The initial few weeks of undergraduate education should be a student’s springboard into an academic career. But some students vanish even before colleges know that they are there. Student retention has long been a focus of educational research and campus interventions, but few people have examined the earliest stages of a student’s academic life which is changing. A large number of researchers are scrutinising students’ early experiences on campus and devising interventions to simplify curricula requirements, increase the sense of belonging, and provide intensive advising during the first year. With the help from different organizations, those colleges are developing new ways to support students at risk of stopping out or leaving early without a degree. Many break off students are minoritised and the first in their family to go to college.
Several organizations that are working closely with colleges to improve educational interventions early in students’ academic lives. The key question is “how do we onboard, support, and transit students into, through and then out of the first year, and revamp it in a manner so all the students can succeed here?” According to an expert, the family income, and dream job determine which students will succeed in higher education. It has been noticed that colleges have increased transparency on areas where composite course requirements prevent students from advancing into the substantive courses of a major. It also offers colleges more insight into opportunities to implement early interventions and to improve the educational success of its students.
Colleges have often assumed that the students who failed few subjects or courses were simply not smart or hardworking enough to pass them. Many students coming from poorly resourced high schools were often declared not “smart enough” and assigned to do remedial lessons. One new approach is to give students instruction in development material. I think orientations and other onboarding workshops for students should also be mandatory, not to be draconian but because otherwise the students most at risk will not attend. Embedded peer support can make an improvement in first- and second-year retention rates.
The schools and colleges have to work on “Caring Campus,” which seeks behavioral commitments from faculty and staff members to show students they are part of a caring community. The behavioral commitments are disarmingly simple and all based on research into the practices of teachers who have a track record of keeping their students in schools or colleges. One commitment, for example, is to learn students’ preferred names and use them. Another key suggestions, such as creating “moments that matter” by having instructors engage students one on-one to learn about their lives.
Teachers should also consider changing the name of “office hours” to “student hours,” so students realize they are not interrupting the teacher’s work but are the central reason the teacher is there. One of the Caring Campus principles is situational fairness which encourages teachers to treat the students individually when they are not able to turn in assignments on time. However, I do object to the idea that colleges are the main places where students should be taught the importance of deadlines. What I’ve noticed is that it’s not so much that they need help understanding what deadlines are. They need someone to understand that they sometimes have multiple deadlines, all at the same time, and there’s only so much time in their day.
For student success, rather than emphasizing bureaucratic rigidity, colleges should focus on academic rigor. Outside of faculty, staff members are unsung heroes and they need to be better utilized in student-success efforts. Staff members are often the first people students come into contact with as they find their way on campus. When they can’t help a student, for instance, they are committed to doing a “warm hand-off,” by calling ahead to another department or walking a student over. “We never want to leave a student feeling that they didn’t get the help they needed. Therefore, we have to prepare our institution to be ready for our students instead of making our students be ready for us.
I would say that redesigning higher-education institutions to make students feel a greater sense of belonging from their first encounters, and provide them with more sustained levels of support to complete their education is the top priority.
The author is lecturer of English in Muscat
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