Matthew Stiegemeyer is the former Director of Student Recruitment at Montreal’s Concordia University.
He has been working in higher education since 2001 at three different public universities.
In 2006, he earned his Doctorate of Higher Education at the University of Memphis, where his research was focused on the influence of student awards on student persistence. After 5 years at the University of Memphis and 5 years at the University of Victoria (BC), he landed at Concordia University, where he worked for over a decade as the Director for Student Recruitment.
1. What role does retention play in the university ecosystem?
Everybody’s playing field got leveled pretty quickly in terms of university recruitment, especially those without the big names. What I’m anticipating is that retention will come front and centre. Suddenly we're expecting these enrollment drops: financial plans have changed; mobility patterns are likely to change, and travel restrictions will change the international concept.
The opportunity that’s before us is that portion of the student body who could really benefit from student support services in order to be fully engaged in their studies. Left alone, these students are at higher risk of attrition.
So, one way you shore up your enrollment is by working on that group of students at a higher risk of leaving the institution, either due to academic issues or because they are simply transferring somewhere else. When it comes to keeping students engaged with their studies, now is a good time to reflect on either proving that the things you’ve been doing actually work or really putting some concerted effort into breaking away from outdated processes.
“It’s not just about whether or not you offer services -
it’s about how much active effort you're doing to connect those activities to outcomes.”
2. In your opinion, has retention been an important part of the institution thus far, and if not, why not?
I think on the surface everyone wants to say yes. They would tell you it's an important component but when you dig a little deeper, what you find is a collection of activities or services that are theoretically supporting retention. What you probably don't have are the metrics that prove whether any of them are actually retention initiatives or just nice things to do. The risk assessment that Concordia undertook with CRi was us essentially saying that while we had these student services that are designed to help students do better, there had never really been an undertaking to prove that they were making a difference.
To address that, we measured each student’s risk for not persisting through their first year and essentially did outreach with a soft marketing campaign to let them know about all the student services that could help them. We steered away from telling anyone they weren’t going to make it through their first year because that's sort of front-loading the issue.
What we found was that the things we thought would make a difference actually made a difference; It was essentially this concept of triaging services that made our work so much more effective.
The altruistic view of student services in higher education is that we're doing this for everybody, so anyone can enjoy our services. What we decided to do was to really campaign and promote directly to the students at risk: you took this survey; we're looking at your readiness for university. Here's some time management skills, here's some note-taking skills. You can be a great student, check us out at the student service center. Lo and behold, we had this great result where retention improved dramatically for those students.
Coming back to the question, I think what you would also find is that a number of people will say, “Oh yeah, we have services to support students. We have advisors.” But they’re there in a passive way; students have to look for or even be aware of the services that can help them. If someone asked me what we’re doing to recruit and I said, “Well, we just passively make sure that the Concordia reputation is solid.” I would be looking for a new job.
It’s not just about whether or not you offer services, it’s about how much active effort you're doing to connect those activities to outcomes.
This year, students will enter a learning environment for which they may not be as prepared as we would like, given remote learning and possible restrictions in terms of physical activity. How do we build up the academic experience to support and engage these students so that they can finish their degrees and enter the workforce?
COVID has got us thinking about actively trying to put resources in place to change outcomes rather than those passive supports.
“It's something like 70% cheaper to retain a student through to graduation than to replace that student through a recruitment process. But beyond the economic impact comes then the cascading impact for true enrollment management.”
3. Can you tell me something about the impact or the benefits of retention from an institutional student services perspective and the individual student perspective?
From an institutional perspective, there's a cost-benefit that immediately rises. It's something like 70% cheaper to retain a student through to graduation than to replace that student through a recruitment process. But beyond the economic impact comes then the cascading impact for true enrollment management.
What does that mean?
Say you have a thousand first-year students entering into your engineering cohort. They need to take this math, this physics and this chemistry. Then in year two, they need to follow those up with this materials course and this fluid dynamics theory class. Point being, the picture becomes more complicated if you're trying to maximize your enrolment when you’re losing students in year two and year three and you’re trying to replace them with transfer applications.It becomes this moving target where you're constantly trying to fill spots. So institutionally, higher retention rates eliminate some of those wild card components. Everything goes a lot smoother in terms of things like course load management, academic assignments, professoriate, and your part-time workload like managing classroom space, lab availability, course scheduling, and so on. Now you don't have to cancel classes because they're under-subscribed. You've got a much smoother enrollment pattern. From an institutional perspective, there's the obvious financial impact: our budget is based on X number of enrollments and however many full-time equivalent or individual bodies. But then there's those side benefits of the course management and the faculty workload assignments. This boosts your graduation rates, which then improves your rankings, which then improves your individual reputation, which then feeds into these other recruitment efforts, fundraising efforts, etcetera.
Our goal should be to either remove barriers for students so that they can continue their studies or create additional supports to reduce the risk factors.
The machine definitely rewards the concept of retention but I think it's harder to pinpoint ownership. There's no office of student retention; it's much more like a spy network where you find your partners across campus who are willing to collaborate and think about how we can make this better. But that’s what we're trying to break away from; how do we formalize this?
4. Do you think that at-risk students share any commonalities or are they as random on the surface as the entire student body might be?
