Retention: Stage Five of the Seven Stages of SEM
Engage and Persist
—From the desk of Brier Albano, Vice-President, Students and External Relations
When you attend a strategic enrolment management (SEM) conference, one of the first things that hits you is just how many sessions are related to retention and just how many ways there are to retain a student. In the early days of SEM, it felt like marketing and recruitment were all anyone ever talked about. But as our sector’s academic knowledge of enrolment grew, it became clear that recruiting a student is more expensive than retaining one.
Most of the roles we all hold at the college have a direct responsibility for retention. For example, our curriculum design encourages students to feel value in what they are learning, and our teaching and learning tactics support students in how they engage with the material. This is in addition to the things we already know make a difference, like Saturday library hours, healthy campus sessions, access to physical fitness activities, same-day counselling appointments and more. And that’s just a sliver of how many people contribute to retaining students. Retention is embedded in every aspect of every experience a student has on campus, including that time someone supported them in finding a bathroom or a classroom. Thinking of retention as one person or one team’s job fundamentally misunderstands retention in our strategic framework. It’s the component of SEM that we have the most investment in. It’s where we have the most opportunity to make sure Selkirk College hits the mark.
At Selkirk College, retention is about the conditions under which students persist toward their program goal or completion. This includes all efforts made to support and retain learners until they graduate or engage in a planned transfer, but it also includes pathways to take students back if they have to step out for medical or other reasons. A student retained does not have a timeline at a community college. It encompasses all students who are welcomed back to cross a finish line that they feel is important.
Instead of droning on a bit more, I’ll share an article that says a lot of what I would like to say by people who have been engaged in SEM much longer than I have. I have been so fortunate in my 21-year career to have met so many of the leaders in SEM from the USA and Canada. While I hope to get back to scholarship and publication in SEM in the next few years, in the meantime, please enjoy Dr. Alicia Moore’s great summary of the variety in retention work.
Stay tuned next week for our second-last blog on our SEM stages: Graduation.
Read the previous blogs: