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Retention, Persistence, And Writing Programs
By Todd Ruecker, Dawn Shepherd, Heidi Estrem, Beth Brunk-Chavez University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-602-1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Retention, Persistence, and Writing: Expanding the Conversation
Todd Ruecker, Dawn Shepherd, Heidi Estrem, and Beth Brunk-Chavez
"Colleges are Failing in Graduation Rates." "It's Bonus Time for Arizona University Presidents." "Keep Students, Earn More." These headlines have something in common: higher education's increased concern over student retention and graduation in recent years, a concern that has impacted colleges and universities in ways we could not have predicted a decade ago. For example, the majority of states now have funding formulas in place that weigh retention and graduation rates in determining funding allotments ("Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education" 2015). Perhaps not too surprising, university president compensation is now often partially based on reaching and surpassing retention and matriculation benchmarks. And in an interesting and perhaps somewhat predictable move, at least one institution, Coastal Carolina University, has implemented a new policy that directly links faculty salary compression raises to improved student retention rates (Mulhere 2015). The logic goes that with more students staying around to finish their educations, postsecondary institutions can maintain their enrollment and share a portion of the tuition dollars that go along with them. These are three examples, but one would be hard pressed to find a single state, even a single institution, that isn't "gravely concerned" about retention and graduation rates and is in the process of developing a range of strategic plans, action plans, programs, initiatives, and metrics to keep students enrolled and graduating in a timely manner. We wonder, however, how involved academic programs and their faculty are — or should be — in these conversations?
As teachers and scholars interested in improving student success at our institutions, this increased attention to retention and persistence is welcomed. As teachers of writing in postsecondary institutions, the four of us have been increasingly concerned about students in our classes who show up for a day, a week, or even a few months, and then disappear, sometimes because of unexpected family obligations or simply because they fall behind in the coursework due to an inflexible or overwhelming work schedule. We have explored how to work with students as individuals while thinking of ways to improve success rates across our writing programs. We are not alone. A search through the Writing Program Administrator's listserv (WPA-L) archives shows retention to be an ongoing interest of the composition community, a community who tends to teach small classes and has the opportunity to get to know the students who disappear. However, with the exception of work by Beth Brunk-Chavez and Elaine Fredericksen (Brunk-Chavez and Fredericksen 2008), Pegeen Reichert Powell (2009, 2014), and Todd Ruecker (2015), and some scholarship in basic writing (e.g., Baker and Jolly 1999; Glau 2007; Hagedorn 2012; McCurrie 2009; Peele 2010; Seidman 2012; Webb-Sunderhaus 2010), there has been very little published work that explores the ways writing program instructors and administrators can be involved in discussions of student retention and success and affect change not only at the programmatic level but also at the institutional and state levels.
But what is it that we mean when we enter conversations about retention? As you read this collection, you will notice that a variety of terms are used to talk about issues concerning this subject. When we discuss and analyze issues related to the retention of students in higher education, we use words like success, persistence, retention, "drop out vs. stop out," and others. The title of this collection captures two of the most prominent terms, retention and persistence. As editors, we use retention deliberately because it is the key term most often used in the popular media and in our own scholarship. Retention is an institutional approach — and one that perhaps too often loses sight of student learning, interests, and motivations while focusing on the statistical and financial importance of each retained student. Student persistence, though, is in many ways the mirror opposite of retention. This term is most often identified with Vincent Tinto's work; it situates agency differently than does retention and assumes that students have a variety of reasons for continuing in higher education, or not. Using both these terms, as we do in the title, reflects our belief that that continued student learning and engagement in college is a mutual responsibility that involves actions by both institutions and students.
Other terms commonly associated with retention/persistence discourse are involvement, engagement, and integration. Wolf-Wendel, Ward, and Kinzie (2009) define involvement as "responsibility of the individual student," (425) focusing on the energy they put into participating in the classroom and in other aspects of campus life. In contrast, engagement centers on the work that administrators, faculty, and staff do in "creating campus environments that are ripe with opportunities for students to be engaged" (425). Finally, "Integration (or what Tinto might now call 'sense of belonging') involves a reciprocal relationship between the student and the campus ... a student must learn and adopt the norms of the campus culture, but the institution is also transformed by that merger" (425). As we discuss below, institutional considerations of integration have often emphasized the need for the student to change as opposed to the reciprocal obligation for the institution to change. Consequently, it is perhaps unsurprising that Tinto himself has been quoted saying, "I don't use the word integration anymore — haven't used it in decades" (Wolf-Wendel, Ward, and Kinzie 2009, 423).
