By Dr. Joe Pace
Facing the reality of retention
When I began working on my doctoral dissertation dealing with student retention, I thought dropout rates would fall if students took a course in success. The Pacific Institute and I created a course, Thought Patterns for a Successful Career, but found that a class in success was not all students needed. I learned that faculty and staff involvement was a bigger factor in keeping students in school. If employees are not aboard or involved in retention of students, you do not get the results you are looking for. Most students drop out in the first 30 to 90 days, so most schools offer a success course during this period. I thought that was going to be it. I thought you just needed a really good one that taught them how to deal with their issues and problems, and that if you taught them how to become a better student, they would just persist. What I found is that if the rest of the employees in the organization are not aligned, and are not paying enough attention to the students, it just unravels any good work that’s done in a student success class. When you are looking at the whole scheme of retention, persistence and school dropout, the big revelation to me was that it’s not just a course that’s taught in the first 90 days. It is total employee commitment and involvement that makes the difference. All employees need to be models, mentors, and monitors.
An intelligent heart
Employees who are student-orientated and have positive expectations of students make a big difference in a school’s retention rate. Teachers get much of the blame for retention problems, and that’s because the employees the students have the most exposure to are teachers.
Teachers need an intelligent heart: knowledge about their subject and the heart to know how to reach students. The same is true about other departments. Most employees just want to focus on their job every day and not really be concerned about being a student oriented or a customer-oriented organization. It’s that challenge that goes on between being an educational institution and a business.
Becoming an “edupreneur”
I advocate becoming an “edupreneur”-half educator, half entrepreneur-in order to understand both the business and educational sides of the school.
Sometimes the administrative side does not understand or appreciate the educator side, so I created the ‘edupreneurial spirit,’. Along with getting all employees to embrace the intelligent heart, we also get them to embrace what we call the “ Edupreneurial Spirit” to better understand that it’s also a business. We get them to understand enough so they don’t undermine each other as an organization or as departments within a school.
Through using our Success Strategies for Effective Colleges Schools training process, that contains teaching, video, audio and written material, we get people to examine their attitudes. We have user-friendly, non-intimidating questions, where people reflect on themselves and deal with scenarios that put them in a student’s shoes.
It’s really a cognitive skill. We’re teaching this information so faculty and staff can lock on to it, just the way an IT instructor would lock on to IT skills. The exercises give instructors a chance to look at classroom situations differently. By presenting scenarios they can relate to in the class, they’ll say, “You know, I never thought of it that way.” It’s telling them about some of the challenges the students may be having in their personal lives.
When they hear that, they begin to understand that maybe they should take a look at this other side. It’s not just the I.Q. side. It’s also the intelligent heart side.
Attention equals retention
My research has shown that paying exceptional attention to students over a period of time will result in improved retention. It’s like attention equals retention. You could spend three months just taking 30 students and every day asking them how they’re doing, smiling at them, paying extraordinary attention to them. Over the three-month period, you will see major improvement in retention. The effect multiplies when faculty and staff team up with the method. There’s sort of a law of synergy or a law of physics that comes into effect. If I can get 10 out of 20 employees to say, ‘You know, this really makes a lot of sense,’ it’s absolutely amazing how you begin to see it reflected in student retention rates improving.
Touching the heart button
Many times, a student has never experienced success, and lacks the vision or experience to succeed. I counter this by training teachers and staff members to help students dig deep down to find a picture or vision that motivates them.
One of the things we found in persistence is that people who persist have a vision in their mind, they have a picture that’s very sensory rich. They can touch it, taste it. If you’re trained properly, you can discern this information and then use it. Then you save one student here, one there, and before you know it, over the course of a year, your retention has improved 10 percent.
One woman, who got a job at the school she graduated from said she thought about dropping out at least 42 times, but didn’t because of her 3-year-old son, Quentin. The school was able to use Quentin as the vision or picture for persisting. This school is always looking at finding ways of getting the students to lock on to a vision, a picture, something they’re most proud of. In this case, it was her son, Quentin, but maybe she had never thought of it in those terms.
Some students drop out because their vision isn’t strong enough to take them through the rough spots. The vision of a new car, for example, might not be enough. Others drop out because the classes aren’t what they expected. The student sees an ad in the paper and the admissions reps know what to do. They play right into the ad. Then the student gets in class, and if the teacher or the other employees have no clue what’s in the ad and what the admissions reps have told the student, they unravel the dream or the picture that the student has.
A student is usually looking for a lifestyle change and has a picture in his or her mind of a better life for someone like Quentin. Some school staff think it’s the course they’re in, the major they’re in, the accreditation. Students could care less about that. They have a picture in their mind, so the more the employees know about the vision or picture, the more they can play into it. When that young girl wanted to drop out of school, they would ask her about Quentin, ‘What’s he going to do?’
There it is, that’s the heart button, or the hot button, that caused her to persist.
