I can recall sitting through an all-day retention meeting at one point during my higher education career. The institution where I was working only graduated two out of every 10 students that entered within six years. Three things never came up during that meeting: recruitment, academics and financial aid, which went a long way toward explaining the woefully low graduation rate. One must account for all three to have a successful retention effort.
There is a simple reason why the schools that are considered academic powerhouses are just that: recruitment. One cannot win a championship without having championship players. In order to have a successful recruitment effort, one must recruit academic champions, if you will. This means targeting students that are fully prepared to do college-level work and those who have the capability but need some remediation.
In many countries, there is no such thing as open admission because, once it is determined that a student lacks academic acumen, that student is steered in a direction outside of academics that will allow them to be successful. Perhaps it is time for the United States to do the same.
Academics in relation to retention mean that not only should the students be able to do college-level work, but the instructional staff must set the bar high and demand that students reach for it. Earlier in my career in higher education, I had a student come to my office confused as to why she received a low overall grade for a course stating that she “turned in all the work.”
As kindly as possible, I explained that her work was substandard and that she had received detailed written feedback on what she needed to do. In actuality, it was painfully obvious that the student did not have the academic or intellectual ability to do college-level work.
This, unfortunately, is not an isolated incident and has played itself out over and over again across higher education: a student is ill prepared for whatever reason to do college-level work, but some “well-meaning” instructors pass them along. This works just fine … until the student encounters an instructor with high academic standards.
In actuality, all instructors should have high academic standards, which should not be a problem so long as the recruitment area is in place and academically capable students are enrolled. If students capable of succeeding academically in higher education are recruited, then situations like the one above do not happen. In that instance, the student ultimately dropped out of school short of a degree. Both the school and the student were damaged, damage that could have been avoided.
