Steven M. Smith, PhD is the Associate Vice-President Academic & Enrolment Management at Saint Mary’s University.
Tom Brophy, M.Ed is the Associate Vice-President of Student Affairs and Services at Saint Mary’s University.
How has the attitude towards student retention changed over the years at Saint Mary’s?
Tom: Well, it certainly has - no doubt about that.
I started at Saint Mary's about four and a half years ago and came from a background in student services. In my prior role, I was an AVP responsible for enrollment management, so I did bring a bit of a renewed emphasis on being data-informed.
I was fortunate to very quickly build a connection with Steven, our then Dean of Science at the time who went on to become our AVP of Academic and Enrollment - so we had in essence, two leadership roles that were very committed to making sure that people were aware of the data and we really started in earnest to bring the Maclean’s national comparative data into focus, pointing to the studies and proclaiming that we did, in fact, have a retention issue. At that point in time, I'm not sure how much people actually were focusing on our retention numbers.
Steven: Back then, people didn’t understand that there was a real issue there - that we had a student success problem. That’s primarily because the students we tended to interact with were the ones that were likely going to be successful. They’re the ones that stick around, the ones that complete their major in 4-5 years. Those aren’t actually the ones you need to worry about.
We had a project where we needed to support our international students because the belief was they were having such a hard time. So we had decided to get to work on that when my colleague asked a fundamental question: “Do we really know that international students are doing any worse than domestic students?
That was the first time anyone had asked that question.
“This reinforced the well accepted statement that it is cheaper to retain students than it is to recruit them.”
So we gathered the data, which has since been validated over the years, that showed our international students were actually doing quite a bit better than our domestic students. That really suggested that we needed to take a different approach to student success.
Tom: That wasn’t unique to Saint Mary’s either, because I've worked at two other institutions and that applied to both of them as well, interestingly enough. To us, that meant that the students we were competing for were becoming harder to find. So, we had to get better at retaining the students we were getting. This reinforced the well accepted statement that it is cheaper to retain students than it is to recruit them.
Steven: We came to understand that we needed a strategic enrollment management plan. We’ve completely combined the academic and co-curricular sides of the house - we don’t just do academic support - we do co-curricular support, mental health support and everything else that all works together to support student success. We’ve been building towards this for 8 years and we only now launched our full strategic enrollment management plan yet - that’s coming out in the next few months. So we’re in a pretty unique position. In my opinion, this is clearly the best approach to take. Break down the silos and work across existing academic and co-curricular boundaries.
“People can be defensive if they think you’re claiming there’s something wrong with what they’re doing. But it's not about saying what is wrong - it’s about enhancing and coordinating existing strategies to maximize impact.”
As you were beginning your efforts to improve retention, did you see any particular challenges forthcoming?
Steven: Well it always seems easier than it is - and it didn’t seem very easy.
I thought the hardest part would be getting faculty and staff onboard because people can be defensive if they think you’re claiming there’s something wrong with what they’re doing. But it's not about saying what is wrong - it is about enhancing and coordinating existing strategies to maximize impact. Also, just getting people to work together - we figured a big challenge would be breaking down silos. We wanted to recognize the different programs we had in place across the institutions, and ask if they were really helping each other or making it more difficult to do things well?
So ultimately, we had to bring everybody together. Now, in an institution of around 1000 faculty and staff members, our strategic enrollment management plan has over 120 people involved. That’s a pretty substantial portion of the university. .
Tom: When you’re starting to take that type of approach at an institution that historically hadn’t, there's going to be some resistance from a change management perspective that you can kind of anticipate.
Another challenge was the fact that when you’re developing clear goals and clear metrics to measure the goals, you really head down a path of increased accountability, which is not something that is part of the culture at many other universities. People were not used to having to be answerable or accountable for their performance in various areas, so that's been some hesitancy for sure.
“If you’re trying to change the way your faculty and staff are doing things, they have to believe it makes a difference. And they have to believe it makes a difference to them. “
When you started working with CRI, was there anything in particular that attracted you to that methodology?
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. It was the concept of predictive analytics when it comes to student success.
I was very interested in those types of systems - I had a curiosity around that already. So when I arrived at Saint Mary's, I continued to look into the types of products that were out there that would allow us to do predictive analytics.
Looking at what we had in place, it clearly became evident to me that we didn’t have a good strategic, intentional approach to collecting the appropriate data upon application or admissions of students into our system.
I did look at a couple of pre-arrival systems from the United States that were very robust systems, but admittedly were designed for the American landscape and were also extremely expensive and therefore, were prohibitive.
At some point I found CRI’s offering through one of the conferences I had attended. Some of the work they were doing with Concordia put it on my radar and because I already had my antenna up for this type of a system, a Canadian-based company with a good track record with Canadian-based universities immediately made CRI very interesting.
Steven: I’m a data geek - a psychologist by training. Looking at hard data is a natural approach I take to everything. If you can’t measure it - it doesn’t really happen. I think that’s very important, particularly on the academic side of things. If you’re trying to change the way your faculty and staff are doing things, they have to believe it makes a difference. And they have to believe it makes a difference to them.
Did you have any observations about the research process itself?
Tom: It was interesting to see how CRI took the information and the research that had been developed over the years in student success and transferred it into a survey type of format and made it something that was a consumable product. That was very much of interest because my master's of education research background is actually in student success.
Another area of interest was actually showing the measurable impact of the pre-arrival survey and student success which I think CRI has done a pretty good job of doing. Of course, we're still in the early stages of building that foundation of data from Saint Mary’s perspective.
Did you find it easy to take follow-up action and engage with the students identified as being a higher risk of attrition? What was the reaction of the student services team to the new information?
Steven: This has been our biggest struggle with this whole process - because we tried to roll it out fairly quickly - there's a lot of people who felt we didn't include them. So some staff who might have done a lot of the kind of resiliency training or academic preparedness training, didn't feel engaged. Again working across all those different silos is a challenge and people can become dubious if they don't feel they've been adequately consulted. And it is up to the leaders of the SEM plan to make sure that all faculty and staff have the opportunity to get involved.
Tom: The other response to the pre-arrival survey was the realization we had two or three gap areas where we just did not have adequate university resources, human resources, committed to actually allow us to respond to some of the very obvious gap areas that our new students encounter in coming to Saint Mary’s. This empowered us to build a case for additional funding and human resources.
What advice would you give a school that was starting where you did?
Steven: Step one: Get the data. Figure out where you really are. Understand if there’s buy-in across the university, because what you need before you get anything done is that leadership buy-in. Once you engage the Board and senior university leadership on focusing on first-year experience, then you can naturally extend that momentum into everything else. You can figure out what kind of first-year programs you want to establish, what kind of initiatives you want to follow up with, until you get to the point where it’s not just about first-years anymore.
Tom: Give yourself at least a semester or two of lead time to kind of get your head around what you’re trying to do and how to do it. Another important thing is consultation with related stakeholders, we kind of rushed that and therefore some stakeholders felt they weren’t consulted.
Last question: would you recommend CRi to other schools looking to reduce attrition among entering students?
Tom: Yes, I do think there is still work to be done to improve the CRI element of supporting the institutions a little more on this and hope to have further dialogue on this post Sept.
Steven: Yes. We have found it very useful to get a sense of students as they are arriving at university. It is one piece of the puzzle we need as part of a fullsome approach to predictive analytics.