Retaining and Sustaining our Students

With the chorus of “Welcome back to campus!” ringing in my ears I am sitting down to consider the current state of CASL. The beginning of the fall semester is always an exciting time here in the college; there are new classes to teach, new colleagues to meet, and new students to welcome into the CASL family. Sadly, however, over the past few years, the number of new students (both traditional and transfer) enrolling in the college has been declining, in some areas very significantly. While the CASL community takes some solace in knowing that this trend is evident in virtually every college of arts and humanities across the country, its impact on our college is significant. This decline poses major challenges for CASL…weak enrollments in many areas across the college, cancelled courses, and constrained finances which have impacted our ability to hire new faculty and staff and to invest in the college’s many strategic priorities.

Accordingly, last year, the college invited one of our faculty members, Ellen Judge-Gonzalez (the Director of our SOAR Program), to examine the college’s efforts around the retention of our students in the hope of generating ideas that will help us to keep the students that we do recruit, convince them to stay here in CASL, and to help move them toward graduation. The results of Ellen’s great work were recently shared with the college at large

CASL White Paper on Retention
https://umich.box.com/s/sb3ntqhs0ejopf2tb6p1q4pn2f7xmdza

CASL Former Student Experience Survey
https://umich.box.com/s/vwe1mvoc6jwup60fl4lvlok4m64xgbw6

and will serve as the basis for a CASL-wide conversation on retention. Holding onto just a small number of these students will have a very positive impact on the college’s bottom line and, even more importantly, on our students’ ability to fulfill their dream of a college degree.

The report is sparking a great deal of buzz in the college and faculty, staff, and CASL alums are all taking up the challenge of thinking about ways that they can (both individually and collectively) make the college a more welcoming and supportive environment for our students. Last evening, for instance, the CASL Alumni Affiliate set up a table in the CASL Building to hand out cookies and other snacks to students as they arrived back on campus. As we all know, even the smallest of actions can make a tremendous difference in making a student feel both welcome and supported and that such feelings go a long way toward encouraging a student to continue on with their studies here at the university.

Over the course of the 2019-2020 academic year I will be highlighting the importance of retention work to our faculty, staff, and alumni and the college will be launching new initiatives designed to enhance our retention and four-year graduation rates. I look forward to reporting out on our new initiatives and on the results of these efforts and invite you to share ideas that you might have!