Show rates improving
I have been experimenting with improving show rates in admissions as well as retention rates, to help students from the time of their initial interview to their first class. We especially focus on getting them to keep the vision alive. There’s always a period before they come, sort of a holding pattern. Usually a school representative calls and talks about how great the school is, its benefits and features. We’re trying something new. We’re talking about the Quentins, the vision, and the lifestyle change. We tell them to keep in mind what they’re going to get when they come here. We ask how it’s going, what are the rocks in road, the obstacles? In some schools I have seen the show rate improve between 5 and 8 percent. We’re using these same concepts that I originally designed for retention. My new approach is now enrollment increase from front door to back door. I have a school that just improved 10 percent in retention and 8 percent in show rate, so they’re up 18 percent over last year.
Sharing ideas
To help students with their vision, some schools take a picture of students in cap and gown on the first day of school. The pictures can be posted on a bulletin board or given to students to put on their notebooks. Others make tapestry with everyone’s name on it, or T-shirts with names on the back. The activity helps students create a new social group built around a common goal and success. The Pacific Institute helps schools use and apply research and ideas such as the cap and gown photo.
We take research that has been around for 50 or 60 years that is very cognitive in nature and make it user-friendly. We’re in close to 600 colleges and schools, so we get great ideas from schools and bring them to other schools. Ideas like the cap and gown bulletin board aren’t new, but it’s important for them to be shared so each school can apply them in their own way. The technique is to apply this information in user- friendly scenarios to get the end results. You want something similar to the picture on the first day of school in a cap and gown, or maybe there are other great ideas.
One way of getting employees to develop an intelligent heart is to have them carry out these projects and ideas. We create implementation teams to come up with these ideas and they take that on as a challenge. They take on that accountability, and have it done for the next start. That fosters more of an intelligent heart within them through activities and ideas that they actually manifest through application.
Implementation Teams will generate new ideas
Part of our training involves establishing implementation teams. Implementation teams should contain men and women from different ethnic backgrounds, and from different departments within a school. It is interesting because they’re seeing things from different perspectives. But in that we want to make sure they’re not all white male; that there are minorities in there; that there are females; that it’s a mixed group. In those small teams they solve and resolve many issues themselves. Many get all kinds of revelations in these small groups.
I have found that six is the magic number for group work. If you have less than six it’s not enough, if you have more than six it’s too many. The art is to try and blend the teams and get them to meet, that’s always the hard part, so we have to create value in what they do when they meet. During those meetings with groups, they begin to see what others don’t see. We want them all seeing everything, it’s hard to do, but it starts from the premise that we have people with different eyes looking.
Faculty changes
One area that is going to change the complexion of schools is the increase in IT faculty. Schools include more IT faculty than ever before, and that area is going to continue to change the complexion of the faculty. In the traditional areas, such as English, I think you still will find many traditional educators, but I think it’s moving the other way.
In that IT group, you many find people who are not your traditional academic people. Some of the brightest that we have in IT are young people in their 20s. They don’t dress in a suit and tie, which I think is refreshing, but I think we’re growing so much in that area that it’s changing the nature of the faculty in schools.
Some of the traditionalists are becoming the minority. I know that’s also begging the question with accrediting commissions of whether you really have to have college degrees to teach in this area? Because some of the brightest and the best don’t.
WIIFM
The biggest challenge schools face is keeping employees interested in improvement, keeping alive the WIIFM, or “What’s In It For Me?”
If you want people to be involved in teams and help with retention, people always say, “Well, why?”. In other words, ‘Why should I do this, and what value is to me to pay more attention to these students, to have an intelligent heart, to get into these teams that come up with great ideas? The answer doesn’t appear to be money, but creating the right environment.
The hard part is for the schools to create an ambiance or an environment where people want to do this just of their own volition. That’s the challenge, keeping that type of environment going. The people at the top dictate the appropriate spirit: presidents and directors.
We help by coming back in and doing what we call ‘booster shots,’ keeping the employees in a school active, interested, seeing why they should be doing this and what’s in it for them. It’s challenging because it’s not a quick fix. Rather, improving retention is a job that’s never completed. We call it CQI, Continuous Quality Improvement. You just keep working at it all the time. People let up. They think, ‘I’m working too hard, when is this retention thing going to be solved?’ It never will be totally solved.
Good for the bottom-line
The presidents and administrators set a school’s organizational climate, and I admit this training doesn’t fit with all management styles. There are some presidents who wouldn’t want to do this kind of training because it empowers people too much.
It fits if a school is student-oriented, concerned about retention, and thinks the quality indicator of an institution is the number of students who persist and graduate. A secure leader is also important. If the leadership is ‘my way or the highway, shape up or ship out,’ they run into conflict with this type of empowering style. However, this empowering style absolutely improves retention and that is great for the bottom line.
Some people might think this stuff is touchy-feely, but it’s not. Research shows that in order to foster change of any type, to get synapses in the brain, an electrical chemical process in the brain, there must be emotion involved. This emotion is sometimes mistaken as touchy-feely. People do not change unless there is a synapse in the brain that comes from some form of emotion causing motivation. That motivation can be value or it can be threat, but the value works much better and fosters more results than the threat.