December 2005

Recruitment & Retention - December 2005 - Full Issue
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Initiative Focuses on Data-Driven Retention Strategies
“Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count” is a national initiative to help more community college students—particularly students of color and low-income students—reach their academic goals. What makes it different from other projects for traditionally underserved students is its large scope and data-driven nature.

Admission Podcasts Tackle What Students Really Want to Know
The admissions website of a small rural university recently received nearly 1,000 unique visitors in just two weeks. What drove them there was the school’s new admissions podcasts.

Do Campuses Offer Choice at Diversity’s Expense? One Anthropologist’s View
By catering too much to students’ (and their families’) demands for choice in housing, majors, and cocurricular experiences, higher education might be hamstringing efforts to create community and diversity, says the author of a recently published book on undergraduate culture.

Survey Finds Unexpected Relationship between Engagement and Retention
The more engaged students are with their campuses, the more likely they are to succeed—at least that’s the common thinking in student retention. But this relationship doesn’t appear to apply to community college students at high risk of dropping out, according to the results of a newly released survey.

Students ‘Swirl’ Their Way to Four-Year Degrees
It’s known that many baccalaureate students attend community colleges before transferring to four-year campuses. Now the 2005 results of the National Survey of Student Engagement suggest that these students take classes via two-year campuses even during and after their enrollment at four-year institutions.

Newswire
National Initiative Focuses on Low-Skilled Adults; Student Debt and Default

Distance Education Retention: The SIEME Model
It’s tempting for a campus, once it has gathered attrition data, to jump straight into implementing a retention program. But a distance educator and assistant professor of instructional and performance technology says that campuses need to take a few intermediate steps.