Dan Seneker is currently the Director of Student Recruitment & Retention at Bishop’s University. Dan has spent the last 20+ years within the areas of enrolment, retention, student success, student recruitment, admissions, scholarships, community outreach, marketing and communications at universities across Canada including Queen’s University, University of Calgary and University of Saskatchewan.
What role do you see for retention in the university ecosystem?
Retention plays the key role on any university campus, no matter the university. I say that because if students aren't successful, then ultimately, we as universities aren't doing our job and we aren’t successful. You see that a lot in the United States when they have schools with 30 and 40 percent retention rates. Those rates aren’t doing anybody any favors.
As institutions, we work hard to admit the “right” students and figure out what the fit is. So, assuming we have done a good job of finding the right students, then keeping them and making them part of our community for the duration of their degrees is very important.
I think that's the key role of retention. After all, you've identified the students and have spent money and time in getting them interested and recruiting them. Once they’ve come, then it would be a shame to see them leave, right? Retaining those students is very important.
“It’s easier to replace those students than it is to do a deep dive into why those students left.”
So, in your experience, has retention been an important part of most universities’ operations? And if not, why not?
I think every institution realizes that it’s just as important to retain students as it is to recruit them. However, in my experience, and I've been at four different Canadian institutions: Queen’s, Saskatchewan, Calgary and Bishop’s – all four of them are pretty much the same in that there are more efforts put into recruiting students than in retaining them. If they leave, no matter what their reason, the solution that universities jump to first is to simply say, “Let’s bring in more students to replace them.”
In the face of those losses, you don’t hear people ask, “Well, where did we go wrong as an institution and how can we do a better job of retaining our students?” That phrase is rarely uttered. I think the reason is that it's more difficult to identify and address the reasons students leave so you prevent others from going down the same path than it is to try to replace students one-to-one.
Some schools purposely recruit a buffer knowing that they're probably going to lose 15 to 20 percent of their students before second year. Sometimes that buffer is disguised as a philosophy of “weeding out students” but it isn’t necessarily the case. It’s more that we know 15-20% of students are going to quit for various reasons, so let's simply create a buffer to compensate for that.
Sort of like the path of least resistance?
Yeah, exactly. It’s easier to replace those students than it is to do a deep dive into why those students left. It’s no fault to any institution, we’re just trying to make the best of what we have. It’s, as you said, the path of least resistance.
Can you talk about the impact or benefits of retention from an institutional perspective, a student service delivery perspective, and an individual student perspective?
Sure, so for institutions (and I’m speaking strictly from a monetary point of view), the perfect scenario for enrolment management is to recruit the right types of students for your university, its environment and ethos and then have them stay at your institution, graduate on time and then become engaged alumni. That's the ideal lifecycle: it creates predictable enrolment, predictable revenue and a fully philanthropic return.
On the student side, universities set up student success services with built-in safety nets to steer students with problems back to the perfect scenario of getting on track and graduating in four years, etc. By having all those safety nets on the campus, we try to address the potential threats to maintaining that perfect scenario. The challenge is getting the right students to take advantage of all those services.
Retaining students to graduation is ideal not only because it helps secure the institution financially, but also because it helps build and maintain the community. It strengthens the bonds between students and between faculty and students. Ultimately it also strengthens the affinity between students and the institution. It's like a symbiotic relationship, with everybody benefitting.
That’s the altruistic perspective. But there are other reasons to support high retention. If I can brag that my school has a 90% retention rate, that tells prospective students and their families, “If I go to this school, they will take care of me, I’ll graduate and be successful.” University is a big investment and you want a return on that investment. You want to minimize your risks; a school with strong retention is a kind of guarantee. Parents want to make sure their child will graduate and be successful starting their career.
“That's where the readiness & retention surveys really help us: identifying students at risk and the services they are likely to need to be successful.”
Do at-risk students share any commonalities or are they as random on the surface as the entire student body appears to be?
I think it might seem random, but I see definite categories that at-risk students fall into.
The first one is academic. For whatever reason, a student isn’t making the cut academically. But, in my experience, the actual number who really can’t make it academically because they lack skills or the capacity to succeed is very small. You see this more commonly when admission standards are lowered to raise intake numbers. If our incoming admission average is around 80% but we admit students with 70% averages, they're likely going to find themselves at the bottom of their class with a pretty steep climb to match their peers. That's one aspect.
I think a bigger factor is financial. Many students are worried about how they're going to pay for school and whatnot, but there are usually two categories of students. For the first, it's poor budgeting skills combined with living on their own for the first time. They don't know how to build and stick to a budget. They get overwhelmed when they come to university because they want to fit in, and they want the entire university experience. They show up with a full bank account in September but by mid-October they're like, “uh oh”.
The second group are the truly financially insecure, where the more extreme cases include an inability to pay the rent, not knowing where their next meal is coming from, and having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. That often leads to their academic performance suffering because there are so many other things to worry about. Basic survival skills take over and everything else falls to the wayside.