This collection aims to unsettle and complicate these terms via chapters that explore how retention efforts at the institutional level impact writing programs, how writing programs can impact retention efforts at the institutional level, and how these efforts may or may not affect student persistence.
STUDENT RETENTION AND PERSISTENCE: A BRIEF HISTORY
Discussion around student retention in higher education expanded largely through the work of Vincent Tinto, whose 1975 piece "Dropout from Higher Education" synthesized existing research while introducing a model of student dropout that remained largely unquestioned for a few decades. Basing his theory of dropout on Emile Durkheim's theory of suicide, Tinto argued that students' likelihood of success at college was based on their integration into the system, namely
that the process of dropout from college can be viewed as a longitudinal process of interactions between the individual and the academic and social systems of the college during which a person's experiences in those systems (as measured by his normative and structural integration) continually modify his goal and institutional commitments in ways which lead to persistence and/or to varying forms of dropout. (Tinto 1975, 94)
Tinto explained that academic integration included engagement in classrooms while social relations meant involvement with students and professors outside the classroom as well as engagement in various extracurricular activities. He briefly referenced additional factors that positively correlated with retention, such as coming from a higher socioeconomic class background with educated parents and strong high school achievement, but he did not study extensively how students from different racial or ethnic backgrounds fit into his theory.
In later work on retention, Tinto (1988, 1993, 1997) expanded his theory of student integration into academic settings by drawing on Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage. Tinto's work here helped influence others who have also used Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital, and field to make similar arguments that explore the disconnect between particular communities and academic communities and how this disconnect may promote high dropout rates. According to Tinto, "Individuals who come from families, communities, and schools whose norms and behaviors are very different from those of the communities of the college into which entry is made face especially difficult problems in seeking to achieve competent membership in the new communities" (Tinto 1993, 97). As a result, Tinto popularized the idea of establishing learning communities within institutions by arguing that creating a stronger community in the classroom setting would help institutions promote student persistence (Tinto 1997).
During this time, more scholars became interested in documenting various factors that promote student retention, with Alexander Astin's (1997) large scale study of hundreds of institutions being well known. As part of a growing movement aimed at promoting student engagement in college that included work by George Kuh and others, Astin (1997) explored a variety of factors that helped facilitate this engagement such as living on campus, attending a teaching-oriented institution, and not working off campus. Kuh et al. has been a proponent of the notion that student engagement is synonymous with retention/persistence, noting later that "What students do during college counts more in terms of what they learn and whether they will persist in college than who they are or even where they go to college" (Kuh et al. 2005, 8).
While various scholars explored the efficacy of Tinto's model, some began to critique and refine it, explaining that it failed to fully consider a variety of external factors such as ability to pay the costs associated with college attendance (e.g., Cabrera, Stampen, and Hansen 1990). More problematic, the approach seemed to promote a deficit model of minoritized students by stating that home communities mismatched with an institution were responsible for minoritized students not succeeding at rates like their majority peers (Rendón, Jalomo, and Nora 2000; Yosso 2005). Tierney (2000) and Rendón, Jalomo, and Nora (2000) have pointed out that the traditional models focused on integration placed the burden on minoritized students to conform to the institutions rather than expect "the total transformation of colleges and universities from monocultural to multicultural institutions" (Rendón, Jalomo, and Nora 2000, 138).
Hrabowski (2005) noted that minoritized students' success is affected by "motivational and performance vulnerability in the face of negative stereotypes and low expectations, academic and cultural isolation, peers who are not supportive of academic success, and perceived and actual discrimination" (126). Pointing to stagnant retention rates of Latina and Latino students and noting that institutions are failing to inquire about and adopt the successful retention efforts that Latina/o university students are already practicing, Sóloranzo, Villalpando, and Oseguera (2005) argued that "higher education needs to adopt more explicit race-conscious practices to truly enhance the success and achievement of Latina/o college students" (289). Nonetheless, much of the interest in retention comes from a different perspective and advocates a very different set of changes, changes grounded more in the economic interests of institutions and governments and not the ethical imperative to help students succeed.
