Enrollment Management Electronic Newsletter

Summer Updates

Over the course of the summer, the Retention Office focused on the following projects:

We contacted students suspended from the University after the spring semester to make sure they were aware of their options and to determine what course of action they planned to pursue. As a result, we have a list of students to contact in the fall semester, when they are eligible to re-apply to, to encourage them to re-enroll for the spring 2010 semester. We also contacted students who were eligible to return from suspension after the spring 2009 semester to encourage them to reapply and re-enroll for the fall.

We contacted all students who had not registered for the fall 2009 semester via email and then a follow-up phone call, a) prior to RAIL closing for advising and registration in mid-June and then b) after RAIL reopened in late-July. We were able to catch some students and remind them to register before RAIL closed and then remind them once more after it reopened. In addition, we now are slightly more aware of students' reasons for not registering and, again, have a list of students who we know are planning to return at a later date. We thus will be able to follow-up with those students appropriately and encourage them to enroll again in the future.

We continued to conduct statistical analyses of our students' attrition patterns. A study of the 2007 FTIC (first-time in college) cohort indicated that we can determine very little of the retention variance from known qualitative factors. Thus we are exploring other methods of getting at this information (see below). We also collected information on other curricular factors that may impact attrition and will conduct that analysis in the near future.

We ran assessments of retention initiatives (FYEX programs, Philosophy 199, stretch model courses, etc.) to determine their effectiveness and make suggestions for future changes.

We worked with External Affairs to develop a new parents Web page (see below) that will continue the outreach made by the FASTPASS newsletter last year.