Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs

Todd Ruecker, Dawn Shepherd, Heidi Estrem, Beth Brunk-Chavez, Todd Ruecker, Dawn Shepherd, Heidi Estrem, Beth Brunk-Chavez

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781607326014
• eBook ISBN: 9781607326021
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

From scholars working in a variety of institutional and geographic contexts and with a wide range of student populations, Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs offers perspectives on how writing programs can support or hinder students' transitions to college. The contributors present individual and program case studies, student surveys, a wealth of institutional retention data, and critical policy analysis.

Rates of student retention in higher education are a widely acknowledged problem: although approximately 66 percent of high school graduates begin college, of those who attend public four-year institutions, only about 80 percent return the following year, with 58 percent graduating within six years. At public two-year institutions, only 60 percent of students return, and fewer than a third graduate within three years. Less commonly known is the crucial effect of writing courses on these statistics.

First-year writing is a course that virtually all students have to take; thus, writing programs are well-positioned to contribute to larger institutional conversations regarding retention and persistence and should offer themselves as much-needed sites for advocacy, research, and curricular innovation. Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs is a timely resource for writing program administrators as well as for new writing teachers, advisors, administrators, and state boards of education.

Contributors: Matthew Bridgewater, ?Cristine Busser, Beth Buyserie, Polina Chemishanova, ?Michael Day, ?Bruce Feinstein, ?Patricia Freitag Ericsson, ?Nathan Garrett, ?Joanne Baird Giordano, ?Tawanda Gipson, ?Sarah E. Harris, Mark Hartlaub, ?Holly Hassel, ?Jennifer Heinert, ?Ashley J. Holmes, ?Rita Malenczyk, ?Christopher P. Parker, ?Cassandra Phillips, ?Anna Plemons, ?Pegeen Reichert Powell, ?Marc Scott, Robin Snead, ?Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, ?Sara Webb-Sunderhaus, ?Susan Wolff Murphy

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Introduction

Retention, Persistence, and Writing: Expanding the Conversation

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Todd Ruecker, Dawn Shepherd, Heidi Estrem, and Beth Brunk-Chavez

“Colleges are Failing in Graduation Rates.” “It’s Bonus Time for Arizona University Presidents.” “Keep Students, Earn More.” These headlines have something in common: higher education’s increased concern over student retention and graduation in recent years, a concern that has impacted colleges and universities in ways we could not have predicted a decade ago. For example, the majority of states now have funding formulas in place that weigh retention and graduation rates in determining funding allotments (“Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education” 2015). Perhaps not too surprising, university president compensation is now often partially based on reaching and surpassing retention and matriculation benchmarks. And in an interesting and perhaps somewhat predictable move, at least one institution, Coastal Carolina University, has implemented a new policy that directly links faculty salary compression raises to improved student retention rates (Mulhere 2015). The logic goes that with more students staying around to finish their educations, postsecondary institutions can maintain their enrollment and share a portion of the tuition dollars that go along with them. These are three examples, but one would be hard pressed to find a single state, even a single institution, that isn’t “gravely concerned” about retention and graduation rates and is in the process of developing a range of strategic plans, action plans, programs, initiatives, and metrics to keep students enrolled and graduating in a timely manner. We wonder, however, how involved academic programs and their faculty are—or should be—in these conversations?

As teachers and scholars interested in improving student success at our institutions, this increased attention to retention and persistence is welcomed. As teachers of writing in postsecondary institutions, the four of us have been increasingly concerned about students in our classes who show up for a day, a week, or even a few months, and then disappear, sometimes because of unexpected family obligations or simply because they fall behind in the coursework due to an inflexible or overwhelming work schedule. We have explored how to work with students as individuals while thinking of ways to improve success rates across our writing programs. We are not alone. A search through the Writing Program Administrator’s listserv (WPA-L) archives shows retention to be an ongoing interest of the composition community, a community who tends to teach small classes and has the opportunity to get to know the students who disappear. However, with the exception of work by Beth Brunk-Chavez and Elaine Fredericksen (Brunk-Chavez and Fredericksen 2008), Pegeen Reichert Powell (2009, 2014), and Todd Ruecker (2015), and some scholarship in basic writing (e.g., Baker and Jolly 1999; Glau 2007; Hagedorn 2012; McCurrie 2009; Peele 2010; Seidman 2012; Webb-Sunderhaus 2010), there has been very little published work that explores the ways writing program instructors and administrators can be involved in discussions of student retention and success and affect change not only at the programmatic level but also at the institutional and state levels.

