How to Recruit and Retain Higher Education Students

A Handbook of Good Practice

Tony Cook, Brian S. Rushton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415990899
• eBook ISBN: 9781135853242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

How to Recruit and Retain Higher Education Students is an invaluable resource for academic staff, administrators and policy makers involved in student recruitment and improving student retention. It offers practical advice on how universities can influence the expectations of prospective students, allowing them to make sensible decisions about careers, courses and institutions.

Many surveys of students who drop out of university show that most do so out of disappointment. Failing to understand what higher education was about quickly enough, they become confused and frustrated. Dropping out seems the best solution. This book describes a series of practices proven to encourage students to stay on, discussing the background research on student attrition. By preparing students better for their higher education experience, the practices in this book are effective not only in recruiting students but also in matching them to the right institutions and programmes.

The practices described range from those reaching out in a broad way to communities of potential students, to university support for pre-entry examinations, to enhanced communication between institutions and applicants. All are described in sufficient detail to allow judgments to be made about how to use and adapt them to suit local needs.

How to Recruit and Retain Higher Education Students provides a sound theoretical foundation for research into student retention and provides the necessary underpinning for those academic staff embarking on courses and assists in preparing them for their roles in both teaching and student support.

1
The Roots of Attrition

ANTHONY COOK
The STAR Project, University of Ulster

Summary

The general causes of student drop out are well known and although the dropout rates vary from country-to-country, the root causes remain a set of unrealistic expectations on behalf of prospective students and inadequate student support in universities. While much effort has been devoted to keeping students in the teaching programmes and institutions that they have joined, less attention is paid to supporting students to make good choices before entry. Students have to adapt rapidly to changes in lifestyle, as well as in teaching and assessment methods. Institutions can forewarn prospective students of the changes they will be expected to make and can make adaptations to their own practices to make the transitions easier. In addition the social changes that students will have to undertake in a short period of time should not be underestimated. Institutions can assist students to make appropriate choices by helping secondary schools to prepare them adequately, making explicit those attributes that will be required of a successful student and the support they are prepared to offer during the application process.

Introduction

The title of this chapter is taken from the work of Joe Cuseo at Marymount College, California, and illustrates that we need to understand student attrition not only as it happens and as it affects both students and the staff who are then in contact with them, but also as a problem that has been growing in the lives of students for some time past (Cuseo 2002). Many of the factors that cause students to leave university were initiated long before they even thought of applying to enter higher education. It is these deep-rooted factors to which we seek to offer solutions.

If there were a single solution to the problems of student attrition then all institutions would be applying it and the problem would fade into insignificance. Student early leaving is, however, a complex and intractable problem with multiple causes and therefore multiple cures. The cures vary with the student population, the institution and those who have to enact them. The practices described in this book have worked well for those who have practised them but they will all need adapting to suit local circumstances.

The Reasons Why Students Leave Early

Cuseo (2002) identified nine causes for students leaving programmes early. They are:

• Academic under-preparedness
• Academic boredom
• Difficulties managing the transition to university
• Uncertainties about their long-term goals
• The irrelevance of the university curriculum
• Social isolation
• A mismatch between student expectation and early experiences
• Low commitment to persist
• Finance

These factors are not independent since one may be the cause of another but together they give an overall impression of what goes wrong in a student’s life when he/she makes the decision to leave university early. They fall into two groups: those causes that pre-date university entry and those that occur after entry. The origins of reasons such as academic under-preparedness, managing the transition to university, long-term goals and problems with expectations are all present before entry. However, that does not mean that universities and colleges can have no input into their resolution and case studies of good practice are available (Cook et al. 2006, Macintosh et al. 2006).

Although the list produced by Cuseo (2002) has been drawn from an American experience it has resonance with research in other countries. Thus, the National Audit Office (NAO 2002) in the UK identified the following reasons for student withdrawal:

• Lack of preparedness for higher education
• Changing personal circumstances or interests
• Financial matters
• The impact of undertaking paid work
• Dissatisfaction with the programme or institution

Again these are divisible into causes present prior to entry and those that are not. Thus preparedness and being dissatisfied are associated with a poor knowledge of what will be required in higher education, whereas changing personal circumstances and finances are not necessarily as predictable.

Surveys of students who do not continue their studies beyond year one support the summary findings of Cuseo and the NAO. Thus Yorke and Longden (2008) report that the most frequently agreed with statements by students when explaining their own early leaving were:

The programme was not what I expected (48 per cent of respondents).
The way the programme was taught did not suit me (42 per cent).
I simply realised that I had chosen the wrong field of study (42 per cent).

