BALTIMORE — Every weekday for a few years, Malik Mosley switched from a full-time worker to a full-time student at 8 a.m., when he finished his overnight shift at an Aberdeen warehouse and drove to class at Morgan State University.
He managed that workload until a family member suffered an illness in 2013. Juggling school and work while helping to care for his family became too much to manage and he dropped out of Morgan in his junior year.
Today, Mosley has a degree in finance, thanks to a program at Morgan designed to entice students who have dropped out to return and finish their degrees. The program has been embraced by the state and is now being replicated at other universities and community colleges around the state.
Students who go straight from high school to college and then finish their degrees in four years make up only 44 percent of the students at University System of Maryland colleges, which include 12 of the state’s public institutions. College students in general increasingly work more hours and are more likely to have families. By intervening with dropouts and at-risk students, college administrators hope to boost their graduation numbers and help students achieve their goals.
“To have someone give you a second chance, it was what I needed,” said Mosley, 26, of Parkville.
Until recently, when students formally dropped out or simply stopped enrolling in classes, the onus fell on them to re-enroll and finish their degree. But faced with flagging graduation rates, some colleges are turning to creative methods to retain students.
Tiffany B. Mfume, director of Morgan’s Office of Student Success and Retention, had just switched to a new cellphone carrier in 2009 when she got a letter in the mail from her old phone company stating “We want you back!” with a list of benefits she could get if she returned.
That pitch gave her an idea. What if Morgan could use that same strategy to lure back students who had stopped enrolling in classes?
Mfume launched Morgan’s Reclamation Initiative the following year and began calling and emailing students who had stopped attending. The school also mailed them letters modeled on the one she got from the cell phone company, compete with “We want you back!” and a list of perks they could get if they returned, such as a scholarship of up to $2,500 and one-on-one help with the re-enrollment process.
