Janene Panfil, Senior Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL, Author at Ruffalo Noel Levitz Blog: Higher Education Enrollment, Student Retention, and Student Success

How three campuses created award-winning programs for college student retention

February 10, 2016 by Janene Panfil, Senior Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL Leave a Comment

What makes a college student retention program exceptional?

That is a question that the Lee Noel and Randi Levitz Retention Excellence Awards tackle every year. This program honors exceptional college student retention programs from around the country, recognizing the most innovative and effective programs that have helped more students persist, succeed, and complete their educational goals. More than 160 institutions have been honored since the awards began in 1989, and the winners include campuses of every size, type, and mission: four-year privates, four-year publics, and community, junior, and technical colleges.

The three most recent winners serve as models for institutional leaders who would like to develop and fine-tune programs as diverse as recruit back and reverse transfer, strategic retention planning, and developmental math and English success rates.

The University of Central Oklahoma: Operation Degree Completion
Operation Degree Completion is a two-step program. The first part involves tracking down students who have disappeared from campus even though they have completed almost all of their requirements and guiding them to graduation. The second step builds on reverse transfer trends by identifying transfer students who have enough credits to receive an associate’s degree from the originating community college. This innovative program is improving institutional graduation rates and represented $1.7 million in additional tuition revenue.
Edgewood College (WI): Strategic Retention Plan
Edgewood College’s Strategic Retention Plan is a multi-year, collegewide project that puts students and their success at the heart of what the college does. The plan includes initiatives for first-year and second-year students. The plan’s objectives are reviewed annually and action steps are updated quarterly by the retention council. This comprehensive approach has been successful in improving student success. For example, four-year graduation rates have increased from 27 percent in 2005 to 40 percent in 2014. Student satisfaction and engagement have also increased.
Grand Rapids Community College (MI): Fast Track
Supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title III grant, Grand Rapids Community College created Fast Track – a program to help students bypass developmental education with an emphasis on retention and completion. Fast Track is an intensive three-week, 14-hour-per-week learning lab in which students remediate academic skills through a combination of web-based and tutor-guided activities. Fast Track participation saved a total of $324,000 worth of in-district tuition, fees, and books for students, as well as a total of 33,480 hours of instruction for students who bypassed their placement.

You can hear how these institutions launched, nurtured, and grew these initiatives into effective retention programs by listening to the webinar spotlighting these three institutions:

Click for the webinar audio and slides

In this recording, each winner provides an overview of their program and results, sharing insightful first-hand nuggets for developing or enhancing similar programs.

I also encourage you to download the Compendium of Retention Excellence Award Winners 1989-2015. The Compendium details each winner’s strategies and outcomes, and is indexed by institution type.

A Compendium of Successful, Innovative College Student Retention Programs and Practices

Download the Compendium of Award Winners

Be recognized for your college student retention success story

Do you have a successful retention program you would like to share? Apply for a 2016 Retention Excellence Award. Applications are now being accepted until March 18. If chosen, your institution will be honored at an award ceremony during the 2016 Ruffalo Noel Levitz National Conference on Student Recruitment Marketing and Retention, July 26-28, 2016 in Dallas, Texas. Sharing your story will help inspire other institutions as they work to improve college student retention and completion.

Click here to to review the award evaluation criteria and application

If you have any questions about the awards and application process, or would like to discuss evaluating and strengthening your own student retention initiatives, please email me.

Three student retention strategies that have impressed me at recent conferences

February 12, 2014 by Janene Panfil, Senior Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL 1 Comment

As we have hunkered down during weeks of intense cold, I couldn’t help but remember the travel I did this fall to several warmer climates (Virginia Beach, Norfolk, and Anaheim) for three very different, yet similar conferences.

These conferences were each convened for three different audiences:

The Virginia Community College System Conference for Student Development Professionals
The Southern Association for College Student Affairs (SACSA)
The Educause conference for Chief Technology Officers and for Chief Information Officers.

Three student retention strategies that have impressed me at recent conferences

How are campuses engaging students and keeping them on the path to educational completion?

These events differed greatly in terms of size, audience, and focus. The Educause conference was by far the largest of the three, hosted in the Anaheim Convention Center and sporting a massive exhibit hall with many vendor-specific learning labs. (The swag was far better than the pens and note pads my kids typically receive upon my return home!)

