Why Assess Your Students: The Path to Better Retention and Graduation Rates

As an enrollment manager or a vice president of academic affairs, or even a leader in student affairs, you might think, “Why should I care about gathering data from our current student population? That’s Institutional Research’s job.” But if you care about the health of your institution, if you care about keeping your students enrolled to graduation and if you care about showing your students you care about them as individuals, then regularly assessing student motivation and student satisfaction is an activity that should be on your radar. Intentionally using that data to improve the lives of your students and to identify key challenges for the college should be a priority for every member of the institutional leadership team.

You may know that assessing student satisfaction is important, but you need to get others on board on campus.

“If the WHY is powerful, the HOW is easy.” – Jim Rohn

Student-level data: Motivational assessments

Understanding what students need to be successful as they first enter your institution is a powerful way to begin building connections and showing students you care about them. Providing them with the services that they say they want and need to be successful will put you in the best position to serve students in the way they want to be served. In the recently published 2025 National First-Year Students and Their Motivation to Complete College Report, we identified the top 10 requests for support by incoming first-year students, based on the nearly 62,000 responses to the College Student Inventory in the fall of 2024:

Among first-year students’ top ten requests for assistance, we found themes of connection and belonging, career assistance, academic support, and financial guidance. These top 10 have remained fairly consistent over the last few years.

When campuses are aware of what incoming students need in the aggregate, institutional resources can be targeted to support these services. And when campuses, specifically advisors, know what individual students have self-identified as desired areas of support, guidance can be provided directly to the students most in need of and most receptive to receiving assistance. 

While campuses can see a 1% improvement in student retention within the first year of implementing a motivational assessment, we have found that campuses that are assessing student motivation on a consistent basis over multiple years are most likely to see retention levels improve. (We recognize that motivation data alone doesn’t lead to improved retention, but the student-level data is an important component of institutional retention efforts.) The impact of consistently assessing student motivation with the RNL Retention Management System (RMS):

The bottom line on why you should care about assessing individual student motivation

Asking students as they enter your institution what they need shows that you care about their experience. Using that data to build relationships between advisors and students lays the foundation of one of the most important connections students can have with your institution. Guiding students to the specific service or support they seek puts you in the best position to engage your students in meaningful ways.  Ultimately, serving your students in the ways they need will make your institution more likely to retain those students. 

Learn more about the national student motivation data and how it supporting campus retention efforts by joining live or listening to the on-demand session First Year Focus: Understanding Student Motivations, Recognizing Opportunities, and Taking Action.

Institution-level data: Student satisfaction assessments

Knowing what students value across all class levels at your institution can provide the student voice in your data-informed decision-making efforts. Assessing student satisfaction is another way to show students you care about them, their experience with you, and what matters to them. Aligning your resources with student-identified priorities will reflect a student-centered environment where individuals may be more likely to want to stay. 

Student satisfaction data from across your student population can inform and guide your institutional efforts in multiple ways:

• Student success and retention activities:  Identifying your top priorities for response so you are working on high-importance, low-satisfaction areas from the student perspective.
• Strategic planning: Incorporate the student voice into your long-term planning efforts to stay aligned with where they want to see you make investments.
• Accreditation: Document your progress year over year as part of a continuous improvement process to show your regional accreditor that you are paying attention and responding to students (and not just when it is time for re-affirmation!).
• Recruitment: Highlight your high-importance, high-satisfaction strengths to attract students who will care about what you can offer. 

To assist institutions with building the case for student satisfaction assessment on their campuses, we have developed two brief videos (under two minutes each), one talking about why assess satisfaction and why work with RNL specifically. My colleague Shannon Cook also hosted a 30-minute webinar that is available on demand to dive deeper into the why and how of assessing student satisfaction. 

Satisfaction data provides valuable perspectives for every department on campus, identifying areas to celebrate and areas to invest more time, energy, and resources. Campuses that respond to what their students care about have reported seeing satisfaction levels increase and graduation rates improve. Most institutions we work with assess student satisfaction at least once every two or three years and then use the intervening months to explore the data through demographic subpopulations and conversations on campus, take action in high-priority areas, and communicate back with students about what has been done based on the student feedback. These ongoing cycles put institutions in the best position to create a culture of institutional improvement based on the student voice. 

Student motivation and satisfaction assessments are effective practices

According to the results of the 2025 Effective Practices for Student Success, Retention and Completion Report, assessing student motivation and student satisfaction are methods used by high percentages of institutions and are considered to be highly effective.

The impact of assessing student motivation and student satisfaction on institutional graduation rates has been documented with numerous studies over the years.

It is important to be aware that just gathering the data will not magically help you retain students. It is the first step in the process, following these ABCs:

1. Assess the needs with student and institutional level data collection
2. Build a high impact completion plan to engage students from pre-enrollment to retention to graduation, taking action based on what students say
3. Connect students to campus resources that best match their needs and will increase their likelihood to persist and complete and Communicate about what you are doing and why as improvements are made. 

Contact me if you would like to learn more about assessing student motivation and student satisfaction on your campus.