This presentation provides results from a national survey on how colleges and universities organize themselves to improve student retention. The study covers a broad-scale descriptive view of campus retention efforts while exploring how these efforts influence student persistence across multiple institutional contexts. Survey results reflect the scope and form of the resources and programs four-year colleges and universities devote to improving student retention and also provide evidence on the association of institutional policies and practices with important student success outcomes at the institution level.

This presentation outlines the findings from the 2009 administration of the College Board Survey of Institutional Retention Practices conducted at four-year institutions nationwide. Highlighted findings include data on coordination of retention efforts and other institutional policies and practices that affect student persistence.

In this presentation, we report results from a study exploring the linkages between campus policy and student persistence at a metropolitan university. We focus on one participating institution from the Pilot Study on Student Retention and explore in particular how survey results help us to understand the persistence decisions of first-year students and of students classified as sophomores or juniors. Of particular interest to institutional researchers, results suggest that this approach can be used to understand how institutional practices play a role in the persistence of students after the first year and beyond.

Lessons learned for campus administrators and policy makers on what they can do to support student persistence at their institutions. Recommendations stem from major research projects based in Indiana and nationally that seek to understand how institutions organize themselves to promote retention.

Using results from the second year of a pilot study of student retention, this paper examines the development and use of factors based on Braxton’s institutional policy levers. Findings indicate that although policy lever factors are consistent across institutions, their utility in predicting the retention of individual students is limited. This is likely due to the highly contextualized and complex nature of persistence. Future directions for this research are discussed.

Looking across institutions with diverse missions, student demographics, and geographic locations, this paper examines how students’ experiences with institutional policies and practices affect student persistence. Additionally, the paper discusses the process of designing and revising the pilot study’s survey instrument through the first two years of this effort.

This presentation begins with a general overview of the research literature on the role institutions play in the retention of their students through campus policies and practices that influence students’ experiences and persistence decisions. Research underway in the College Board Pilot Study on Student Retention is discussed, including preliminary findings and suggested directions in the search for policy-relevant insights into how campuses can intervene to positively influence student persistence.

This handout provides a brief description of the goals of the project and its research strategy, which includes an institutional survey, a student survey, and collection of students’ enrollment data for analysis of student persistence.

In this presentation, we report results from a pilot study on the practices, resources, and programs that colleges and universities devote to improving student retention. A survey of four-year institutions in five state contexts--California, Georgia, Indiana, New York, and Texas--asked respondents to report on participation rates, programs, and policies related to student persistence, and on first-to-second-year retention rates.

In this presentation we discuss results from a pilot effort to develop a policy oriented student retention survey. Based on results from eight campuses, our discussion examines the potential of the College Board Pilot Study student survey, lessons learned in the first year, and implications for institutional practice and theory development in this area. Institution-specific factor analyses and logistic regressions on persistence are reviewed.

In this paper, we explore how actionable institutional practices and structures, in combination with student behaviors, play a role in students’ institutional commitment and intent to persist at the end of the first year of college. We use logistic regression to examine the influence that student characteristics, social integration, and academic integration experiences have on college students’ intent to persist.

A panel of researchers and campus administrators involved in this project presented results from the College Board Pilot Study on Student Retention.  The panel focused on analyses of survey data, discussed implications for student persistence, and also considered the potential future use of the surveys developed for this study.

Although considerable research exists on factors affecting student persistence, little work exists that relates significant factors to institutional policies and practice. This presentation highlights results of a pilot study intended to connect research to institutional practice in a way that informs campus practitioners and policy makers.

Published in the journal About Campus and available at the website of Wiley InterScience at:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122214074/PDFSTART

Drawing on their experiences in and findings from two distinct but complementary research projects that focus on institutional efforts to enhance student persistence and graduation, the Indiana Project on Academic Success and the College Board Study on Student Retention, the authors share their growing understanding of how institutions organize themselves to enhance student persistence and the extent and effectiveness of those efforts. This article can contribute to the ongoing discussion among scholars and practitioners around the country about how to increase persistence and graduation and, by extension, to improve student learning.

Most of the relevant research on this crucial issue has focused on the role of student characteristics and experience in persistence and graduation. This study examines the critical role of institutional policies and practices in student persistence and graduation and how that role develops and is enacted in institutions’ efforts to boost these measures of student success.