These reasons are remarkably persistent over time since they vary little from a similar study a decade before (Yorke et al. 1997). Clearly, identifying the causes of early leaving has not, by itself, led to effective solutions since student early leaving is now just as much of a problem as it was a decade ago in the UK, in the USA and elsewhere (NAO 2007, van Stolk et al. 2007).

From the viewpoint of this book, the significance of many of these factors is that they have their origins and are potentially soluble before the student enrols at the university. They are associated with the decision to attend a particular institution and follow a particular subject and, therefore, with the factors students use to choose what programme and what institution to which to apply. Changing the ways in which students engage with institutions and particularly with institutional information before entry has the potential, therefore, to address a significant proportion of early leaving. The impact can be to change the decisions prospective students make, to encourage students to make more informed decisions and/or to change their expectations such that they are less disappointed on arrival and are encouraged to prepare themselves more thoroughly for their higher education experience.

Student Retention as a Global Problem

The survival rate for students (i.e. the percentage of those initially enrolled who eventually graduate) varies between major countries from over 80 per cent in Japan to just over 50 per cent in the USA. The UK, with a rate of nearly 80 per cent, is among the highest in the developed world (NAO 2007). This survival rate is an issue because students may not achieve their goals or they may take longer, and institutions invest time and money in education that has no measurable outcomes. Further, in most countries tax-payers’ money is invested in universities and student attrition is perceived to be a waste of resources that may be more productively deployed elsewhere.

Many of the factors associated with student withdrawal are not solely attributable to the student. Students sometimes fail academically, not so much because they lack application but because they have misunderstood institutional expectations (Scott and Graal 2006). Further, a student’s failure to integrate into an institution might be as much about that institution’s failure to provide adequate facilities as it is about the failure of individual students to cope with change (Yorke and Longden 2008). Students, therefore, are not necessarily totally to blame when they do not complete their programme. Indeed, there has been a major change in institutional philosophy over the last decade, which has seen institutions respond to student withdrawal by setting up proactive student retention programmes designed to support students through those circumstances during which they might have formerly withdrawn. Much of the research and the development of practice, however, has been on investigating and developing the experience of students in year one (Moxley et al. 2001, Peelo and Wareham 2002) rather than on resolving the reasons behind making poor entry decisions in the first place. Some of this focus has been because institutions can more easily change the ways in which they deal with students once they have been admitted than they can change the perceptions of incoming students. The imperative for some change has undoubtedly been brought about by increased public scrutiny of student retention as a ‘value for money’ issue, as evidenced at least in part by university league tables (Guardian 2008, Times 2008) and, in the UK, by the increased availability of university data through the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA 2008). Changing those factors that impact on students prior to entry is more difficult because they are not always within the control of institutions.

Students giving reasons for leaving such as ‘The institution was not as I expected’, ‘Stress related to the demands of the programme’ and ‘The amount of contact with academic staff’ (Yorke and Longden 2008) are clear indicators that the pre-entry conversation between prospective students and institutions has not successfully conveyed the subject expectation, the nature of learning in higher education or even the nature of the institution. This mutual understanding of needs should be clear if students are to choose an appropriate programme or to prepare themselves adequately for their first year experience.

Students rely on information from peers, parents (and other relatives) and school careers advisors to narrow down the myriad of options to a manageable number. They then depend on the information which institutions distribute to market themselves and their programmes and on the personal experiences they have when interacting with the institution to finalise their selection (HEFCE 1999). In seeking to encourage students to make appropriate choices, therefore, it is important not only to address applicants directly but also to influence those who advise them. In addition, there is a plethora of advice offered by the media in the form of league tables, which institutions believe influence the choices of the younger students (HEFCE 2008). The implication of early leaving as a result of not understanding what the experience will be like is that one or more of these information sources has been inadequate, misleading or has been misinterpreted.

In the UK, there has been an emphasis on institutions retaining the students they have recruited rather than recruiting students they can retain. If the current emphasis on retention results in universities recruiting those students who are most likely to persist then further expansion of the sector will depend on the better preparation of students prior to entry, i.e. we need a notion of ‘readiness’ as well as being well qualified.

Universities are strange places with transient populations of large numbers of relatively young people with their attendant problems of social adjustment and evolving ambitions. They offer an educational experience to those who volunteer to undergo it. How ready are these volunteers to undertake what is on offer? How ready are institutions to adjust what is on offer to suit those that they recruit?

Academic Readiness

Many of Cuseo’s reasons for early leaving can be summarised as ‘under-preparedness’. This encompasses a range of factors for which students might be expected to have prepared themselves. Academic under-preparedness results from studying an inappropriate range of subjects prior to entry or studying in a way that does not prepare them adequately for university programmes.

