Freshman Retention Rates

The freshman drop out rate is an issue facing colleges across the country. The retention rates between a student’s freshman and sophomore is the lowest of the rates for the four years of college. The more selective a college is, the higher the retention rate. So a private school is likely to have a much higher rate than a four year college and a college such as Harvard will also have higher retention rates. The three main reasons for such a high attrition rate for freshman students is money, academic struggles and the expectations of the student are not met.

There is a generic national study given to freshman students called the “Nessie”. The Nessie asks questions like:

How often was electronic medium to discuss or complete an assignment? (never, seldom, somewhat,

often, always)

What was the quality of relationships with faculty members? (scale of 1 to 7 or helpfulness)

If you were to start college over again, would you choose this institution?

I am not sure how one could assess why freshmen are not returning based on questions like this! These questions do not seem to be helpful nor do they seem to give any reasons why a student might not return the following year.

“How College Affects Students” is book written by Terenzini, a professor of Higher Education at Penn State and Pascarella, a co-director of the Center for Research on Undergraduate Education at the University of Iowa. These authors did a study at 19 liberal art schools gathering background information of freshman students, their experiences, and recorded their outcomes after the 1st and 4th years. They did student appraisals of teacher organization of material, how effectively the instructor utilized class time, reviewed the subject matter, etc. “Good teaching is not defined by test results” according the a recent article “What Spurs Students to Stay in College and Learn.” Their study found that their was a 30% increase in returns for students that experience good teaching practices.

I feel like this information is common sense but I am thankful that this information is documented. I would also think that the students that have the better social experiences also return at a higher rate. Meaning that if the student feels more involved with the school and has been socially successful, the retention rates would also be higher for such students. But I also feel that some of this is up to the individual student, too. And according to Pascarella and Terenzini, “because individual efforts and involvement are the critical determinants of impact, institutions should focus on the ways they can shape their academic, interpersonal, and extracurricular offerings to encourage student engagement."

Look at the Numbers

I have to give a disclaimer first, I am not the biggest fan of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The publication is just not something that appeals to my literary senses, however, I've been trying to keep an open mind and check out some stories for this class.

The headline a few weeks ago (Thursday 10/13) was intriguing (especially as I am in the Finance class.) It read:

180 Private Colleges Fail Education Dept.'s Latest Financial-Responsibility Test

This is the first paragraph:

"A total of 150 private nonprofit colleges failed the U.S. Department of Education's most recent financial-responsibility test, which covers the 2010 fiscal year, according to data released by the department on Wednesday. More than half of them scored so low that they will be required to post letters of credit to remain eligible to participate in the federal student-aid programs."


Most interestingly is the interactive graph provided: http://chronicle.com/article/Interactive-Chart-/129353/

As I looked through the results, I immediately when to look for Metro State (but them I realized its a private school list.) and then I wondered how these colleges came to be at this financial state. Some have previous years where scores are the same showing they may have always had financial issues. However, some schools three years ago had incredibly high scores and have seen changes potentially because of the changes to the economy.

We don't have the best financial responsibility at Metro State either when it comes to repayment of loans and financial aid.

While the chart and article are interesting, I would encourage you to read the comments under the chart. Numerous comments talk about making these financial low performing schools close. Others are suggesting a government take over of these schools. Others argue for private education and some talk about for-profit vs. not-for-profit.

The other thing this list makes me think more about is Gainful Employment. Are these the schools "Gainful Employment" is trying to target? And if so, are there other measures we need to be taking as well?

What are your reactions to seeing this list of schools? What do you think about the comments made? Do you agree, disagree?

"We're rewarding the wrong types of behavior, Oakley said (Fain, 2011)."

Eloy Oakley's comment, as president of Long Beach City College, is in response to a new initiative in the state of California to shift the focus in enrollment and student retention in Higher Education - and specifically in Community Colleges - to a more performance-based model.

