tag: Retention

Despite gains in higher education enrollment in the 2023-24 academic year–the first increase following years of enrollment declines–an impending drop in the country’s college-going population threatens the prospect of future enrollment growth and stability. To that end, colleges and universities need timely and data-driven insights on the drivers of attrition and the policies that might impede or support progress to better meet the needs of students and increase student success and ultimately retention.

Higher education in prison programs are receiving significant attention in light of the restoration of Pell grants, but the provision of reentry support and continuing education post release has only recently become a focus of the field. From complex college application systems and financial aid processes to meeting basic needs, students face a range of obstacles that may prevent them from completing their degrees after incarceration. Building pathways that specifically support students in achieving their educational goals post-release will be…

One of the most significant challenges that higher education institutions are currently facing is shrinking undergraduate enrollment, a trend accelerated by the disruptions of the pandemic. Among four-year institutions, enrollment declines have been particularly acute for those institutions that admit a relatively large percentage of their applicants and are dependent on tuition for a significant share of their revenue.[1] Between fall 2020 and 2022, colleges and universities that admit between 75 and 85 percent of applicants experienced…

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US labor market has undergone dramatic ups and downs, with employment numbers dropping off a cliff in Spring 2020 and climbing back towards pre-pandemic levels in fits and starts since the vaccines became widely available. Over the past several months employers and employees have been navigating the complex repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic: return-to-office vs. work-from-home debates, continuing social reckonings following the murder of George Floyd, rising inflation, and the looming possibility…

Colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to simultaneously cut costs and improve student learning outcomes. There is a perceived tension between these goals: the conventional wisdom is that increasing instructional quality is not possible without increasing expenditures, but colleges and universities have limited resources to spend on improving instructional quality. But what if the relationship between institutional finances and instructional quality were more complex than that? In Instructional Quality, Student Outcomes, and Institutional Finances, a new white paper…

For the past twenty years, Florida State University (FSU) has focused relentlessly on retaining and supporting every student it enrolls. Its efforts have yielded one of the largest increases in six-year graduation rates in the nation—nearly 16 percentage points, from 63.2 percent in 1994 to 79.1 percent in 2014. In our latest case study, “Broad-Based and Targeted: Florida State University’s Efforts to Retain Every Student,” Daniel Rossman and I detail FSU’s two-pronged strategy for improvement. First, it has sought…