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Five Year Retention Plan Table of Contents
Five Year Retention Plan:
Introduction and Goal
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For the last 15 years Syracuse University has been reporting on retention rates and developing recommendations for improving these rates. And improve we have-from a 69% six-year graduation rate for the Fall 1991 cohort to a six-year graduation rate of 74% for the Fall 1994 cohort. But this is not enough. It is critical to our vision "to become the leading student-centered research university" and to our aspiration to be competitive with our select University peer group that we aim much higher.
The goal of the five-year strategic plan is to raise the six-year graduation rate, for undergraduate classes entering Fall 2001 and later, to at least 80% in six years and to at least 85% in ten years.
During the past fifteen years, our retention efforts have focused on new programs and services (see Appendix A for a history of these efforts). We have reduced our class size and added first-year gateway courses. We have tried new orientation programs and academic support services. We have responded to the national literature about the need for social and academic integration. We have done so within our own schools, colleges, and professional units in a general approach to raising the retention rates. We have set targets for individual schools and colleges with the hope of improving the overall rate. Most recently, we have created a benchmark for our efforts by comparing our current status to twelve aspirational peer institutions (see Appendix B). We recognize that it is time to do more.
To reach our goal of 85% graduation rate in the next ten years, we must implement a comprehensive, campus-wide retention strategy that builds partnerships among all of the units and constituencies within our campus community. Our strategy must be to meet the needs of the students that we, as an institution, recruit, admit, and enroll. Our goal can only be reached if students, staff, and faculty share in the strategic responsibility for retaining our students.
This shared responsibility has started with the formulation of this Retention Plan by the Retention Council and the Retention Steering Committee (see Appendix C for the mandate from the Vice Chancellor and Provost). These groups include members from all of the schools and colleges as well as from various academic, student affairs, and auxiliary units (see Appendix A for the membership lists). Conversations over the last year have been focused on reviewing new and existing data, identifying issues, and developing recommendations for action. The following document describes these issues and establishes the action plans these groups recommend. This is a dynamic plan that will be updated as we learn more about students' needs and the success of our interventions.
The issues and recommendations identified by the Retention Council and Steering Committee can be summarized around two concepts - engagement and accountability - which carry forward the theme of shared responsibility. Faculty and staff must hold students accountable for their efforts. Students, faculty, and staff must all be actively engaged in the process of learning inside and outside the classroom, and must encourage each other to focus significant energies on the work of learning. Faculty and staff should review their courses and programs to determine how they are encouraging and facilitating the rigorous and focused response of students.
We must as a university community and within our individual units (e.g., schools, colleges, Student Affairs, Honors, HEOP, Athletic Department, DIPA) be accountable for the students who have been assigned to us. This means being able to understand and explain why any student in our care has left or was asked to leave the University. If we understand why students are leaving, then we can determine appropriate individual student, school/college, or campus-wide interventions. It is the sharing of this knowledge about the reasons students leave and what has worked or not worked in retaining them that is central to the success of this retention effort. We cannot achieve our goal without this shared knowledge.
The strategies outlined in this plan do not imply that we should retain all students. We recognize that for some students, it is best for them to leave Syracuse University. This University may not be a good match for their interests, or they may not be ready to attend college. There will be students who will be dismissed for academic or behavioral reasons, and these cases should be documented. Some students will leave for personal or financial reasons, but we must understand what is behind these choices and determine if there is some intervention that will assist the student in completing a degree at Syracuse University.
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