The new part-time liaisons, working 5-10 hours every week, called freshmen who had not yet registered for orientation, along with current students who applied to WITCC but had not registered for classes, students who left school during the previous semester, and those who hadn’t graduated and weren’t registered for any upcoming courses.
College officials said using the computer program and the part-time liaisons helped the school retain about 300 students last year.
All retention alerts are sent to WITCC’s team of liaisons, officials said, but some cases are routed to specialists. Ed Koster, director of information systems at WITCC, said the records of students with personal conduct issues are sent to campus security officials, and resident advisers are assigned to any student with a housing problem that could lead to a dropout.
Koster said the Datatel retention system, accessible by administrators across campus, has sped up the process of finding potential dropouts and forwarding their cases to the proper college department.
“In just two clicks, now everyone on campus has the ability to save a student,” he said.
For major research universities, gaining or losing 100 students would hardly register in campus finances. But for small liberal-arts colleges, bringing in tuition from an extra 100 students can make an impact, or—at the very least—grab decision makers’ attention.
Baldwin-Wallace College, a 3,800-student campus in Cleveland, used the school’s College 101 class—designed to help freshmen acclimate to on-campus life and set educational goals—to boost retention by 15 percent from 2005-08, improving retention by more than 100 students through 2010.
“It’s not a large number of students, but it’s very valuable still,” said John DiGennaro, director of educational technology.
The school used Campus Pack, an online portfolio complete with blogs, wikis, podcasts, and journals made by Learning Objects, a Washington, D.C.-based social software company, as a foundation of the course.
Freshmen enrolled in Baldwin-Wallace’s College 101 class, which students take during their first semester, are required to create “action plans” in the web-based Campus Pack program, DiGennaro said.
New students can lay out ideas for which majors interest them, maintain blogs detailing their everyday campus life, and post academic highlights that could help professors and instructors better understand students’ backgrounds before the start of a semester.
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