KSC retention and graduation rates drop

According to an April 2010 report by the KSC Office of Institutional Research, retention rate of first-year students dropped slightly between Fall 2008 and Fall 2009, but the college remains above the national average of 76.8 percent. The rate of students graduating in four years, however, fell to its lowest in some years, showing more KSC students tend to finish in their fifth or sixth years of college.

For freshman Ryan Bonfiglio, the decision to take a leave of absence came after another opportunity presented itself. Bonfiglio will be embarking on a year-long tour with Youth Encounter, a traveling non-profit group that plays music at churches, nursing homes and prisons across the country. He said he’s heard of other freshmen leaving the college as well.

“It’s mixed between people staying and people leaving,” Bonfiglio said. “I have a few friends who want to do other programs.”

Anne Miller, chair of the Enrollment Management Committee, said the most common reasons students leave the college are financial complications between the student and institution, transferring to another institution, academic trouble, personal situations with the student or shortcomings of a student or institution. The institutional research report offered a potential economic reason for the changes as well.

The 2009 Cooperative Institutional Research Program Survey of the class of 2013 reflects feelings of student hardship. Seventy-one percent of freshmen said they felt they would need to get a job to help pay for college, a 54 percent increase from the Fall 2006 survey.
According to an American College Testing study called “What Works in Student Retention,” many colleges fall short of where they need to be nationally.

“Institutions are far more likely to attribute attrition to student characteristics than they are to attribute attrition to institutional characteristics,” the report stated.

The report listed 13 student characteristics that have the greatest impact, some of which were lack of motivation to succeed, inadequate financial resources, inadequate preparation and poor study skills. However, only two institutional characteristics were reported: amount of financial aid available and the bill itself.

The report stated only 33.1 percent of campuses have established a goal for improved degree completion. In addition, currently BA/BS public institutions have the lowest retention  rate (43 percent) out of all categories including Masters, PhD, private schools and the national average.

On the other end of the spectrum is the dip in graduation rate; a statistic which, in many ways, is reflected in the switch from the Transition General Education Program (TGEP) to the Integrative Studies Program (ISP) in 2007.

Senior Danielle Ledger will be staying at KSC for an extra semester.

Her transition between systems left her a math prerequisite behind some of her peers. As a result, she is required to stay to complete student teaching, an experience not held during the summer. Ledger said a number of seniors in her methods courses were caught up in the same circumstance.

“There’s a good amount of seniors in at least both of them [methods courses],” Ledger said.

Ledger said her extra semester came with a slew of additional costs, including an extra semester’s worth of tuition, housing and meal plan costs and deferment of her plans for graduate school.

“For me, it has benefits because I come out with a Bachelors in Arts and a Bachelors in Sciences,” Ledger said. “However, at the same point, you’re paying more money… I’m just giving them money basically.”

Miller said, although KSC roughly follows the national averages for retention and graduation, there is room for improvement.

“We’d like to be stronger,” Miller said.

To keep rates from decreasing, the enrollment committee pushed for student incentives to achieve.

They developed the Keene Leadership scholarship, which will award those who have helped develop or diversify their communities.

The Honors Program was also a way to attract students who would normally attend KSC only as a steppingstone to another institution.

“Retention can be a body count,” Miller said. “Many of us are interested in a consideration that’s more complex than that.”

Corey Smith can be contacted at csmith@keeneequinox.com