But what is it that we mean when we enter conversations about retention? As you read this collection, you will notice that a variety of terms are used to talk about issues concerning this subject. When we discuss and analyze issues related to the retention of students in higher education, we use words like success, persistence, retention, “drop out vs. stop out,” and others. The title of this collection captures two of the most prominent terms, retention and persistence. As editors, we use retention deliberately because it is the key term most often used in the popular media and in our own scholarship. Retention is an institutional approach—and one that perhaps too often loses sight of student learning, interests, and motivations while focusing on the statistical and financial importance of each retained student. Student persistence, though, is in many ways the mirror opposite of retention. This term is most often identified with Vincent Tinto’s work; it situates agency differently than does retention and assumes that students have a variety of reasons for continuing in higher education, or not. Using both these terms, as we do in the title, reflects our belief that that continued student learning and engagement in college is a mutual responsibility that involves actions by both institutions and students.

Other terms commonly associated with retention/persistence discourse are involvement, engagement, and integration. Wolf-Wendel, Ward, and Kinzie (2009) define involvement as “responsibility of the individual student,” (425) focusing on the energy they put into participating in the classroom and in other aspects of campus life. In contrast, engagement centers on the work that administrators, faculty, and staff do in “creating campus environments that are ripe with opportunities for students to be engaged” (425). Finally, “Integration (or what Tinto might now call ‘sense of belonging’) involves a reciprocal relationship between the student and the campus . . . a student must learn and adopt the norms of the campus culture, but the institution is also transformed by that merger” (425). As we discuss below, institutional considerations of integration have often emphasized the need for the student to change as opposed to the reciprocal obligation for the institution to change. Consequently, it is perhaps unsurprising that Tinto himself has been quoted saying, “I don’t use the word integration anymore—haven’t used it in decades” (Wolf-Wendel, Ward, and Kinzie 2009, 423).

This collection aims to unsettle and complicate these terms via chapters that explore how retention efforts at the institutional level impact writing programs, how writing programs can impact retention efforts at the institutional level, and how these efforts may or may not affect student persistence.

Student Retention and Persistence: A Brief History

Discussion around student retention in higher education expanded largely through the work of Vincent Tinto, whose 1975 piece “Dropout from Higher Education” synthesized existing research while introducing a model of student dropout that remained largely unquestioned for a few decades. Basing his theory of dropout on Emile Durkheim’s theory of suicide, Tinto argued that students’ likelihood of success at college was based on their integration into the system, namely

that the process of dropout from college can be viewed as a longitudinal process of interactions between the individual and the academic and social systems of the college during which a person’s experiences in those systems (as measured by his normative and structural integration) continually modify his goal and institutional commitments in ways which lead to persistence and/or to varying forms of dropout. (Tinto 1975, 94)

Tinto explained that academic integration included engagement in classrooms while social relations meant involvement with students and professors outside the classroom as well as engagement in various extracurricular activities. He briefly referenced additional factors that positively correlated with retention, such as coming from a higher socioeconomic class background with educated parents and strong high school achievement, but he did not study extensively how students from different racial or ethnic backgrounds fit into his theory.

In later work on retention, Tinto (1988, 1993, 1997) expanded his theory of student integration into academic settings by drawing on Van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage. Tinto’s work here helped influence others who have also used Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and field to make similar arguments that explore the disconnect between particular communities and academic comm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Retention, Persistence, and Writing: Expanding the Conversation
• Part 1 : Writing, Retention, and Broader Policy Contexts
• Part 2 : Writing Program Initiatives That Matter
• About the Authors
• Index