100 studies, no fix for poor retention
By Micah Sommer
Earlham’s declining retention rates have raised concern among faculty and students, who are working together to understand and improve the situation. So far, their work has produced few perceptible results.
The freshman-to-sophomore retention rate this year was 81.2 percent, according to a document President Doug Bennett delivered to the Board of Trustees in February. This is the lowest retention rate Earlham has seen in 14 years. Of the 324 students who entered in 2008, only 263 returned for the fall of 2009, down from 85.3 percent just one year earlier. Other measures, such as the four-year graduation rate, have shown similar declines.
This is not the first time retention has been a concern, according to Provost Nelson Bingham.
“It’s really the same situation we’ve been facing for probably 10 or 15 years at least,” Bingham said. “Earlham’s retention and graduation of entering students is significantly lower than our peer schools.”
Bingham acknowledged a financial aspect, since the college must spend more on admissions to replace students who leave, but said that the problem goes beyond money.
“A larger concern for us is in terms of why those students are leaving, [and] whether they’re not finding what they were looking for at Earlham,” Bingham said. “Is this telling us something that we should be listening to in terms of some aspect of the institution?”
As director of institutional research, Bingham has been watching the data. “We’ve now done well over a hundred separate studies of retention,” he said, “and unfortunately I wish I could say that we got a consistent picture from that data, but we haven’t.”
Nonetheless, the administration is taking steps to address the issue. A retention working group has been meeting to discuss possible courses of action. Bennett is also forming an ad hoc committee on the first-year experience, which will examine aspects of students’ freshman year such as New Student Orientation, the general education curriculum and housing to see what can be done.
Associate Dean for Student Success Wendy Seligmann said that thinking about leaving is common among students.
“College students have made a huge choice, and I think going through that discernment process is not unusual,” Seligmann said. However, the question still remains, “What is that point where [one] student makes a decision to stay and the other student makes a decision to leave?”
In her current position Seligmann works with students who are considering leaving, connecting them with academic and social resources and helping them explore their options. Seligman said that while she can identify individual students who have decided to stay after working with her, this has not translated into large-scale improvement of the retention problem.
“We have not seen the numbers change, and that’s what so discouraging and distressing,” Seligmann said. “We’re not happy with our numbers; we know we’re a better school than that.”
Sophomore Sarah Clinton-McCausland nearly left Earlham last spring because of a lack of academic challenge and unstable personal relationships. She had been accepted at a different school, but situations at Earlham improved so that she decided to stay rather than go through the process of readjustment.
Clinton-McCausland theorized that Earlham “tends to attract the kind of people who aren’t even sure if college is the right place for them in the first place.” She noted that some students quickly discover they would rather be active in the “real world” than studying theory in class.
When asked to give advice to those considering leaving, Clinton-McCausland said, “It’s okay to decide that it’s not the right place for you, but … don’t close yourself off to [the possibility of staying] too early in the year, because I think a lot of people do that freshman year.”
Senior Rachel Hawkins said that she has seen friends leave Earlham for a wide variety of reasons. She expressed a desire for more open discussion among all members of the Earlham community on the issue of retention.
“I don’t think it’s something that’s commonly discussed except for in regards to specific incidents of people leaving,” Hawkins said. “Within the community as a whole, there doesn’t seem to be that dialogue, and that could be an important thing to people who are in the situation of considering leaving.”
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