Emily Fjeldsted is the Director of Student Recruitment at Montreal’s Concordia University.
What role do you see for retention in the university ecosystem?
That retention goes hand-in-hand with some of their more popular efforts like recruitment. Like the also important conversion of the students who apply to the students who actually register and then kind of more my domain of the big rituals of orientation or trying to get the students prepared for their first year. So then retention just kind of, to me, follows in with that sequence. So they all work together and I think retention maybe comes in a bit later after all these kinds of common milestones have been accomplished for an incoming year, let's say.
And so I think the tricky part is just to keep at it for the retention cycle to work in your favor for the next year. Like that is the trickiest part about retention – you don't see it immediately.
In your experience has retention been an important part of most universities’ operations, and if not, why do you think that is?
I think all universities have retention on the radar, you hear it talked about all the time. I’ve worked for two universities but in both cases it's like the University knows it's important but the complicated part is that it's hard to figure out who is going to coordinate those retention efforts. In both of the institutions I've worked for there hasn't been a retention office.
It’s been distributed amongst many other departments, so that’s what makes retention a hard one to master. I think most universities see it as important but it's hard to carry through on. You know, is it the faculties or the academic departments’ responsibility? Is it recruitment's responsibility? Is it a student services responsibility? Is it all of our responsibilities?
What we've discovered in the last two years at Concordia is that the best approach is to work together. You need equal buy-in from the partners who have decided okay, this is important to us.
In addition to buy-in from all of them, we also need commitment to continue moving forward even though sometimes it's hard because you’ve all got lots of other stuff on your plate. For those of us who came together on retention, we all get along and have been able to get things done rather smoothly, so I think that's definitely helped get our retention efforts up and running.
For us, the hardest part is to get the process set up once we have an idea of what our steps are and when the baton is handed from one unit to the next or you know, what is our procedure - then it was easier. It was really finding out what that procedure was going to be when everybody's part came into play, you know, and then carrying it out isn't that bad. But getting it set up just a real hard, you know, it's the roadblock.
In your experience, who takes point on those sorts of efforts?
In our situation, Matt, our director of recruitment, had been in touch with CRi about the readiness survey and really believed that this could help. And so, I think he was really one of the champions to get this initiative off the ground. He then reached out to a few colleagues including myself who he knew would benefit from it or also be able to like contribute to it.
So there was a core three of us who really worked on carrying it forward but whether there was a huge initiative put on him to explore it or whether he took that, I'm not quite sure.
Can you talk about the impact or benefits of retention from an institutional perspective, a student service perspective and an individual student perspective?
I think that the obvious and number one impact and benefit on the institutional level is that retaining students increases enrolment numbers.here's also the benefit in knowing that the students who are staying are succeeding.
There's like that kind of fine balance where you don't want to just keep students enrolled if they're not doing well for themselves, so I think the retention efforts don't just look at making sure students stay at all costs but make future students stay because it makes sense for them.
So I do see the question in terms of it being like there's an institutional benefit but there's also benefit to the students.
In your experience do at risk students share any commonalities or are they as random on the surface as the entire student body appears to be?
Of course each student’s case is unique like there's no denying that. Everybody deals with different realities, but for sure there are certain like recurring difficulties that we see in at risk students so one of the main ones, is of course financial instability or financial struggle. There's the pure kind of financial responsibility of just you know, being able to live while also going to university so having enough money to do the basic things - never mind paying for your tuition in your books and all your supplies.
I mean that adds an incredible amount of stress to students. Those who are also caregivers, I mean, it's a huge response ability too. So, we see that financial instability definitely influences at risk students quite frequently. Things that might also play into that are students living on their own for the first time. So this could be in the case of international students - which may be as one of the most common situations - but it could also just be Canadian students who have moved to their city of their university and are really trying things out for the first time so they've never had to make their own meals and they've never had to do their own laundry and you know organize their own bills and you know, keep track of all of the responsibilities that come with being on your own and we definitely see that a lot.
We have a first-year support counselor on our team and we see that as a common issue that surges when students are at risk is they're just not able to manage regular life on their own, nevermind also adding the responsibilities that come with university. Something that goes hand in hand is, you know students who are often away from families or friends for the first time so there's a there's kind of like an isolation component that that plays in to you know, creating an at-risk scenario as well. When you can't ask family or friends for direct help or you're living virtually through no face time with your family or anything like that, we see that come up often as a key kind of commonality.
It comes up a lot with more undergraduate but graduate students as well. It's common. For international students and students who have moved to Montreal from away it’s a real challenge and then there's also the group of students who are returning to school after having been away for a significant period of time, that also presents kind of a common at risk scenario.
I say that that one isn't quite as present as the financial or the living on your own for the first time but that one that we face rather often. Then there's also the needing to work and study at the same time, getting that balance right is really tricky. I’m a strong believer in the fact that it is possible to study and work at the same time, you just have to have the right balance and I think that sometimes if money is a really big issue then you know, you say to yourself “I have to work more” and then studying will just come second or if you're providing for other people in your family then working a full-time job plus study time - that starts to get impossible to manage. There's a balance in working and studying that has to be struck in order to succeed.
What types of intervention measures have you personally seen to be effective and why do you think those are effective?
In our situations, that kind of system that we set up using our welcome crew mentors - essentially they're like peer mentors who are also undergraduate and graduate students who have been trained extensively on supporting first-year students and so we use them to outreach to students at risk. So far we've done it by phone and by phone seems to be working nicely because the students who need to talk have the opportunity to talk and they don't have to worry about finding the number or calling somebody or, you know writing an email trying to formulate what they want to say, so we had a campaign where we would be reaching out with a very specific script to at-risk students to ensure that they felt comfortable so that would be kind of our first gauge so that gave the student an opportunity to speak with somebody who's like on the same level as them so another student often, you know, same same level same faculty as them and they could just chat.
