Submitted to the college of education and health sciences benedictine university lisle, illinois

John N. Gardner (2009) has claimed that the first year of college has traditionally been "assessment-free" when it should be assessment-rich. The first year encompasses the core of the general education curriculum, and foundational courses are too often taught by part-time or adjunct faculty. Institutions focus on retention, and what to do to barely get by to meet an institutional goal in this area. Institutional reforms on retaining students are good, but Gardner points to first-year reform that is more inclusive and engaging of faculty. Faculty needs to focus on first-year students and how they may better engage them in the classroom. Gardner points to the need to not just focus on institutional programs such as first-year seminars or learning communities, but to also consider all components of the first year. His multi-analyses approach to the first year of college includes gathering information about the new students, policies and practices that involve or affect first-year students, the courses that enroll large numbers of new students, and gathering any existing first-year assessments. Initiatives to inform faculty who their first-year students are, for purposes of early intervention, must be in place. The current practices inventory (CPI) is a comprehensive review of student performance during the first year, in order to provide evidence to support recommendations for improvement. Rather than have the institution focus on retention rates, the goal is for the institution to focus on environmental variables in order to structure the first year, and enhance the learning of the new students (Alexander & Gardner, 2009). Gardner points out that "the first college year is central to the achievement of an institution’s mission and lays the foundation on which undergraduate education is built" (Alexander et al, 2009, p. 22).

Models of Student Persistence

In order to understand the theories behind student persistence, an exploration of the literature on attrition and retention is also required to begin to understand why a student would persist in their studies at any given institution. Though most models are formulated from four-year institutions, the same principles would apply at community colleges, with the exception that community colleges are based on open enrollment and open access for students in their communities, and are not selective in admissions, except for geographical indicators, such as county, municipal, state, or out-of-state residencies. Public community colleges are financed on the basis of acceptance of students in their respective communities. Four-year public institutions also have geographic indicators, but may be selective in admissions. Because most Developmental Education students are not scoring high enough for four-year institutions, they may apply to local community colleges. Many four-year institutions do have remedial programs, but not to the extent that community colleges have in terms of an emphasis on developmental education programs in Mathematics and English. It is important to note the impact of developmental education students on the community college.

McNeely measured retention or persistence from time of enrollment to getting the degree. One of the earliest to study student attrition, McNeely was interested in the reasons why students withdrew from college. His study was launched in the Depression era from 1936-1937, under the Project in Research in Universities of the Office of Education, and financed under the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act under the Work Progress Administration. The federal government, facing massive unemployment, came to assist college graduates and former students in finding work for which they were “best prepared” (Seidman, 2012, p. 64). McNeely gathered data from sixty institutions, examining the extent of attrition, the reasons for attrition, average time to degree completion, the impact of the size of the institution, and other variables such as gender, age at admission and entrance, location of their home, extracurricular activities, and possible work schedules. His work was entitled “College Student Mortality” and considered a forerunner to future work on student attrition (Seidman, 2012).

• 
  Size of the institution
  
• 
  Policies, programs and student activities (extracurricular or academic)
  
• 
  Impact of institutional programs for students
  
• 
  Frequency of interaction between students, faculty and administration (such as Deans or Student Affairs personnel)
  
• 
  Interaction with Peers (the availability of places of gathering for meetings and recreation at the institution)
  
• 
  Residence Halls Program Designs (promotes community but also supplies areas for group meetings of an academic nature such as study groups)
  
• 
  Curriculum Design in which the students are empowered in their own learning
  

1. 
   Encourage contact between students and faculty
   
2. 
   Develop reciprocity and cooperation among students
   
3. 
   Encourage active learning
   
4. 
   Give prompt feedback
   
5. 
   Emphasize time on task
   
6. 
   Communicate high expectations
   
7. 
   Respect diverse talents and ways of learning.
   

Kamens (1971) maintains in his study that large, complex institutions had lower attrition rates than smaller ones. He subscribes to an open systems landscape of institutional organizational behavior. This open landscape means that institutions are able to use their influence and power to assist students in multiple ways to have them persist in their studies. Today, this may include interventions and establishing learning communities, as well as establishing social avenues for the student to engage with peers, faculty, and the institution. However, results from a multi-institutional study (Kamens, 1971) of organizational behavior and student persistence indicated that increased levels of bureaucratic organization within the institutions led to increased levels in the number of dropouts. Kamens indicates that the impersonal nature of a highly bureaucratic college or university decreases levels of student persistence.

Community colleges are seeking ways of increasing student persistence from enrollment and registration, and systematically attempting to direct developmental education students through remedial programs to college–level courses. By easing the process of enrollment, use of a website structure and online assistance, the presence of student advisors to guide students from enrollment and registration to financial aid, and the establishment of student coaches and mentors and learning groups, students can be engaged in the academic community, while forming social contacts. The institution, by simplification of the process, by unification of established departments, and by reducing the bureaucratic administrative enrollment and registration processes, makes it easier for the student to enter the academic and institutional culture and form the necessary relationships required to persist in their education.

