Last fall, students were psyched to be starting school at Coppin State University in Baltimore.
But if history is any guide, 40 percent of them will disappear before next year — victims of this school's low retention rate.
This is the time of year when students are wondering whether they will get accepted to the college of their choice. But many colleges and universities are asking themselves another question: How can we hold onto students once they're enrolled?
But schools are now trying to keep students coming back with a new twist on a familiar tool — social networking.
A School-Based Facebook
Peer support means a ready network of friends. Only students can gain entry to these sites, and they're invited in the moment they are accepted to a school. The feel is supposed to be small and intimate, unlike schools' fan sites on Facebook, which are open to everyone and don't inspire much networking.
Merging Social And Academic Lives
School clubs can also use this technology to recruit and discuss campus issues. The sites are there for students, not for administrators.
Schools pay what they say is a nominal fee for Inigral to build the site. Colleges and universities hope they will get paid back through greater student engagement and higher retention rates. Ultimately, that saves schools money because they don't have to replace all of those dropouts.
Hard To Measure The Impact
It will be tough to show whether these efforts played any direct role in students' decision to stay or go — that's a subject for future research. And, of course, many students are out of reach for this and other approaches.
"That's something that they have to be proactive about," she says. "So, the Facebook app can be there. But unless you're being proactive and you want to go out and look for things like that — it's really on the student."
Source: NPR.org
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