Complete College America, a nonprofit organization based out of Washington, D.C., and the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education have entered into a partnership to improve retention rates among the state’s universities, including at UCO.
One of the broad goals? 20,400 graduations in 12 years, set by Oklahoma State Regents chairman Glen Johnson when the partnership was announced last year. After a year of planning, the program is getting under way, with universities across the state improving or updating their remedial classes as a first step towards raising retention rates.
“Complete College America focuses on two sections,” Dr. Myron Pope, Vice President for Enrollment Management at UCO, said. “It focuses on making sure that students are prepared and ready to go off to college, and we’re doing everything we can to recruit them, and the second part of that is when students arrive at college, specifically UCO, we try to do as much as possible to help them to be successful.”
Pope said that the university has done a good deal of community outreach recently, trying to establish “pipelines” to both high schools and local businesses and individuals but that the goal was to increase that outreach.
“I feel like one of the things we’ve got to do long-term is invest a little bit more in terms of creating a pipeline,” he said. “Barry Lofton over in our TRIO programs, with the Upward Bound program, they’re going out to the high schools and helping those students who are from a variety of backgrounds.”
Oklahoma has also changed its graduation requirements for high school students, which has opened the door for universities to work with secondary schools to sync curricula. This would help universities be able to place incoming students where they need to be, according to Pope.
“Once students arrive here at UCO, we try to make sure that we place them in the right courses initially. That process is one that, if flawed, if a student starts off at the wrong level, their likelihood of success is not going to be very high,” he said.
One issue UCO and other universities face, however, is “squirelling,” or the act of moving around from university to university within a given system for whatever reason. According to Pope, UCO’s Institutional Research Office is looking at a new model on retention and student success taken from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, that seeks to address that issue, but it is not the federal standard.
“Typically when you look at retention and graduation numbers, essentially what happens is, everyone’s put into this box. The federal government has a standard that says, for all students coming in as first-time, full-time freshmen, this coming Fall, we’re supposed to track those students as a cohort,” Pope said. “And essentially, if that student returns their second fall, that determines your retention rate. If that student graduates in six years’ time, that determines your graduation rate.”
According to Pope, the average student at UCO has three transcripts.
“In some cases, students may graduate with UCO; in other cases, they may graduate from another institution. If they graduate from another institution, even though they graduated in six years, we don’t get credit for it,” he said. And neither do the other schools the graduate attends.
“In any given year, 50 percent of our new students are transfers,” Pope said. “And even if those transfers are successful, they don’t count toward our graduation rate. And we’re penalized for that.”
Pope said the Anchorage model looks at student success rates based on students who are squirelling, which lets the university focus on who’s leaving and why.
In the midst of more public discussion on student debt, waning public support for higher education and steadily increasing tuition rates, this shift in focus may be a step in the right direction.