Emily Fjeldsted has been the Manager, Services for New Students at Concordia University’s Student Success Centre since 2016. She oversees the bi-annual Orientation activities for both undergraduate and graduate students, the First-year Support Counselling program and the Welcome Crew – a team of peer mentors who provide new students support with the transition into their first year at Concordia.
Margaret Colton is the Facilitator of Academic Advising Support at Concordia University. She chairs the Central Advising Working Group, which spearheads academic advising initiatives and best practices at Concordia, encourages connected communication between advising stakeholders and provides professional development to academic advisors. She is also the incoming 2022 Canada Chair for the professional association NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising.
What kind of strategic decisions have to be made in order for retention efforts to really work on the front lines?
Margaret: One of the most important strategic decisions that helps any retention effort is to prioritize early and consistent collaboration with campus partners who have a stake in retention.
So the front lines of retention were, for us, started with our colleagues at the Student Success Centre, our student mentors, our colleagues in the Financial Aid and Awards Office, and now include academic advisors.
Not only is that early collaboration key for leveraging the retention survey that we partnered with CRi on, it's also really important for all frontline staff to recognize their own critical roles in student persistence and retention. It empowers and motivates them in their student-facing roles to know that they have the power to shape the experience of our incoming first-year cohort through their interactions and service to students.
On that topic of strategy, when we began engaging in front-line retention efforts, it was really clear that our commitment and efforts shifted to center on student persistence, and not just on the institutional benefits of retaining our students.
Emily: One thing to add: There has to be a strategy of cooperation between the various units that are sending communications out to new students and the follow-up contacts to whom the students will reach out. It helps to align a consistent tone throughout all messaging -- before, during and after touchpoints.
“Often, nobody is really tasked with retention and this can be dangerous because it can lead to inaction.”
What kind of retention efforts have you personally seen to be the most effective?
Emily: I think both Margaret and I can say that retention efforts done via phone calls have been the most successful and most effective.
Part of the follow-up to our retention campaign is having our team of student mentors actually call the students who have completed CRi’s predictive survey.
By taking a friendly approach in these phone calls, we've seen really great results in the reactions we get back from the students we called. Also, just purely looking at it from a statistical point of view, we have a higher rate of successful connections with the students through phone calls than we do with emails.
Let's say you do reach them and they respond. What's the next step? Well, there's some rapport building. Often, the student mentor will have listened to whatever the student decided to share with them and will have offered support based on their personal experience as a fellow student in addition to making some suggestions of other services that could help.
And so the kind of immediate action after a phone call would be for the mentor to write a summary email of what they spoke about to the student and in that email it would have direct contacts to whoever they thought the student could benefit from speaking with.
What’s nice about this initial connection is that the next time the student feels like they're in a pinch or needs help or doesn't know where to go, they have that conversation with the mentor in mind and they'll come back to the mentor to say, “Oh, I didn't ask about this thing when we spoke, can you help me with it? Or can you send me in the right direction?” And that's also a really valuable connection.
Can you talk about the value of proactive retention efforts and how they differ from mid-semester efforts?
Emily: It’s all-too-common to encounter a student who’s about to graduate and didn’t know they could have had help along the way. What’s even worse is when, hearing students who don’t make it to their graduating year, tell us they didn’t know help was available. So the value of taking a proactive approach to retention is that we can have meaningful conversations before a student finds themselves in the situation where they need support. Before they get those first grades back, before they've gone through their first exam period, before it seems hopeless to them or that it’s too late to turn things around.
When we've been able to plant the seed of support to incoming students who have just barely set foot in the door, it makes a big difference. Whether it’s financial, academic, or social support, when they hit a roadblock, they at least have a faint memory of a conversation with somebody and that there are people who can help.
And with CRi’s predictive survey tool, we can target thoseour efforts, so we can have those early conversations with the students who need them most.
“Don’t think of a retention project as something that needs to get started from scratch… It's just a matter of refocusing some of the already existing great services that are available to students and Putting it in front of their eyes at the right moment. “
What is the biggest obstacle that institutions face when they want to improve retention?
Margaret: I think many institutions will relate when I say that retention seems like something that's almost too large to tackle. It can indirectly relate to the mission of many departments across campus. And many departments would say that the work they do contributes to retaining students.
But often, nobody is really tasked with retention and this can be dangerous because it can lead to inaction. It can lead to everybody assuming that it's someone else's job and then nothing ever gets done. It’s so far-reaching that higher ed professionals may not know where to start. Some may think that they have to do all this research and become an expert on the topic before leading a charge. But it’s much more important to just start somewhere, even if it’s in a small way. You don't need to be a Director or a Dean to do it. When we started our program, it was really basic but we still saw a positive impact.
Do you have any success stories that you’ve seen that were especially impactful on a student?
Emily: We get lots of feedback about student outreach calls where it lasts half an hour, sometimes even an hour, and the student on the other end of the phone is so thankful they were able to spend so much time and ask all of their questions to the mentor.
Students have said that they were surprised that Concordia was calling them to say “Welcome! Do you have any questions?” And they remember that experience when they’re facing adversity and feel more comfortable to reach out.
Margaret: I would say one of the best things that we've gained in our partnership with CRi is the great opportunity to learn more about our students through the data that we've collected. So the survey implementation process and data really encourages us to develop thoughtful and intentional interventions based on students' needs.
It also helps us identify where we should focus our efforts in the future. Student-facing staff can then leverage this data to inform their conversations and appointments with students and that could potentially prompt more meaningful conversations with the students they meet with.
Emily: Plus, it's trackable through our SIS (student information system) and eventually, it's going to be implemented into our new CRM - all building toward a 360 degree view of a student - from pre-arrival all the way to graduation. This is big because with this centralized information, students don't have to always re-explain their situation to whomever they're speaking.
Last question: any advice for schools that want to embark on their own retention initiatives?
Emily: Margaret kind of alluded to this earlier, but I think one of our biggest pieces of advice is to not think of a retention project as something that needs to get started from scratch, because there are likely many programs or services that are already in place on your campus that can be leveraged to create an initial retention campaign.
It's just a matter of refocusing or specifically targeting some of the already existing great services that are available to students. Putting it in front of their eyes at the right moment. The first attempt likely won't be perfect. But a first attempt is better than nothing.
Margaret: The other thing to know is that institutions across Canada are engaging in retention work from small scale to campus-wide initiatives. So my advice is to reach out to those people. Learn what others are doing, even if you imitate what they do and and translate it into your context, at least it's somewhere to start. And that way, you're leveraging the expertise of your colleagues across Canada. Lastly, you might seriously consider CRi's predictive retention research. It tells you where to focus your energy and resources, which is a big step in the right direction.