Team works to improve retention rate

At Norwich there is the basketball team, hockey team, soccer team, volleyball team and lacrosse team. There is another team on campus that does not fit in the same category.

This team, consisting of three staff members, focuses on the student experience at Norwich. It does not compete in games, tournaments or championships. They are competing against low retention rates.   

According to Shelby Wallace, director of student retention, Norwich has created a retention team that focuses on student life, academic and operational initiatives to help keep students at the university.

"When you look at any institution, you want to make sure that you are providing the type of education and the type of experience that students want," said Tony Mariano, director of athletics. "One of the things we saw at Norwich over a long period of time is that our retention rate wasn't very good."

The team's roster consists of Wallace, Mariano and Peg Meyer, director of the Academic Achievement Center.

"The university created a committee a couple of years ago to look at retention," Mariano said. "They came out with a report that gave a lot of suggestions about retention."

The report was passed down from the president to the committee, and a decision was made to create committees and a smaller focus group.

"We have 15 committees around the university whose focus is on all different areas," Wallace said. "We have committees that are focused on advising, committees that are just focused on student activities and clubs."

"The smaller group is what we call the ‘retention team'," Mariano said.

"When I look at retention," Mariano said, "it's being able to provide an environment for students on our campus that will allow then to successfully achieve the goals that they set at the institution.

"If we can do that, I think our students will stay and prosper and be very successful," Mariano said.

"A lot of institutions are focusing on freshman year retention" said Wallace "but we also know that we want to focus on sophomores, juniors, and seniors."

"In the past, we felt that Norwich is different and we are going to have students that will leave for a lot of reasons and that's OK," Mariano said. "But given today's economy and the shrinking number of students that are going to college, we thought it may be time for us to take a good hard look at retention."

"For Norwich, we've been about average for the national average for four-year private institutions in terms of first- and second-year retention which has been right around the 70 to 80 percent mark," Wallace said.

According to Mariano and Wallace, the student experience is the key to retention.
"The initiative really started around the areas of student experience," Wallace said. "And that is what I call a three-spoke wheel."

"A student's education is not just academics, it is not just student life," Wallace said. "We really focus it around a three-spoke wheel of student life, academics and operational."

The operational side of Wallace's "three-spoke wheel" includes processes like registration, working through the billing process, financial aid and making all this possible and easy for students to deal with.

The academic part includes enhancing processes such as advising and classroom instruction, according to Wallace.

For the student life-side, the team is looking at student clubs, activities, athletics and, "we're looking at every measurement," Wallace said.

"People are starting to look at their areas and say, ‘How can I define the experience a bit better for our students? What kind of customer service do I want students to have?'" Wallace said. "I think students are seeing that and acknowledging that."

According to Mariano, there are certain "pockets of individuals" that retain better than others.

"We know that student athletes retain, for example, at a higher rate than non-student athletes," Mariano said.

  Wallace said student involvement in extracurricular activities is a major contributing factor in improving retention on campus. 

"The students who have the highest persistence of staying (and) graduating from Norwich, are those who (take) advantage of the full experience of (the school)."

From an academic standpoint, committing to a major is a common characteristic that keeps retention numbers down.  A student's decision to leave may not have anything to do with grades or classroom performance; instead, it could be because a student is unhappy with his or her major of choice.

It is common for students to change their major two to three times during their college career.

"The university is designed to help students establish what major they want to pursue," said Wallace. A program is available to help students who are in limbo or transition about their majors.

The retention team is working to improve the student experience at Norwich and provide more outreach to those students that need help, according to Wallace.

"When a student needs help," Mariano said, "whether it's academic or what have you, they have to be able to turn to somebody to get help. In many times in the past, they didn't know where to go.

"The next thing you know, they've slipped through the cracks and they didn't do well academically and had to leave or decide to leave because it wasn't the type of environment they were anticipating," Mariano said.

The percentage of retention has always differed between Corps and civilian students, both male and female.

"What happens is, the Corps kids usually leave early," said Norwich President Richard Schneider. "They think they want to be in the Corps, then they start doing it, and all of a sudden they decide (they) don't want to do this."

Low retention is expected in the Corps because of the physically and mentally demanding environment, especially for the freshman, which can be exhausting to those who don't know what to expect. 

Some of the former cadets become civilian students, finish off the year, and then depart the university.  There are the few who stay for all four years.

"We usually bring back about 73 percent of both groups (but) by (the time of) graduation, the Corps (graduates) a couple points higher than the civilian students" said Schneider.

The Retention Committee developed a Red Flag Program, designed specifically for rooks that are at risk or showing signs of leaving the university.  A program such as this assures that no student, Corps or civilian, will be left behind.

Schneider also mentions that the issue with retention doesn't always point towards the fact that a rook lacks the confidence to continue, it sometimes points to "bad role modeling by the upperclassmen."

"We work with a group that has developed what we call an early alert system," Mariano said. "When a faculty or staff member sees a student that looks like they have issues, we've initiated a system to help that student and keep them here."

"Some of the immediate things we've done are just simple outreach to our students," Wallace said. "We've identified an ability to take what we have, and take it to a different level."

"It also touches upon the students that are here," Mariano said. "They can help support other students, they can help with some of the initiatives that we are working on."

"It's an entire university-wide issue that we need to deal with and students certainly play a big part," Mariano said.

Since the retention team has been working, it has seen many positive changes according to the team. More students are staying at the school, and even more are coming.

"We've seen a dramatic increase in applications in the past few years," Wallace said. "This past year, the new freshman class we brought in was the largest class possibly in Norwich history."

"The most important thing for Norwich is that (retention) is a university effort," Wallace said. "The ultimate goal is to continue to enhance our students' experience."
Nicole Terry contributed to this story.