The mentor would be kind of just gently talking about what maybe works for them and that this particular student might be able to explore as a solution, but also what they were doing is they were providing key referrals if needed (and if the student wants). One of the key referrals was to financial aid and awards. So they would talk about what financial aid could do for them and if the students felt comfortable, the referral would happen directly to financial aid and financial aid would contact them immediately. So there wouldn't be a long waiting period where the student would be asking themselves like “Oh what's going on?”
As quickly as possible, financial would reach out to them and then from there they take the approach based on whatever the students were presenting as their problems. And the other referral that was often made was to our first year support counselor that I mentioned earlier.
Right.
So she would reach out and follow up with the student as soon as possible and sometimes it would be like immediately. So that the student could come in and really talk a little bit more about the heavier issues and our counselor isn't a like, it doesn't do psychotherapy, so it doesn't treat depression or treat anxiety, but at least give the student a little bit of guidance or listening ear and provide techniques to get through this particularly rough patch and if the counselor notices that it's a recurring problem or something that maybe has been diagnosed or needs to be diagnosed, then there's a handoff that happens to our counseling and psychology services team.
So one of the key things is really the handoff has to be seamless because as soon as the student gets dropped, that just adds to the risk, you know, so it's like if they were told somebody would follow up and then that person doesn't follow up then they're probably not going to reach out to that person themselves because that's just one step too much.
So the seamless handoff is really important in our kind of process and our service that we're providing. And another thing - this one is more on speculation because I don't think we have the results on this yet, but we have a university skills for success course.
We refer to it as the UNSF course. And it had originally been built for students who went into failed standing and then were coming back after failed standing. So by default, that would be students who had at least done one year of university and that had to take a break and then come back.
But this past year the course was open to students just if they were interested. So that is something I think that we're exploring as well in terms of when students are identified as at risk. Is there a way for us to encourage them to take the university skills for success courses before they end up in the failed standing scenario.
So can you talk about the impact of an intervention with an at-risk student that occurred at a critical point?
Overall, I find it hard to intervene effectively with at-risk students before the beginning of the term. My general observation is that when we try to reach out to students who would be identified as at risk before classes have started we don't really get much uptake on this service provided that we're offering.
It's really once the university term has begun and it has to be really soon after it’s begun - so maybe one or two weeks the students have understood what their classes are asking of them and have realized already that maybe they’re having a hard time keeping up with the work or the reading and then when they are targeted that's when we get the best response.
So it's like they have to have had a little taste of the reality of university to understand the full benefit of taking that offer, that hand up that's been reached out to them. I mean that being said, figuring out who is at risk beforehand is extremely beneficial - to be proactive on that end.
So, you know, that's why we want to get the timing right on when we do the readiness survey and all of that. So we have the information so that we're ready to reach out right away once the first term starts. But it's really like it's a scenario where the student has to have a little taste of what they're in for and then they realize okay, no I do need the help. And when the help is offered - perfect, they'll take it.
An example that I have is one particular student - the student ended up in my office in a very bad situation. He had already been on failed standing and he was an international student so his visa was at play here and he was just really in a bad kind of academic situation where he needed to stay in order to stay he had to really pick up his game and when I told him about the just like initiative that my office was working on because we were we were discussing he was kind of, you know, feeling upset with how maybe he got dropped, let's say, by the university and i was talking about this initiative about the readiness survey and then how we could reach out and help proactively and he said “you know I would have REALLY needed to take that survey”.
Had somebody really told him “Do it this will help you” - he realized like after the fact how important it would have been for him to do it right away and so it's kind of like in hindsight he's like “oh I really would have benefited from that for somebody to tell me like okay, yes seems all great right now you're excited for it to start but once I started the courses and I started to feel the the panic of how I wasn't doing. I didn't know where to go. I didn't know what to do to start. So had somebody called me or contacted me, you know, it would have been the right moment for me to take that offer of help.” .
Do you have any ideas of how retention efforts need to change to help institutions improve retention for these students that are basically stuck at home and will most likely be taking their next semester online?
I think that one of the main changes is that retention is going to need to be a priority.
It's a hard one because we're not just going to be trying to retain the at-risk students. We are going to be trying to retain all of the students who are used to University one way - who are now doing University in a completely different way. I mean for students who are used to taking online courses, for them - It's not going to be a big deal. Or less of a big deal because they're used to to doing the virtual learning but even for them, support has been available in person.
But if the fall semester goes completely online, I think we’ll see a lot of students that just go “ Well, I'll just take a break from this and come back when things go back to normal.”
That in itself is a risk, taking a break is a risk.
So it I think it needs to be part of the university's strategies to build into their campaigns out to students about the importance of sticking through university even despite the changes.
That’s just in general but for at-risk students, it's going to be extremely important that we provide readily available assistance for them, identifying who the at-risk students are and then having a system in place to ensure that we're reaching them.
The good news for us is that our system for identifying at-risk students is done NOT in person so we're able to carry that through almost like very similarly to how we would have done in a regular like on-campus situation.
But so how would we improve the retention efforts in this situation?
I know that communication campaigns are gonna be really important. To reinforce the value of maintaining even a part time schedule, though a full time is even better, maintaining it throughout the difficult period. This will build resilience and I’m sure there's going to be lots of narratives that come out of this surrounding that.
I know that our communications team at Concordia has already thinking ahead to to how to build a campaign that with that would be relevant and and reach the students so I'm excited to be like to participate in that too and I know that on the recruitment side, they’re going to be working on something similar for their new incoming students - how to convince the students to continue with their start date of September if even if the semester is online. A lot of it is gonna have to do with communication to the students.