As enrollment cliffs loom and public skepticism regarding the value of higher education continues to permeate conversations with students and families, the drive to retain enrolled students at higher levels than ever before is no longer only a student success strategy but a key component of broad enrollment management strategy. It also is the right thing to do. Higher education is about students completing a journey, and their continued enrollment until achieving a credential should be our ultimate goal.
Not every enrollment vice-president has the opportunity I do to also serve on the student success side of the house. When my team considers enrollment efforts for our campus, it’s standard for us to consider both new student enrollment and current student retention as flip sides of the same coin. It leads to conversations regarding how well Cal Poly Humboldt delivers on the promises we make during recruitment once students join our campus and helps us identify ways to improve that each year.
It also means we spend a lot of time talking about getting students connected on campus—to each other, to faculty and staff, and to the broader community. A demonstration of the importance of those connections that I saw years ago at a student success training has never left me. I call it the sticky note concept. I try to envision every action our students have with someone on our campus as leaving a sticky note somewhere on their clothing—the faculty member they see in class, the financial aid counsellor who helps figure out how they will pay for college, the groundskeeper who smiles as they pass them on the way to the library. Each of those sticky notes represents a connection. And, as sticky notes do, some stick less than others—dropping off over time or getting knocked off as the student dashes from place to place—but some stay put.
Our job as higher education professionals, particularly those who work in student affairs, is to provide enough contacts and opportunities for connection, so every student has a sticky note they can reference when they need help. Not sure what to do when illness puts you behind for the semester? Oh, here’s the name of that nice guy I met at the orientation BBQ. I think he worked in the Dean of Students Office, and maybe he knows how to help. Feeling overwhelmed by classes, plus the fact your parents just announced they’re divorcing and moving to separate states? I went to that resource fair two weeks ago and talked to a really cool counsellor from our Student Health Center who said I have access to free counselling sessions. I’m going to stop by on the way to work.
At Cal Poly Humboldt, surveys of our own students have shown that new students are often at their peak when they feel connected to campus and confident in their ability to access resources. When we survey those same students later in the year, whether they are transfer or first-time students, we find their confidence in accessing resources drops, as well as their belief that they belong. We do find a slight uptick in their sense of connection with a faculty or staff member in many cases, but they also engage in campus activities to a lesser degree than they indicated they wanted to initially. These survey results are an important starting point for our next phase of retention and success efforts. They give us some insight into why students walk away, even when they tell us they intend to graduate and when they once felt so welcome and empowered to support their own success.
What happens? Going back to my earlier sticky note example, I posit that some of the sticky notes simply fall off students. The weather changes from August to January, and some of the stickiness just disappears. In other cases, they brushed up against a person or an experience that knocked off another note. Over time, unless we are intentionally resupplying students with notes via contact with people—including student peers—they begin to lose their confidence, to feel a bit less welcome. And that’s our greatest point of opportunity.
Universities are used to building transactional interventions that address an issue, like no-showing in a class or failing to pay a bill. Less common is the use of available data to take action if a student has stopped swiping their meal card at the dining hall or hasn’t logged into their learning management system in the past week or attended that club meeting they were always making last semester. And if we do leverage that data, we need to do it in a way that helps reconnect them, not just with their faculty or staff contacts but with a student who lives right down the hall or one in their chemistry class. That next-level focus on belonging requires that we layer data usage and communication with a personal touch, that we provide opportunities and activities that allow students to engage with new faces, but that we also build in peer support networks with known entities that can engage when students begin to drift.
If we are to stay relevant in the coming years, higher education must fully embrace the warm-and-fuzzy approach student affairs professionals are often known to take. That does not mean abandoning the data-informed approaches that guide me as an enrollment professional but finding a way to balance them both, using data to show us where additional human interaction is needed. We let our students tell us what sorts of contacts they need, design programming and activities that provide those interactions and use communication strategy and technology to promote their participation. We must also move past the attitude that we already shared everything students need to know at orientation or in the syllabus and they will remember it. Instead, we need to send gentle nudges at times the data tells us they are needed—important reminders to engage, that we care, that they belong.
At Cal Poly Humboldt, we have long known that personal connections on our campus are a strong part of our campus identity and often why students chose us. Now, we are doing the tough work of figuring out how to reinforce that personalized experience, so students actively keep choosing us from one semester to the next, through graduation. I challenge all my higher education colleagues to do the same: Figure out how to keep resupplying your students with those sticky notes, so the contact they need, the feeling of belonging, is accessible at any time.