The state of California is well known for it emphasis on access as the first and foremost priority in Higher Education. Last year a bill was passed which required the California educational system to create a "Task Force on Student Success (Fain, 2011)." In their report this year, the Task Force found that one of the key loads on California's system was the emphasis on access irregardless of student performance. Their recommendation? Give students who demonstrate academic success based on completion and other "success metrics" priority in
enrollment, advising and other services. (Fain, 2011)

In Student Affairs, one of the causes most commonly championed is increasing access to education. The rationale, which one of the members of California's Task Force - David
Rattray - calls "the ideal" is that this is America and the more open-access we provide to education the greater Higher Education embodies and serves as the vehicle for the American Dream. "In an ideal world, community colleges would grant equal opportunities to all students regardless of their academic preparation...In the real world it's not working (Fain quoting Rattray, 2011)"

President Obama, in his recent speech to the Auraria Campus student body and faculty, was proud of the fact that - by executive order - they have eliminated subsidized student loans. When I asked my students what their thoughts were about this, they had no idea what the ramifications of this would be for them. Most of the Student Affairs professionals reading this will have already seen the critical failing of this premature action. While it does eliminate federal subsidies which are paid to private sector financial institutions - a popularist move with the electorate in the run-up to an election year (given the wildfire growth of Occupy Movement) - the subsidies paid to banks served a function for students who receive these loans: interest
does not start to accrue until six months after they are out of school. Without subsidized student loans, the end-cost of an education goes up. Now, one of our colleagues mentioned to me that when more widespread student loan forgiveness kicks in it won't matter - but thus far, it hasn't. Movement on that initiative is stalled in Washington to say the least.

Proceding, then, from these facts... Remedial education goes hand-in-hand with increasing access to education. Students are mandated to take classes for which they receive no college credit but which are intended to prepare them for academic success. While remedial education certainly serves a much needed purpose (and my own livelihood and that of many of my colleagues is largely derived from teaching such courses) the issue comes to a head when one casts remedial education into the light of these recent changes. Unless loan forgiveness becomes a fact, not only will these students spend as much as an additional year or even two in their educational programs, the interest on these loans will begin accrueing - the end cost of the degrees students in these programs receive will be higher on two counts.

The California proposal promotes a number of measures which could, potentially, narrow access. The report questions, "Is it enough to provide access to education without the policies and practices that ensure students succeed in meeting their educational goals?...The answer is simply that we can no longer be satisfied with providing students open access and limited success (Fain, 2011)."

With the escalating cost of an education, and the ever tightening pool of resources allocated to Higher Education, questions are beginning to be raised about how we can optimize Institutional resources and those of our students. For the California community college system (which had to turn away nearly 150,000 students last year due to budget cuts) it seems this includes reconsidering the real-world ramifications of freely open access. (Fain, 2011)

I, myself, am perpetually perplexed over the real-world ramifications of completely open access. We can provide access and funding - but not all students are prepared to succeed in an academic environment. We can provide them classes which will "prepare" them - but they won't receive credit towards their degree from these classes - the cost of which is often the same as normal classes (or not much less) and the added time spent in securing an education means their students loans will accrue interest for that much longer. There just doesn't seem to be an easy ethical answer. We can try to change the system - but systems only changes but slowly and it is difficult to anticipate what could be severe consequences to even the most minute adjustment.

~David Dorr

New blogs are open

Current Issues Students:  the new blog have been created for the second half of the course. Each is based on a student recommendation.  You should receive invitations to join these 5 new blogs this afternoon.  If you do not (or if you need the invitation to go to a different email address), please let me know.  The older blogs will remain open for students who want to post in them for this week.

The new blog titles are: Higher Education in Colorado, For Profit, International, Protest and Conflict, and Graduate Education.

Defining Community College Student Success

To my relief, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article focused on an advisory committee to examine how the government measures success rates of community colleges. The 15 member advisory committee, The Committee onhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Measures of Student Success, is comprised of college officials, scholars, and policy experts. They have spent the last year exploring ways that community colleges can follow the new federal requirement that degree-granting institutions report graduation rates. What caught my eye about the article was that The Committee on Measures of Student Success is also charged with exploring alternative methods for measuring community college student academic success.

I was encouraged by the advisory committee’s acknowledgment of the variations of community college student success that often do not include graduation. Although The Committee on Measures of Student Success recommends the graduation rates of degree-seeking, part-time students and students placed into pre-college level courses be included in reports to the Department of Education, they recommend caveats to the reporting guidelines such as reporting students in remedial courses separately from those in college level courses. The most impactful caveat related to the aforementioned inclusions would be the recommendation that students be reported who are still enrolled past the legislated time limits for graduation.
One aspect unmentioned by the article that I deal with frequently is the length of some two-year degrees at community college which are much longer than two years particularly some health care related fields. For instance, the Associate’s Degree in Nursing, an Associate’s of Applied Science degree, requires 4 semesters of biology before entering the nursing program which is 5 semesters long. The biology courses are sequential in nature requiring the students to enroll in one biology course at a time. Extending the time even further are the remedial courses most students must complete before being allowed to enroll in the college level biology courses. Therefore, an Associate’s Degree in Nursing could potentially take a student 4-5 years to complete.

