Emily Fjeldsted is currently the Manager of Services for New Students at Concordia’s Student Success Centre.
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 applicants into registered students. And then the part that is more my domain: the big rituals of orientation or trying to get the students prepared for their first year. To me, retention follows in with that sequence. They all work together and I think retention comes in a little bit later, after all those common milestones have been accomplished for an incoming year, let's say.
In your experience, has retention been an important part of most universities’ operations, and if not, why do you think that is?
I think universities all have retention on their radar and know it’s important but it's hard to figure out who is going to coordinate those retention efforts. None of the institutions I've worked for had a retention office, for example. So it ends up getting distributed among several departments, so that’s what makes retention a hard one to master. 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 this is important.
In addition to buy-in, we also need commitment to continue moving forward even though sometimes it's hard because you’ve all got a lot 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 so he was really one of the champions to get this initiative off the ground. Matt then reached out to some colleagues he knew would benefit or also be able to 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.
You don't want to keep students enrolled if they're not doing well for themselves, so the retention efforts can’t just look at making sure students stay at all costs but rather 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; there's no denying that. Everybody deals with different realities, but there are certain recurring difficulties that we see in at-risk students. One of the main ones is financial instability or financial struggle. There's the pure kind of financial responsibility of being able to live while also going to university: having enough money to do the basic things, never mind paying for your tuition, your books and all of your supplies. That adds an incredible amount of stress to students.
Then there are those who are also caregivers because it’s a huge responsibility on top of your studies. Other things that might also play into that are students living on their own for the first time. So this could be students who moved to another city to go to university and are really trying things out for the first time. But they've never had to make their own meals, do their own laundry, organize their own bills or keep track of all the responsibilities that come with being on your own. 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.
For students who are away from families or friends for the first time, there can also be an isolation component that plays into creating an at-risk scenario, as well. 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.
Another one that we face rather often is when students need to work and study at the same time, because getting that balance right is really tricky. If money is a really big issue and you have to work more, studying will come second. Or if you're providing for other people in your family, working a full-time job plus study time gets 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?
Welcome Crew mentors -- undergraduate and graduate peer mentors who are trained extensively on how to support first-year students and to reach out to students who are at risk. We've done it by phone, which seems to be working nicely, because the students who need to talk get the opportunity to talk and don't have to worry about finding the right number and calling somebody or trying to formulate what they want to say in an email. We used a very specific script to at-risk students to ensure that they felt comfortable. That also gave the student an opportunity to speak with someone on their level: another student, often in the same faculty, and they could just chat.
While the mentor would gently talk about what works for them and what that particular student could explore as a solution, they were also -- if the student wanted or needed them to -- providing key referrals to school resources like Financial Aid and Awards. So after talking about what Financial Aid could do for them, a referral would go directly to Financial Aid and someone from Financial Aid would contact them immediately.
Any other referrals were often made to our First Year Support counselor that I mentioned earlier, who reaches out and follows up with the student as soon as possible. The student can come in and really talk a little bit more about their heavier issues. While that counselor isn’t a psychotherapist, they can give the student some guidance or even just a listening ear and provide techniques to help them get through this particularly rough patch. 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 to our counseling and psychology services team.
The most important thing is that the handoff has to be seamless because as soon as the student gets dropped or if there’s a big delay, it just adds to the risk. If a student is told somebody will follow up but that never happens, that student is probably not going to reach out to that person themself because that's just one step too much.
Another thing we have is a University Skills for Success course. We refer to it as the UNSS course and it was originally built for students who had done at least one year of university but had to take a break due to poor grades, and then come back.
But this past year the course was opened up to any students who were interested. So that is something we're exploring in terms of when students are identified as at-risk: whether there is a way for us to encourage them to take the University Skills for Success courses before they end up in the failed standing scenario.
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, and not just for traditionally at-risk students. We are going to try to retain all of the students who are used to University one way who are now doing University in a completely different way.
With the fall semester being mostly online, I think we’ve seen a lot of students who will decide, “Well, I'll just take a break from this and come back when things go back to normal.”
Except, as we already know, taking a break is a risk factor when it comes to successfully completing your studies.
So I think it needs to be part of the university's strategies to build into their campaigns going out to students about the importance of sticking through university, 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 not done in person, so we're able to carry on doing that very similarly to how we would have done in a regular on-campus situation.
But how would we improve the retention efforts in this situation?
I know that communication campaigns will be really important. To reinforce the value of maintaining even a part-time schedule -- though full time is even better -- throughout the difficult period. This will build resilience and I’m sure there will be lots of narratives that come out of this about just that.
I know that our communications team at Concordia is already thinking ahead on how to build a campaign with that kind of message that would be relevant and reach the students. I'm excited to participate in that and also 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 going to have to do with communication to the students.