The Advanced Level General Certificate of Education has been held to be the ‘gold standard’ of British educational qualifications over many years. It is the qualification that forms the basis for the entry of most UK students to university and has been exported world-wide. A comparison of secondary level assessment with university assessment over time serves to illustrate that the two schemes have diverged over the last few decades.

In the mid 1960s, A level assessment was closely aligned with first year university assessments. A two-year A level course was typically assessed using three three-hour examination papers, each of about two sides of A5 in length. All were essay style questions, i.e. they required the interpretation of the question, the selection of information, the construction of an answer and its expression in coherent English. The syllabuses for all subjects in both the post-16 and post-18 examinations were contained in one A5 booklet of 116 pages (JMB 1965).

A typical question in A level biology was in the following format:

Make a clearly labelled diagram to show the structure of a typical mammalian eye. Describe briefly the mechanisms whereby: (a) the amount of light entering can be controlled, (b) adjustments can be made for viewing objects at varying distances.

(JMB 1965: Biology Paper II)

The following year, at the University of Birmingham, a similar topic was assessed using the following question:

Give an account of the functions of the various parts of the vertebrate ear.

(University of Birmingham 1966: examination paper for Course 1A)

The questions are of similar complexity and the supporting material for both would have been standard texts in the topic. This would have been the routine form of specification of syllabuses and forms of assessment of the time.

A level syllabuses have developed to lend much more support to candidates. Not only are topics specified in greater detail but the examining boards produce extensive support material to show the level of detail required. Scrutiny of the questions and the supporting materials suggests that candidates need learn and understand little that has not been explicitly specified in detail by the examining board (Cook 2005). Thus where the 1965 syllabuses were typically just two sides of A5, the syllabus for biology alone in 2004 was presented in an A4 booklet of 62 pages (NISEAC 2002). This is supported by a 72 page A4 booklet specifying the detail in which each of the topics will be assessed and by mark schemes for past papers that give, in even more detail, the information required.

The explicitness that now accompanies publicly set and marked examinations is not, of itself, detrimental. Candidates should know what it is they are supposed to be learning. To specify a course in such a way as to delimit what is to be learned, however, can only serve to inhibit the exploration of the subject and results in teacher centred approaches to learning.

The typical university syllabus is not specified in the same way and students would not have access to the detail available at A level nor would they have access to past mark schemes. A programme specification describes degree programmes in the UK and states ‘the outcomes that should result from successful completion of an individual programme’ (QAA 2006). It specifies what all successful students should be able to do rather than to delimit the subject. Further, the student is typically assessed with a diversity of assessment methods that, although they will have associated mark schemes, rarely exclude reward for knowledge and understanding that has not been explicitly specified.

The switch from teacher-dependent learning to independent learning, from a teacher who is independent from the assessment scheme to a teacher who is also the assessor and from a syllabus that limits what is to be learned to one that specifies only what must be learned is confusing for many. This is especially true when it may be the student who is the only participant in this system who is aware of the change.

Admitting students onto inappropriate programmes can arise from an institutional imperative to fill a programme by adjusting the entry requirements for that programme. Although ensuring an adequate range of prior academic experiences should be accomplished by specifying subject based entry qualifications this is not always possible. For example, in the UK an Advanced Vocational Certificate in Education in Science (AVCE Double Award) consists of six compulsory and six elective modules (from a choice of 25 modules in all). Although, therefore, there is a guarantee that a core curriculum has been studied neither the depth of study nor the range of topics can be. In addition, in an examining system that can only sample the syllabus, students may actively avoid subject areas that eventually have to be tackled in a university programme. The ways in which students study prior to entry are even more difficult to control and may require remedial action after entry, such as a greater emphasis on small group teaching, first yea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Roots of Attrition
• 2 Access and Admissions
• 3 Transition … From What? A Review of the Influences on the Choices and Expectations of Entrants to Higher Education
• 4 udecide: Helping Learners Make SMART Decisions
• 5 The Community University of the Valleys Model: ‘Reaching the Students Other Recruitment Strategies Can’t Reach’
• 6 New Opportunities for Disadvantaged Pupils: The Step-Up Programme
• 7 Progression into Higher Education via an Access Summer School
• 8 Quality Information Available to Students Prior to Entry
• 9 University Visit Days
• 10 ‘I’ll Be There For You’: The Impact of Northumbria ‘Friends’ on Recruitment and Retention
• 11 Promoting Student Retention Using Support Strategies Prior to Entry
• 12 Student Mentoring Prior to Entry: Getting Accurate Messages Across
• 13 Online Pre-induction Support
• 14 Second Chances for Students: The Fresh Start Project
• 15 Recruitment for Retention: A Way Forward
• List of Contributors