There are some commonalities, but it's not simply a matter of lower grades or having fewer advantages. I’ve seen this in some of the models that predict when students will persist and when they're at risk.
What we saw in our own studies at Concordia is that there's an attitudinal influence along with some of the students’ self-identifying factors, and some of it was educational background. And I think again about some of the work that CRi has done – when institutions look at their first-year retention rate. CRi helped us to identify how to focus our efforts based on a combination of educational background, attitudes and how prepared a student felt as he/she began their studies.
The question I get from a lot of prospective students is, how many students make it to the end of their first year?
In Quebec, the CEGEP system really changes that outcome because CEGEP is post-secondary. The space where an Ontario university is looking at a first-year retention rate is different from what Quebec is looking at from their CEGEP retention pool.
You're really comparing students about a year apart in terms of their age and mentality and engagement with their education. So, based on that, a large portion of persistence at Concordia is tied to the number of years of academic preparation. The Quebec education model offers students a transitional experience between high school and university – for Concordia, that factors heavily into how we approach our retention efforts.
What we’ve found is that persistence is not measured solely by GPA or standardized test scores. Plenty of people on scholarship don't make it through their first year in part because their high school education might not have challenged them in the same way that a university experience is going to challenge them.
You're looking at those individual student traits combined with educational background or how much time they've been away from school. With what I've seen, it really is a combination of these things.
“In some ways we’re really looking for how adaptable our students are in developing transferable skills with an increased sense of autonomy.”
5. What types of intervention measures have you personally seen to be effective and why do you think they are?
Some of the more effective strategies I’ve seen were either building up study skills or building up habits to improve academic performance. I think it kind of goes back to my earlier point that the university experience, especially that first year, is different from people's high school or even their CEGEP experience. In some ways we’re really looking for how adaptable our students are in developing transferable skills with an increased sense of autonomy.
I think part of this is asking how students can develop the right kind of patterns and habits and understand that actions have consequences and every decision comes with some counter-result to go with it.
It's the effective intervention methods that help students start to contextualize this and formulate a plan.
We've seen this in our financial aid office, with students who work on formulating a budget and just trying to live within their means rather than overloading their work schedule to pay for a certain lifestyle and therefore have their studies slide. That makes a difference because finances are a big factor in education.
When I talk to groups of students, I make this analogy of joining a gym. You join a gym to achieve this physical change, right? But it only works if you put in the time and effort. You can't just sit on the bench and then go take a shower and then six months later, be ripped. You have to work the machines, you have to have a routine, you have to stretch.
It's also true with university life. You have to show up to the classes, you have to do the readings, you have to ask questions and you have to be comfortable with being asked questions and not having the right answer. There are places in the world where that's a huge learning challenge because that's not the way students have been taught to learn. But that is how we typically do it in Canada.
6. So can you talk about the impact of an intervention with an at-risk student at a critical point in their transition of first year?
One of the things that we've hammered in at Concordia is this concept of the Navigator program. It's essentially a staff mentor who is available for students when they're not quite sure where to take their questions.
So not advisors, not a professor. It's just somebody who should be a nice person who can listen.
I had a student who basically said, “I'm going to drop out. It’s just not for me.” We had been in contact throughout her recruitment cycle during her application, so I said, “Okay, why don't we go have a coffee because you're here in October, you're going to be here until December. You might as well make the most of it.”
And so we meet and she's quite upset, saying, “Oh, this is not really what I expected and I really don't like my major. I'm really disengaged with what I signed up for.” Which was Italian, I think. When I asked her what she was really interested in, she says, “I love my history class.” Hmm. When I asked whether she had considered changing majors, she was surprised, saying, “I can do that?” And I said, “Oh yeah!” and told her to talk to our career placement service and to ask them what students with BAs in history are doing.
The strategy was to connect people and their passion and let them see their degree as productive outcomes. It was a simple one-on-one, honestly, it was a coffee. She was excited and switched majors and graduated.
There was no one person that was well-suited in this case, she just needed someone to tell her it was okay to change her mind. I think it's hard to find that one office on campus, you know, because there's no such thing as an Office of Second Thoughts.
But we're asking 18-year-olds to pick a major and only some of them will have the wherewithal to look up the processes and feel like they can go ahead and do this. Others feel like they're somehow backed into a corner and they can't see it through. And again, one of the advantages of the Canadian higher education system is that it's okay to let people move around in order to connect with what really excites them. That part for me has been a pillar of the higher education discussion, to be engaged with that material that excites you. The career, you'll figure it out.
7. Finally, do you have any ideas of how retention efforts need to change to help institutions today improve retention for these students that are basically stuck at home and are very likely taking their next semester online?
If I had that answer, I would be a consultant!
So much emphasis in online learning is going to be around time management and committing to a schedule and building a routine – how to establish a pattern that reinforces good study habits. In a face-to-face model, the physical act of going to class, studying in the library, travelling to and from campus all create routine. The onus is now on the individual to find effective strategies without the physical change in environments to assist in the pattern building.
So how do we develop the support materials to keep people engaged with their content, develop the appropriate measures of learning progress and help people connect that back to their larger degree?
I don't necessarily have a very clear answer for that one, I think we’re all sort of brainstorming. I think even for big institutions it's about creating meaningful check-ins, so that people can get that sense of community or engagement or even a little bit of accountability.