Recent Interest in Retention and Persistence: Opportunities and Challenges
In the twenty-first century, federal and state governments have increasingly become interested in student retention, a trend that has emerged largely out of economic interest. One thread of this argument states that the US economy will need larger numbers of college-educated workers to compete in an increasingly globalized knowledge-based economy. Another area concerns the increasing cost of student loan debt along with increasing default rates, stemming in part from students who borrow money or use government grants (e.g., Pell Grants) and ultimately drop out of college without a job to pay for the accrued debts. Finally, states especially are increasingly concerned with reining in the costs of higher education and, in this perspective, one of the most wasteful areas of spending is educating students who never finish school.
It is not entirely clear where this government interest in student retention in higher education begins, but one likely responsible force has been the increasing costs of college tuition alongside the growth of large educational foundations such as Lumina, Achieve, and the Gates Foundation (Donhardt 2007). Lumina, for instance, has a $1.5 billion endowment and spends around $50 million in grants annually, which has helped make it tremendously visible and influential. Its primary focus, or Goal 2025, is aimed at "increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025" (Lumina Foundation 2015). It intends to reach this goal by developing an "outcomes-based approach that focuses on helping to design and build an accessible, responsive and accountable higher education system while fostering a national sense of urgency for action to achieve Goal 2025" (Lumina Foundation 2015). Although focused primarily on increasing achievement in the K–12 system, Achieve has also directed some of its attention to higher education with similar aims to Lumina, asserting that "states must collect, coordinate, and use K–12 and postsecondary data to track and improve the readiness of graduates to succeed in college and the workplace" (Achieve 2015). As researchers interested in promoting student success through student learning outcome development and continual assessment of the work we do, we are on one hand interested in the possibilities that Lumina and Achieve promote. However, we share Adler-Kassner's (2012) concerns that organizations like these risk pushing a reductive, vocational-oriented form of higher education. We have been especially concerned with the rapid increase in high-stakes testing at the K–12 level and the associated push for machine scoring; consequently, increasing usage of words like "accountability" and "data" is troubling and we wonder how long it will be until a K–12-style testing regime comes to higher education. With the introduction of the Collegiate Learning Assessment as a measure of students' learning at college (a test that is partially based on written response but completely machine scored), this future may not be too far off.
A few trends have emerged at the state level that are shaping higher education, trends that were briefly mentioned in the introductory comments. First, presidents at major universities in states such as Arizona and Kentucky are receiving bonus packages for "sharply increasing student-retention rates," among other goals ("It's Bonus Time" 2013). In another area, state legislatures are increasingly pushing performance-based funding for higher education, which ties some amount of allocations toward metrics like student retention and graduation rates. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures ("Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education" 2015), this model is in place in thirty states with several others considering this move. In these states, annual state funding for public colleges and universities is linked to improvements in retention rates, and it's no secret why when in recent decades, many publicly funded state institutions have crossed a critical threshold: student tuition accounts for more revenue than state appropriations. Therefore, institutions are desperate to find ways to keep students in classes. According to a Government Accountability Office's 2014 report, this milestone was reached on a national level in 2012. During the recession of the early 2000s, state funding decreased by 12 percent overall and by 24 percent per individual student ("State Funding Trends" 2014, 7). This reduction then brought a 55 percent parallel rise in student tuition (7). During this same time period, student enrollment increased by 20 percent, a "trend has been driven mostly by 4-year colleges, which experienced faster enrollment increases and steeper declines in median state funding per student than 2-year colleges" (8). As state funding becomes more scarce and at the same time dependent on meeting certain performance metrics, it is important for faculty to become more aware of these policy shifts and join the conversation in order to shape it in a productive way. As the title of Adler-Kassner's (2012) article alluded, these are "challenging times"; however, writing professionals have much to contribute to these conversations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Retention, Persistence, And Writing Programs by Todd Ruecker, Dawn Shepherd, Heidi Estrem, Beth Brunk-Chavez. Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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