Retention efforts paying off at Iowa universities

University of Iowa officials hope free tuition is a carrot that entices more students to stick around and take classes in coming summers, to help keep them on the road to timely graduation.

The UI's Summer Hawk Tuition Grant for up to 12 free credit hours joins other recent initiatives, including expanded free tutoring for students in designated courses and more supplemental instruction outside of class time, aimed at boosting retention and graduation rates at Iowa's three state universities.

And while those rates vary from year-to-year because each year represents a different cohort of students, UI, Iowa State University and University of Northern Iowa officials say they see efforts slowly paying off with gradual improvement in success measures over time.

“The university started going through on intensive self-review of its first-year experience,” said Michael Licari, associate provost for academic affairs at UNI. “Out of that came a number of ideas. A lot of those focus on getting students who are brand-new to campus off to a good start.”

The UI and ISU have seen one-year retention rates rise when comparing 2011 to 2007, and all three universities have seen four-year and six-year graduation rates make up and down but gradual improvement over the past five years.

Keeping students enrolled - and keeping them on track toward timely graduation - has been a renewed area of focus in recent years. ISU last fall launched the Student Experience Enhancement Council, and UNI in 2011-12 set up the Retention Council.

“The idea is to use tools that let us, at least in some cases, decide earlier that somebody might be headed for trouble,” said David Holger, associate provost for academic programs at ISU.

Spotting trouble

All three universities use MAP-Works, a survey-based program that helps schools intervene and provide resources when a student is struggling with personal, financial, social or academic issues. The UI pays about $50,000 per year, for example, for MAP-Works, which produces a “signal” of red, yellow or green for each new student within the first few weeks of the fall semester. Students also see this information about themselves.

At the UI, 99 percent of first-year students took the survey last fall, and 57 percent took the follow-up in the spring, said Michelle Cohenour, director of retention and early intervention.

“We had 7,500 individual comments and we literally read every single one,” she said. “It's a much quicker intervention than in the past.”

UNI links struggling students with a success coach who helps identify resources. They also use peer teaching assistants, additional tutoring and supplemental instruction in key courses. Those efforts boost class grade-point averages but are expensive, which means the university doesn't have the resources to use them for all classes, said Licari, who heads the Retention Council.

A change to placement exams also has helped. UNI officials were seeing “unacceptably high” rates of close to 50 percent of students receiving Ds, Fs or withdrawing from calculus I and math for biological sciences courses, Licari said. After implementing a new placement exam, those rates dropped to around 10 percent to 12 percent, he said.

ISU also is looking at courses with high “DFW” rates, said Beate Schmittmann, liberal arts and sciences dean and  Student Experience Enhancement Council member. The math department several years ago focused on using better placement measures, providing more resources to students and having the best instructors in courses with high DFW rates, Schmittmann said. Now, math classes have DFW rates of 35 percent or lower, a “major improvement,” she said.

Other ISU units are using that model to address high DFW rates in some introductory courses. In fall 2012, five courses with enrollment of at least 100 students had DFW rates of 40 percent or more, and 17 courses with enrollment of at least 100 had DFW rates between 30 percent and 40 percent, Schmittmann said.

“It's really targeting where students seem to be struggling the most,” she said. “The quality of instruction is only one factor; another one is helping students find a course at the right level for their background and having good tutoring and support services available.”

Students who earn Ds, Fs or withdraw from a course often retake the class, which delays academic progress and keeps other students out of that seat.

Another common bump in the road is changing majors. The UI hopes making summer classes more affordable will result in better progress toward graduation, said Beth Ingram, associate provost for undergraduate education.

Free credit hours

The Summer Hawk Tuition Grant is for first-time students who enter this fall or in fall 2014 and are enrolled full time in the fall and spring terms before they take summer classes. The grant covers up to 12 credit hours for resident students; for non-resident students, the grant equals the different between in-state and out-of-state tuition. It could mean several thousand dollars for a student, depending on how many classes they take, Ingram said.

About 5,800 UI undergraduates take summer classes, many of them juniors and seniors, and officials want more students to think about the summer option earlier. And many of the UI's 800 or so summer courses are “underenrolled,” so this is a way for the university to fill that capacity, Ingram said.

“This is really aimed at trying to get students, especially those who have changed majors, to catch up so they can graduate in four years,” she said.

UI student Kate Quigley said free classes likely will entice more students to hit the books in the summer. Quigley, a senior who will graduate next May with a degree in human physiology, is taking a summer class this year for the first time. She decided on the summer session because she switched majors a few times, but didn't want that to extend her schooling.

“I had to take one summer class to make sure I graduated on time, otherwise I would probably have to stay another semester,” the 21-year-old from Kankakee, Ill., said.