3 College Student Retention Strategies to Prioritize at This Time of Year

It’s that time of year when retention committees, student success professionals, and leadership teams across the country calculate the retention rate for the fall 2024 cohort and compare it with their previous years’ outcomes. Some campuses have undoubtedly stayed the same, others decreased, and some increased, but the overall conversation is usually about how “it” can be done better for the fall 2025 class. 

Let’s talk about “it” for a minute. Many of you have heard the message that two of our founders, Lee Noel and Randi Levitz, and the student success professionals who have followed in their footsteps, have shared for several decades: Retention is not what you do. “It” is the outcome of what you do. “It” is the result of quality faculty, staff, programs and services. As you consider improvements to your efforts which will impact the fall 2025 entering class and beyond, keep in mind the following three student retention strategies and practices. 

1. Assess college student retention outcomes completely

The first strategy RNL recommends is a comprehensive outcomes assessment. All colleges and universities compute a retention rate at this time of year because it has to be submitted via the IPEDS system as part of the federal requirements. But many schools go above and beyond what is required and compute other retention rates to inform planning purposes. For example, at what rates did you retain special populations or students enrolled in programs designed to improve student success? In order to best understand what contributed to the overall retention rate, other outcomes have to be assessed as well. For instance, how many students persisted but didn’t progress (successfully completed their courses)? Before you finalize the college student retention strategies for your fall 2025 students, be sure you know how your 2024 students persisted and progressed so that strategies can be developed for the year ahead. 

2. Know what worked and what didn’t

The second strategy we recommend is to consider what worked well during the previous year and what didn’t. Many of us have been in situations where we continue to do the same thing and expect different results, which has been called insanity! (Fun fact, this quote is often attributed to Einstein, but according to Google, was not actually said by him!) A common example would be the academic advising model.  RNL has many years of data which show that academic advising is one of the most important college student retention strategies. But just doing what you have always done may not still be working with today’s college students. Advising is an area which needs constant attention for appropriate improvements. Here are a few questions for you to consider: Does your academic advising model, its standards of practice, and outcomes assessment reveal that your students are academically progressing by taking the courses needed for completion? Can you identify for each of your advisees an expected graduation date (which is one of the expected outcomes of advising)? Establishing rich relationships between advisors and advisees, providing a quality academic advising experience, can ultimately manage and improve the institution’s graduation rate. 

3. Don’t limit your scope of activity

Once you have assessed the 2024 class outcomes and the quality of your programs and services, RNL encourages you to think differently about how you will develop college student retention strategies that will impact the 2025 class. Each college has an attrition curve, or a distribution of students with their likelihood of being retained. The attrition curve, like any normal distribution, will show which students are least and most likely to retain and will reveal the majority of students under the curve. See the example below:

As you consider your current activities, you may find that many of your programs are designed for the students at the tail end of the curve (section A above) or to further support the students who are already likely to persist (section B). Institutions set goals to increase retention rates but then limit the scope of students they are impacting. To have the best return on retention strategies, consider how you can target support to the largest group of students in the middle (section C) who are open to influence on whether they stay or leave, based on what you do or don’t do for them, especially during their first term and their first year at your school. 

Onward for the year ahead

RNL congratulates those of you who have achieved your retention goals for the 2024 cohort. You certainly must have done some things right and must have had student retention strategies that were effective. For those of you who are looking for new directions in planning, consider the three practices outlined above. 

And if you aren’t currently one of the hundreds of institutions already working with RNL, you may want to implement one or more of the RNL student success tools to support your efforts: the RNL motivational survey instruments to identify those students who are most dropout prone and most receptive to assistance, the RNL student retention data analytics to identify the unique factors that contribute to persistence at your institution, and the RNL satisfaction-priorities surveys that inform decision making and resource allocation across your campus population. RNL can provide support in all of these areas along with on-going consulting services to further direct and guide retention practices that can make a difference in your enrollment numbers and the success of both your students and your institution.  Contact me to learn more in any of these areas. 

Note: Thanks to my former colleague Tim Culver for the original development of this content.