However, I did appreciate The Committee on Measures of Student Success consideration of the vast diversity of the community college population. The current graduation rate survey of the Postsecondary Education Data System fails to collect the completion rates of part-time, non-degree seeking, and noncredit students who make up the majority of the community college population and the group recommends them in the reporting. The advisory committee also recommends the reporting of the significant number of transfer students. The term transfer students would include students who transfer; to other community colleges, to 4-year institutions, and students who are “substantially prepared” to transfer. The criteria for “substantially prepared” were still under review by the advisory committee at the time of the article’s publication.

I am so grateful that at least a few of the unique characteristics of community college students are on the radar in relation to the new federally mandated reporting guidelines. Success for a community college student can be achieved in many ways that do not include walking across a stage to collect a degree within a prescribed amount of time. The definition of success can be the completion of a few reading and English classes for a Burma refugee student. Taking a year off from college to take care of a sick child for a single working mother of four may mean success because she is waiting to continue her education in order to avoid the potential for withdrawals or failing grades. The struggling university student who attends a community college to build their skill and improve their GPA for one semester before returning to the university has achieved success. Success for a community college student can look many different ways but despite reporting mandates, one is no less important and integral to a student’s ultimate academic goals than another.

Changes in the College Dating Equation?

Upon leaving our Greeley cohort class this Saturday afternoon, I felt fatigued from participating in some eleven hours of current events discussion stretched over a twenty three hour period. I also felt exhilirated, as the occasion offered the rare opportunity to discuss significant and interesting news in higher education with about twenty five diverse, talented, and thoughtful higher education experts (relative to the general populace, at least) under Matt's very capable guidance. How often does one get the chance to do that?

Feeling like I needed a real break on the drive back to Longmont, I stopped off to visit the Barnes and Noble bookstore at the Centerra Shopping Center in Loveland (one of the few remaining national chain book stores in the region) to hunt for some diversionary reading. There I noticed a provocative article beckoning from the cover of the Atlantic magazine authored by Kate Bolick titled, "What, Me Marry? In today's economy, men are falling apart. What that means for sex and marriage." Wow.

As I have taken a particular interest in the purported declining fortunes of men in higher education recently, I flipped through the article, figuring there would be a higher education component included, being that the primary reading audience for the Atlantic are middle-to-upper class college educated folks. And, sure enough, there was. I'll attempt to provide a basic summary of the article as it relates to higher education, as well as a brief critique and analysis in light of recent topically-related research.

The American College Campus: An Increasingly Lopsided Sexual Marketplace?

Bolick's article follows on the heels of a similarly pot-stirring article published in the Atlantic last year, titled The End of Men, by Hanna Rosin. In Rosin's article, men are portrayed as being left behind in the new globalizing, post-industrial information economy, and how this trend has significant cultural implications, including the outpacing of males by females in higher education enrollment and degree completion at both the general undergraduate and graduate levels.

In Bolick's article, the author discusses how rising rates of male joblessness and the generally declining life prospects of large numbers of males (as interpreted by Bolick, at least) are fundamentally changing the nature of the heterosexual "romantic market", including perhaps the notion of the "traditional" marriage itself. The 39 year-old Bolick (that is a picture of her above on the right) writes in a personal, narrative fashion, often drawing upon her own life experiences in buttressing her case. Citing research by social historian Stephanie Coontz at Evergreen State College and the article by Rosin, Bolick notes that there are now fewer non-married households in the U.S. than married, and that both females and males are delaying marriage more than at any time in our nation's history. A major reason for these trends cited by both Bolick and Rosin is the transformation of our economy over the past several decades from primarily industrial to primarily information/services, which has in turn necessitated college-enhanced skills that females have been providing in larger numbers than men overall. Currently, females outnumber men roughly 57% to 43% throughout contemporary higher education, a significant 14% differential. What does this difference mean in terms of the college dating scene?

