Experiment Raises Retention Rate

Business gurus know there’s more to success than just attracting new customers. You also need to pay attention to your current customers’ needs to keep them with you. In the last few years the school has taken this advice to heart, focusing on nurturing students to be the best they can be. One result is an innovative project led by professors Alan Cohen, Donald Lifton, and Warren Schlesinger. These professors have created a "learning community" by requiring the same group of first-year students to take two classes together.

Learning communities are a pedagogical concept; they help students develop personal connections and practice techniques for learning together. The idea is gaining popularity at many colleges and universities. "Research shows that learning communities have a robust effect on student retention," says Dean Robert Ullrich. "which is why we adopted the approach." This experimental first-year learning community has led to significant improvement in the School of Business retention rate. And the three professors’ study of the experiment has produced publishable results.

Professor Cohen, whom Lifton calls "the champion of concerns about the first-year experience," got the project started. He was worried that entering students sometimes had a difficult transition into college. "Some students are not immediately ready for the rigors of college life," he explains. "Our goal is to find the students at risk, identify them early, and try to help."

All first-year business students in fall 2000 were enrolled in World of Business, an introductory course. They were also required to take a one-credit first-year seminar, which emphasizes study skills and is intended to get them on the right track for the next four years of college study. Two different types of first-year seminar were offered. The first used a curriculum teaching study skills for all courses throughout the College. The second, while following the same general syllabus, was tailored especially to match coursework in World of Business. Students were assigned randomly to sections: 45 percent of freshmen wound up in sections linked to World of Business, and the remaining 55 percent were assigned to unlinked sections.

Status of First-Year Students One Year after Initial Enrollment

The study shows that retention rates improved significantly for students who attended the linked classes. Of the 173 students who participated in the study, 153 returned to Ithaca College in their sophomore year (18 of them returned in a different major --- 4 from the linked sections, 14 from the unlinked). Of the 20 students who dropped out, 14 were from the unlinked classes, 6 from the linked. The researchers believe that these numbers are good evidence that the linkage between classes particularly helps students who are at risk of not returning to IC. "And," says Lifton, "not only does it look like linkage helps these kids stay on campus, it also looks like it disproportionately helps them stay in the School of Business."

The researchers are also predicting that four-year retention rates, which have hovered around 68 percent for the last decade, will improve. Of business school students entering in fall 1999, 74 percent returned to the College as sophomores. In contrast, 88 percent of business school students who entered in fall 2000 returned as sophomores. "If this retention rate continues," says Cohen, "we could be looking at an ultimate retention percentage by senior year in the School of Business in the high 70s."

The study had an unexpected finding: that the linked learning community seems to have helped students earn better grades in all their classes. Students in the linked sections earned better grades on exams in Lifton’s World of Business class, averaging B- for overall class grade, than did students in the unlinked sections, who averaged C. Overall semester GPAs were also higher for students in the linked sections, who averaged B, while students in the unlinked sections averaged B-. "And here’s the biggest kicker," says Cohen. "Of the 21 students placed on academic probation for failing to meet a 2.0 GPA, 18 came from the unlinked sections." And again, he reports, the coaching provided in the linked sections seemed to especially help the students who were at most risk.

The creation of the learning community also produced a nonquantifiable, but equally important result --- the students enjoyed it. "Before I came to college, I expected classes to be big and scary," says business major Christi Montgomery ’04. "But 12 of us first-year students were in the same courses. We all got pretty close and studied together." Montgomery enjoyed the coursework, as well. "In the first-year seminar class," she says, "we kept a journal, did exercises, and played games. Professor Cohen is funny. He’s a good motivator!"

Lifton, Cohen, and Schlesinger hope to expand their study in three ways. They are writing up the results of this initial stage and plan on publishing the article in a journal of pedagogy. They will continue to follow this class of business students throughout their time at Ithaca College, studying GPAs and retention rates. And this past fall they created another first-year seminar link, this one to a four-credit-hour professional writing course; they look forward to sharing the results of the expanded experiment soon.

"I find two things about this work to be particularly exciting," says Dean Ullrich. "First, these professors are involved in managing the educational process. We teach management, and I am delighted that we practice it in our own shop. Second, they are practicing action research, which blends action with assessment. It is at the heart of continuous quality improvement."