However, they all had the same goal: for participants to share and explore new ways for tackling the challenge of student success and completion. In fact, the urgent need to increase student retention and completion was palpable at all three events. Those from the Virginia Community College System are motivated by an aggressive statewide strategic plan. The attendees of SACSA are working under increased accountability brought on by performance-based funding and economic development drivers. The attendees at Educause have the desire to use technology to contain and reduce costs, as well as to enhance student learning outcomes.

Participants at each event were intensely engaged and motivated to take away new ideas and strategies back to their own campus. A few strategies and ideas really resonated with me:
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Are campuses supporting transfer students enough? A look at recent data

January 28, 2014 by Janene Panfil, Senior Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL Leave a Comment

College transfer students have been a significant yet understudied student population. Thankfully, recent studies have uncovered valuable findings on transfer students.

In July 2013, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released Baccalaureate Attainment: A National View of the Postsecondary Outcomes of Students Who Transfer from Two-Year to Four-Year Institutions. The report, which tracked more than 230,000 students, included some informative data about students transferring from two-year institutions to four-year institutions:

61.6 percent completed their degree at a four-year institution six years after transfer, and 7.8 percent were still enrolled at a four-year institution.
Those transferring with a two-year degree or certificate graduated at a rate 15.7 percent higher than those who did not (71.6 percent compared to 55.9 percent).
Those who transferred to a four-year institution within a year of completing their two-year degree or certificate graduated at a rate 26.3 percent higher than those who transferred after more than one year (66.3 percent compared to 40 percent).

Benchmarking yourself against these data and sharing them with institutional constituents pushing for higher completion rates, greater accountability, and affordability could inform the completion agenda, partnerships, articulation agreements, advising, and student support services on your campus.

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Three ways to use motivational data to intervene with college students

February 14, 2013 by Janene Panfil, Senior Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL Leave a Comment

Photo of a college student who appears to be unmotivated. Many students need help with academic or study skills, general coping, or life and stress management to be successful in college.

Using student motivational assessment data, there are key ways to target and influence students and help them succeed.

It is well recognized and accepted that student success and completion is multivariate and complex. My colleagues Tim Culver and Lew Sanborne have blogged about the importance of a data informed annual retention plan, using multiple data points.

I’d like to dig into just one of those multiple variables we talk so much about, student motivation. Non-cognitive student motivation data enhances campus early-alert programs. Early-alert programs and programs designed to serve at-risk students are regularly cited by campus practitioners as one of the top 10 most effective retention strategies. Like the overall retention plan, these programs are more successful when they are data driven.

The best early-alert programs identify incoming at-risk students before they even enroll and prioritize interventions for those who could most benefit. After enrollment, you want to identify students experiencing academic, social, and/or personal problems that might be addressed by institutional intervention.

The way campuses use the Noel-Levitz Retention Management System Plus illustrates how motivational assessment can provide a significant advantage with student success programs. This system is a suite of non-cognitive motivational assessments and predictive modeling that gauges students’ likelihood of persisting. Campuses use these data to identify at-risk students and student receptivity to institutional support. Using the data, their advising programs, academic support services, mentoring programs, and career services programs target students who indicate both a need and a desire for assistance.

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Strategies for strengthening second-year student retention during the summer months

April 24, 2012 by Janene Panfil, Senior Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL Leave a Comment

On most campuses, we feel as if we’re sprinting down the home stretch to the lazy days of summer. However, in terms of year to year retention, we’re still mid-way through the race.

Noel-Levitz research shows that, for both first- and second-year cohorts, more students make the decision not to return during the spring and summer months than between the fall and spring terms. Thus there is a compelling reason for extra focus and emphasis this time of year and over the summer months.

Data from the Noel-Levitz Mid-Year Indicators report shows when college students are most likely to leave an institution.

Click on image to enlarge.

Lew Sanborne, one of our Noel-Levitz retention consultants, works with his clients now, while the students are still enrolled, to make sure that continuing students are well positioned and confident for a smooth transition back to campus in the fall. Lew and his clients typically focus on the following areas.

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