A third group includes students affected by family and personal matters that pop up, because life happens. We all have things in our life that require attention and happen outside our best-laid plans, whether it's a divorce, or a death or illness in the family, or their family gets transferred or moves or students get pregnant or whatever. And of course, there are medical reasons that are out of our control where a health issue needs to be dealt with right away and everything else gets put on hold.
But I think the biggest reason – and one which we don't talk about a lot – is that it really comes down to the wrong fit. Fit has a big impact. If you aren’t fitting in socially, if the personality of the institution doesn't match with your values, if you're in the wrong program, if you have picked the wrong type of institution – it’s too big, too small, too personal, too impersonal – this is going to affect your performance and your desire to be there.
When you ask a student, “What do you think about your university?” and they answer, “Oh, it totally sucks,” you know that the university doesn’t actually suck. After all, it’s been around for a long time and lots of its students graduate and go on to be successful; it just wasn't right for that particular student.
What are the measures that you've personally seen to be effective in terms of intervention? And why do you think they are effective?
Of course, you need to have the right resources on campus.
But equally important is that you have to build awareness of those resources and encourage students to use them.
That's so important and so often overlooked. Students need to know about the resources and be encouraged to use them. De-stigmatization is really important. Also having those resources front and center is also important. They have to be visible, not tucked away in a corner. If it’s hidden away and hard to find, that sends the wrong message to students who might need those resources.
To talk explicitly about CRI, we’ve used their readiness and retention surveys and they have been very effective for us.
I mentioned earlier that limited resources are a big challenge in public institutions. Getting the best return on your investment is important. The readiness survey has helped us with this as we're able to see not only who's more likely to be at risk before they set foot on campus, but we also get a better idea of what resources will be needed and in demand once they get here.
That way we know where to focus and where to bulk up our services. You know uncertainties – and we're finding this with COVID – uncertainty is the hardest challenge to overcome. But if we can minimize an uncertainty, we can be prepared and do a better job helping our students and hopefully retain more of them.
That's where the readiness & retention surveys really help us: identifying students at risk and the services they are likely to need to be successful.
“It sounds kind of simple but having someone throw you a lifeline can make a world of difference.”
Can you talk about the impact of an intervention with an at-risk student at a critical point in their transition to first year?
Often when a student struggles in that transition period, they do so in isolation. They’re transitioning and they don’t want to appear as if they have issues. The students around them seem to have it all under control, not having any problems. Entering students are pretty young for the most part; they’re still impressionable and trying to find their groups. They don’t want to appear to be in need because that might affect where you fit on the social scale.
The intervention with the most impact is having a person reach out and offer help. It’s usually someone with training on the university side, but it could be a fellow student. It sounds kind of simple but having someone throw you a lifeline can make a world of difference.
Two summers ago, I sent an email to a group of students identified as being at risk as part of the follow-up to the readiness survey. I offered each student some support. Four reached back to tell me that they were ready to pack their bags and go home. They were just lost, they didn't know where to turn, and they felt alone. Having someone who not only offered to help but also became a real person, a connection and bond was made that provided them hope.
Again, it seems simple: having someone they can email or an office where they can go to say hi and feel like they belong. There was one student in particular who struggled socially and had a hard time making friends, so he was finding it really hard to fit in.
When I reached out, he felt that he was able to connect with somebody and reach out in turn. I was able to offer him with some directions to help find his fit on campus. Flash forward to now: he has one semester left until he graduates. Unknown to the student, his dad, who found out what happened, has been in touch with me every year since to thank me. He said if it wasn’t for that simple intervention, he didn't think that his son would have made it past Thanksgiving. His dream of obtaining a university degree might not have happened. A simple course of action that will hopefully reap benefits for that particular student and others as well.
That happens all the time; a connection is made, and it makes all the difference. For some students, that’s all it takes.
Lastly, do you have any ideas of how retention efforts need to change in order to help institutions improve retention for all the students that are basically stuck at home and appear to be taking their next semester online?
Million-dollar question! Great question but extremely difficult to answer.
There’s little doubt that retention is going to be even more important if universities offer completely online delivery models past the fall. And it also means that our intervention efforts are going to be even more difficult to provide and deliver. Even though we're more connected technologically, we have less sense of physical and emotional connection and this will affect mental health and wellness.
We’re probably going to need to check in with our students more; the personal touch, even if delivered by technology, will be even more important. We will need to be creative in trying to generate a meaningful feeling of connectedness. So far, I’ve seen a lot of institutions sending out emails with links to resources and webinars or TED Talks. But we need to engage students one-on-one and get students to connect with each other. I think new students will be the most vulnerable; they’re already in a new environment as the new kids on the block. How can we integrate them into our communities, integrate them with one another, and help them find a fit in a virtual place? Once we get back to campus and more face-to-face interactions, this is going to be a little easier.
Right now, we’re all working on this: student services professionals, faculty, staff, our student government. They all have a role to play. We need to be more welcoming, more understanding, more forgiving. We’re likely going to fumble our way through this. It’s an unprecedented time.
It will be tough, and resilience will be even more important. But, as we say in Quebec, ça va bien aller. It's going to be okay. The struggle will be hard but we're going to be okay.