The Chronicle of Higher Education – Glenn Davis and fellow researchers at St. Cloud State University, in Minnesota, figure that improvements in retention begin with identifying at-risk students. They have developed a brief survey that detects first-year students who are at risk for attrition because of a low sense of belonging despite strong grades. At Rutgers University, some student-work supervisors are being trained to use their professional relationships with student employees to connect them more securely with the campus. While student success is always of the highest value, shrinking pools of prospective students make retention improvements important to institutional sustainability.
