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Student retention strategies ensure that every student can successfully complete their education at your institution. To have a successful higher education experience, every student should pass through three stages: belongingness, engagement, and retention.
At the individual level, students must feel connected to the university, which helps develop relationships with others. Then comes the engagement stage, where students get involved in university activities. Once students feel like a part of the university, they can thrive in the environment and thus choose to finish their course.
Student retention strategies precisely aim to build a relationship between students and the college where the former feel safe and well supported. Implementing these strategies will decrease dropout rates in the long run.
In this article, I’ll discuss five student retention strategies that you can use to increase retention rates at your university.
Create a perfect First-Year Experience: Student retention strategies
Students end up dropping out of college due to several factors. However, the most common one is the lack of integration. They never feel like a part of the campus community, get used to an academic environment, or lack confidence. That’s why you need to implement a first-year experience program.
Create a small community within your campus for first-year students. This will help them socialize and build relationships with fellow students and faculty members. The students will also demonstrate positive relationships with peers and faculty, better use campus resources, and display time-management skills.
In addition, you can set up learning communities to increase student engagement. It would be best if you also encouraged first-year students to join career development programs to help them plan their careers. All of this will motivate students to push through barriers and remain enrolled.
Collect data and put it to good use: Student retention strategies
Universities must gather data on curriculum effectiveness, student achievement, and resource allocation to address the problem of low student retention rates. Once you have this data, you can use it to enhance student retention efforts. An excellent way to collect data is through polls and surveys.
By creating surveys, you can initiate a two-way conversation, understand student psyches, record their responses, and curtail issues before they arise. However, following the old paper and pen survey method requires much effort. To ease the process, you can create SMS surveys and follow-ups based on them. All you have to do is create a survey and send out text messages to your students. Your initial message can say:
Administrator: Hi Amanda, It’s Brenda from the administration office. As you know, we’ve updated the student curriculum for this semester, and we’d like to see what you think of it. Can you spend five minutes answering a few questions?
Amanda: Yes, count me in 👍
Once a student responds, you can note their response in the survey forms. This will help you follow up with students and send reminders for important events.
Early risk-detection
Every struggling student faces a common downward spiral. It looks like a few missed classes lead to a failed exam, which leads to a low midterm grade and, ultimately, withdrawal from the program.
Recognizing these early warning signals is the key to helping these students cope. But you’ve got thousands of students; looking into each can seem impossible. This is where you can use SMS to deliver thousands of texts to students, reminding them to study for an upcoming test, work on an assignment, or submit a project before the deadline within minutes.
You can customize these texts to each student’s profile and collect real-time responses. The goal is to provide timely support to students struggling to keep up with the demands of university-level academics.
Develop intervention programs: Student retention strategies
Implementing a student referral program is an easy way to reach out to at-risk students before they leave. Send information and resources available at your university to help them address the issue. The issue could be academic, personal, financial, or social difficulties.
Getting students to talk about these issues requires them to connect with you. However, your guidance counselors don’t have enough time to speak to each student. You can use tools like peer-to-peer texting to have individual conversations at scale. Your staff or counselors can easily manage several conversations over text, get to know the students, identify their problems, and give them the right resources to solve them.
A guided conversation looks like this:
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Counselor: Hi Amanda, I’m Brenda, your college coach. Are you facing any difficulties in your current academic curriculum? Student: I’m not able to recall what I did in class. When I go back home to read and watch videos, it doesn’t stick in my head when it’s time to take the test. What can I do? Counselor: Have you tried joining a study group? Student: No, not yet. I’m not sure if I can concentrate in a group. Counselor: You should give it a shot. I was in one, and it was great because you could talk about what your professor discussed and hear various versions of it, which can be super helpful. Student: Okay, I’ll try that and let you know how it goes. Thanks! Counselor: Good luck! And you’re welcome 😁 |
Promote your campus support services consistently and creatively
If you think listing your campus support services on your website or mentioning it on your social media channels is enough, you’re wrong!
Campus support resources such as academic counseling, career planning, alumni mentorship, financial aid, and free tutoring should be showcased regularly and creatively.
Your students need encouragement to seek help, and making your campus services more visible is the first step you should take. You can get your students to opt-in to your campus services via text. Once they do, you can reach out to them, connect with them, share updates and reminders, and provide the necessary resources.
For example, you can display an ad (on your website and social media) saying:
Text “CAMPUS” to 56887 to get personalized campus support services.
Once a student texts the keyword, send an automated reply saying something like this:
Thank you for joining our text list. You can expect support services such as academic counseling, financial aid, alumni mentorship, and more.
Take time to implement the student retention strategies at your institution. If you plan on improving your drop-out rates, check out CallHub’s text messaging software. For further information, reach out to us at [email protected]