Bolick answers by discussing how the increasing numbers of females vs. males on campus has encouraged the development of the so-called "hookup" culture, where casual, non-committed sex has gradually become more of the norm since the 1970s and 80s, thus neatly correlating with the rise of females in college. In this unbalanced environment, fewer men means more heterosexual market power for men, with women increasingly forced to either meet the demands of many men for casual sex, or to possibly risk being marginalized out of the campus dating scene.

Bolick tries to add depth to this thesis by sharing the work of blogger Susan Walsh, a Wharton M.B.A. and stay-at-home mother of two who has been advising young women on dating for about six years now via her blog hookingupsmart.com. According to Walsh's anecdotal insights into the contemporary college dating scene, only about 20% of college men in general (those with the highest status) are having roughly 80% of the sex on campus with only about 20% of the women (those with the greatest sexual willingness), thus leaving about 80% of both male and female campus populations on basically the sexual sidelines (whether by choice or lack of prospects; interestingly, a 2007 study commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department suggested that male virgins outnumber female virgins on campus). Even so, as Bolick points out, "the myth of everyone having sex all the time is so pervasive that it's assumed to be true, which distorts how young men and women relate." In other words, if a female on campus tends to believe "that everyone is doing it", she may be more inclined and/or easily persuaded to engage in casual sex "despite the fact that most people would actually prefer something quite different", per Susan Walsh. The alternative may be to give up on dating and romance altogether because "there are no guys", as Bolick quotes a University of North Carolina student, even though many college males and especially females still desire committed relationships, according to Bolick.

What are we to make of Bolick's observations and insights? Are they supported by research?

My initial findings did not yield much on the general topic of contemporary college dating habits and trends, but two studies were somewhat contradictory in their implications. According to a recent University of Missouri-Columbia study, college-aged females and males are 'trying out' committed relationships without a clear path towards marriage by engaging more often in "stayover relationships" that involve spending three or more nights together each week with the option to return to one's own home at any time. However, even if that may be the case, according to a 2001 survey of some 1,000 college women, the college date is all but 'dead', as only half of college seniors surveyed were asked out on more than five dates in college, and a third were asked on two dates or fewer. "Dating does not really exist," said Renee Daniels, a 2000 graduate of the University of Notre Dame. "Either you participate in random hookups or you are in an ultra-serious relationship. There is nothing in between." The survey also supports the notion that many college-aged females simply do not want to immediately find marriageable men. For example, Rachel Parsons, a senior at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, explained that she "...loves boys, don't get me wrong, but I do not want to be committed, nor do I want to get married for many, many years...I want to advance in my career, become independent, establish stable finance, and focus on finding myself before I decide to share myself with someone else". Which were sentiments echoed by article writer Kate Bolick herself during her emerging adult years.

In the same survey, William DeMartine offered a contrarian male student perspective, saying that college men essentially get a bum rap in the media nowadays because, "you can't even try to meet girls, because when you try to meet them they've already put you in your place...they already think that you want to hook up and that's it."
Another possible reason for cautious and unproductive dating efforts on campus that Bolick fails to reference in her article may be heightened awareness among females of the dangers of possible date rape and other related dating violence. In their 2002 research article, Stephanie Washington Kuffel and Jennifer Katz discuss the findings from an actual campus experiment they conducted that indicated high levels of physical, psychological and sexual aggression was occurring in their particular college setting (they also suggesting that preventative measures can serve to ameliorate such levels of aggression, per their experimental findings).

As this Bolick's article was just published, the only dissenting viewpoints I could find so far are within the article itself as posted online. Below the article are a number of comments pro, neutral and con in tone, with men (not surprisingly, perhaps) taking issue with Bolick's points more often than women. Critically speaking, Bolick does not attempt to differentiate her generalizations about college dating with respect to types of institutions. She does refer to the plight of black women in general with respect to finding marriageable men, but otherwise fails to include multicultural viewpoints within her writings, including those of the LGBT community. In essence, she seems to write about the dating habits of women and men who more or less look and live like her.

However, to the extent that Bolick accurately captures at least some aspect of the contemporary dating scene at colleges and universities, what implications do her insights have for student affairs practice? This is a question to which I would welcome the thoughts and comments of my fellow cohort members, including those who are more recent college graduates, and/or who primarily work directly with students on a social learning basis outside of class.