Moving Into Town—and Moving On by Cliff Adelman should be required reading for anyone interested in student success and retention. Even though it focused on traditional-aged community college students, the methodology and principles apply in multiple settings.
Using a metaphor from Clark Kerr to describe the experiences of four-year students as a town or village, Adelman constructs event portraits using logistic regression. In the town, there are homeowners, tenants, and visitors.
ISU Student Success Portraits
Homeowners
ISU homeowners maintain academic momentum towards a degree and are highly engaged in personal interactions and collaborations. Although academically successful for the most part, many homeowners are successful despite lower GPAs. However, ISU homeowners may be more engaged in specific rooms in the house, not the entire house itself.
Homeowners tend to engage in specific rooms.
Tenants
ISU tenants also maintain academic momentum and invest time in their experience. A difference is tenants are over-extended. College costs are more of an issue. They are more likely to hold an off-campus job. Or several. They’re more likely to have dependent care obligations. And so on.
At the end of the day, many tenants leave ISU because they run out of time and money.
Visitors
Visitors fail to do two things. First, they fail to maintain academic momentum. Second, they fail to engage in the college experience and belong. GPA and academic performance are signals, not outcomes. Visitors can’t find a room for them and wander around until they eventually leave. There’s nowhere else for them to go.
Collaboration & evaluation is a solution
Unit level student success initiates are inevitable. GPA, retention, and other indicators will communicate what happened. But not why or how. Planning and monitoring are often confused with evaluation. Another issue is they tend to be focused on the student, not the program or intervention.
It’s more a matter of designing intentional institutional interventions around retention, evaluating them, and sharing evaluation results about the program and the student.
However, if unit-level or institution-level programs aren’t evaluated or assessed for effectiveness, there’s no way to know if they are successful. Even for successful unit-level programs, there’s nothing to learn if nothing is shared. That’s a significant waste of time and resources. Those resources could be better spent on effective programming.
