Giving Compass' Take:

• Civitas Learning, a software company that helps colleges track student success, found that academic support services for students can help increase retention.

• How can universities and education donors use this research to best help students in the future?

• Learn about how some colleges are boosting college student retention through faculty improvement. 

What keeps college students coming back for more? A new report on the effects college programs have on student retention attempts to answer that question.

Academic advising meetings, Greek life, supplemental instruction, scholarships and tutoring are the programs that correlate most with improved student retention rates, according to a study of nearly 1,000 initiatives at more than 55 colleges and universities conducted by Civitas Learning, which sells software that uses predictive modeling to help colleges to track and support student success.

“In the first few years, non-academic supports tend to be really important and have more impact. After the fourth or fifth term, academic supports tend to kick in,” says Mark Milliron, chief learning officer and co-founder of Civitas Learning.

Sometimes called student success or persistence, retention rates of students who return from term to term or year to year is tricky for college leaders to predict and influence. Many institutions have room for improvement.

For its new report, Civitas dug into the data it helps colleges collect on students’ daily activities to figure out which programs most correlate with better retention from year to year. To do this, it compared students who participated in particular programs with a control group of non-participating students whose characteristics matched closely.

Overall, the programs associated with the highest percentage point increase in student retention over the control group were:

  • Advisor meetings: 5.80 percentage point increase
  • Greek life: 3.79 percentage point increase
  • Supplemental instruction: 3.43 percentage point increase
  • Scholarships: 3.24 percentage point increase
  • Tutoring: 3.02 percentage point increase

This means, for example, that students who participated in advisor meetings returned to campus the following term at a rate of 5.8 percentage points higher than would be expected had they not gone to those meetings.

Read the full article about retaining college students by Rebecca Koenig at EdSurge.