In This Issue Current Issue Archives

April 2006

Recruitment & Retention - April 2006 - Full Issue PDF
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Student Blogs in Recruitment
Less than half of colleges are using blogs in marketing to prospective students and their families. But blogs could grow in importance as recruitment cycles lengthen—beginning as early as the seventh or eighth grades.

A Sampling of Student Life Blogs
Here’s a look at the variety of approaches different schools have taken to student life blogs.

Study Undermines Argument Against Race-Sensitive Admissions
The “mismatch” hypothesis—sometimes called the “fit” hypothesis—predicts that race-sensitive admissions harm some minority students by placing them in academic environments that are too rigorous and thwart their chances of graduation. A new study challenges this hypothesis.

Getting a Clearer Picture of Who Graduates, and Why
The attendance patterns of bachelor’s degree–seeking students has changed dramatically, and so should our efforts to track and understand their achievement.

Quick Quotes
Why are bachelor’s degree–seeking students more likely today to attend more than one four-year institution than they were a decade earlier?

How to Recruit Faculty to Learning Communities
Midcareer faculty tend to have professional interests and needs that learning communities can fulfill.

Newswire
Institutions pilot transfer programs for low-income, high-achieving students; Study examines Latino high achievers’ profiles; Report tracks per-student recruiting costs

Resources
Community college student development conference; African American Men in College; Student Development in the First Year; Closing the Expectations Gap; State goals for increasing postsecondary attainment; National recruiting, marketing, and retention conference

Interdisciplinary Program Meets the Needs of Returning Adult Students
Approximately 1,300 of Northern Arizona University’s 16,000 undergraduate students are enrolled in the bachelor of arts in liberal studies program, the university’s largest program. The program’s popularity and success are not due to a strong recruitment effort—there is no formal recruitment—but rather have been achieved by meeting the needs of a growing undergraduate demographic, the returning adult student.