Student Retention & Outcomes
COLLEGES ASK:
How effectively can we predict our new students’ likelihood of attrition in the first year? Can we identify the students with greater likelihood of attrition to target resources more effectively in retention interventions?
What elements of the student experience—including the particular courses they take—are most significant in affecting retention outcomes?
What are the cumulative long-term impacts on net tuition revenue of various retention strategies?
Given our retention patterns, what are the long-term enrollment and revenue outcomes if the composition of our freshman classes change?
What are the employment, career and personal life outcomes of our alumni and how do those relate to their student experiences?
How do we build a data warehouse and research agenda to best support the work of our retention committee?
HCRC SOLUTIONS
Cohort Performance and Persistence Tracking
Comprehensive, longitudinal analysis to focus retention strategies for optimal impact on academic success, persistence and completion patterns.
Enrollment Flow Models
Integrate new student, aid and retention data to project long-term enrollment and net tuition revenue consequences of compositional changes in freshman classes and alternative pricing/discounting strategies.
Attrition Prediction Models
Early identification of students at risk of not performing academically or progressing toward degree completion.
Connections Survey
Assess student engagement and the student experience and its impact on student retention and progress.
Alumni Outcomes
Alumni surveys designed to understand relationship of the student experience to alumni affinity, satisfaction, career and personal outcomes. Analysis of career and earnings outcomes of graduates by academic program.
Slate Services
Custom development of a Slate-based platform providing case-management tools to support student services, automated communications for student support, real-time dashboards on student engagement and analytically-derived estimates of attrition risk.
WHY IT MATTERS
Though student retention is the most studied of all enrollment dynamics and presents great opportunities for enrollment and revenue growth, many colleges find that improving rates of retention and degree completion is an intractable challenge. Colleges can achieve success by avoiding the pursuit of elusive ‘silver bullet’ solutions and undertaking concerted analyses of the many inter-related factors affecting patterns of student performance, progress and completion – including the student profile, academic programs and curricula, affordability, the student experience, and the college’s value promise.