student satisfaction surveys that could have information about obstacles students are facing. These are often a requirement for accreditation purposes.
Another option, which can take time and require further organizational buy-in, is to conduct a dropout outreach campaign via text, phone, or email with a short survey asking the student why they dropped out. I would include some type of reward for responding, like a gift card, to increase your likely response rates. Notable, you should be prepared to inform your Admissions team if you have some students that would be interested in coming back. Your Marketing team might already have a re-engagement campaign, so you might already have a rather easy logistical way of doing this. Hint for enrollment marketers this can be a very good source of enrollments if you are not already doing this, like 5-20% of enrollments.
Now that you have some insight into why students are dropping out do a review of how your school’s website, student support team, and other resource centers assist students with this challenge or if they do at all. Spend some time mapping processes and determining if you do have these services and how can other parts of the school and student communications include them to bridge the gap. Often support varies amongst staff and is one-off.
If your institution doesn’t have the ability or resources to resolve the issues you identified, determine what local or national partners the school could partner with our direct students to. Connecting with your local United Way 211 organization can be helpful for matters involving mental health, utility bills, housing, transportation, and food. National organizations like Childcare Aware of America can help with childcare-related issues, Everyone On can help with internet accessibility and computer access-related challenges, and Benefits.Gov provides a short questionnaire to help identify federal benefits that could mitigate student challenges.
Acting upon the above steps will create inertia in tackling the issue of identifying and starting to remediate barriers contributing to retention issues. This, however, is just the start, as the next steps will be to start or adjust survey assessments to capture relevant information related to student life challenges and academic challenges that will help inform your internal staff and faculty of these challenges. Survey assessments should be conducted at multiple points of the student lifecycle. Capturing this information in a systematized way can help with the future development of reporting ecosystems to monitor efforts and changes with your enrollments. This data can also be used by data scientists to help predict retention and graduate placement outcomes and timing.
It will also be important to look to develop cross-functional partnerships between your marcomms, admissions, student support, and faculty functions to ensure the school is working in unison to lean into this pervasive but addressable issue.
I have worked with several institutions, and there are over two dozen academic and student barriers that can lead to adverse retention and job placement outcomes that I have come across. Each institution is unique, and the complexity of the barriers could be as small as providing more information about scholarships during the enrollment phase to helping students navigate domestic violence issues. It is important to know that students will build a stronger bond with your institution if you ask and make an effort to help resolve the issue. Your institution might not be able to resolve the issue, but the student will have greater admiration for trying to help.
If you found this helpful, please share, and if you want to discuss this further, feel free to contact me via DM or email at dsmith@headsdowngroup.com
PS I want to thank a former colleague for suggesting that I write this article and Enrollify podcast with Zach Busekrus and Dr. Carrie Phillips I listened to this AM that motivated me to write this based on the conversation they had around the enrollment cliff and how critical the intersection of communications and data will be to assist with student retention and ultimately branding efforts of institutions. Listen here.
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