The Spady Model (1971)

William Spady studied the interaction between student characteristics and the institutional or campus environment. He broke studies on attrition down to six types:

• 
  Philosophical - Studies founded on assumptions that the student dropout could have been prevented, and listing recommendations for prevention.
  
• 
  Census - Studies describing the degree of attrition, dropout, and transfer rates, across institutions, individually and aggregate.
  
• 
  Autopsy - Institutional self-reported data as to why the student left college.
  
• 
  Case studies (such as in case management) of identified at-risk students; students were followed from enrollment and their success or failure in graduating from college recorded.
  
• 
  Descriptive - Summaries of the characteristics of dropout students and their college or personal experiences.
  
• 
  Predictive – Studies identifying admissions criteria to forecast the potential for students to succeed in college.
  

Tinto believed that strengthening institutional efforts toward retaining students was more important than recruitment itself (Gardner, 1981; Tinto, 1987). The financial impact on institutional budgets of student attrition makes it implausible to maintain a balanced budget in the face of such attrition, restricts strategic planning on departmental and campus-wide institutional goals, and hinders the development of new programs for the students. Tinto believed that institutional behavior was just as important as, if not more important than, student behavior itself. It was also noted that high levels of student engagement on campus, whether academically or socially, are associated with higher rates of student retention (Astin, 1993; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991; Tinto, 1993). The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) released data from 469 colleges and universities revealing that students with the highest degree of satisfaction with the quality of their academic advisement were likely to have high levels of student engagement (Kuh, 2002). Tinto also pointed out that institutions with low rates of student retention are where students generally report low rates of faculty-student contact (Tinto, 1987).

Tinto has therefore argued that greater academic and social integration into the institution is a key to higher retention rates. Tinto’s integration framework was modeled for four-year institutions (Karp, Hughes, & O'Gara, 2008). Findings from a 2008 study from Columbia University’s Teachers College, or the Community College Research Center (CCRC), suggest that Tinto’s model could apply to two-year institutions as well. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews of students at two community colleges in the Northeastern United States. It was found that a majority of students do develop attachments to the institution. It was further found to relate to student persistence in the second year of college. Information networks found in the classroom were similarly related to student persistence (Karp, Hughes, & O’Gara, 2008).

The Tinto model is an extension of the Spady model (1970, 1971) and also included research done by Irving Rootman (1972) on socialization outcomes in the United States Coast Guard. Tinto also studied persistence from the perspective of Émile Durkheim’s 1897 theory of a lack of values in a social system. Lack of values in a student pertained to a fragmented personal identity with little self-regulatory values, or a lack of purpose or ideals. Durkheim theorizes that a student that comes to the institution with this kind of problem cannot succeed unless the institution assists in the integration of this student into the college culture. He argued that dropping out of college is a multi-dimensional process, resulting from a poorly-constructed integration process between the student and the institution. Tinto maintains that the quality of interactions between the student and the academic and social systems of the institutions determine the extent of his or her integration into the college culture or environment. The more the student integrates into an institution’s environment, the further engaged the student is, leading to increased student persistence.

A study by Alexander Astin (1972) found that almost one-third of entering freshmen at two-year institutions did not return for a second year (Astin, 1972). This has since increased to over 44% as of 2010, though the retention rate was near 47% in 2009. The attrition rate for community colleges is far above four-year institutions due to the disproportionate number of developmental education students being absorbed by community colleges.

Astin (1972) theorized that the more a student is involved in the institution, whether academically or socially, the more the student would persist at the institution, thus increasing student retention. Astin also suggests that certain variables influence student persistence such as financial aid, college-sponsored activities, and interaction with faculty. The quantity and the quality of the students’ involvement will determine the persistence of the student and ultimately their success. The student’s interests and their life goals factor into whether or not the institution can facilitate student success. The institution must provide access to quality resources to the student for the achievement of the student’s academic goals. Astin has also suggested a difference in the approach to pedagogical practices in the classroom, advising that instructors should focus less on their technique of teaching, and instead direct their attention to student learning, picking up on how motivated the students are and how involved they can be in the course. Paying attention to students’ needs in respect to the course and addressing them would be Astin’s revised pedagogical approach to faculty-student interaction.

Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini
Pascarella and Terenzini (1979) researched the impact of faculty-student contact on student persistence in academic discussions outside the classroom. To this end, this research was institutional. It focused more on pedagogical practice than a student’s personal needs. However, the research did show that faculty-student contact engaged students. In addition, prior research into the orientation process showed that faculty contact during orientation proved successful for promoting academic achievement (Pascarella, Terenzini & Hibel, 1978). They also found the frequency of non-classroom contact, involving discussion of course content, aided in the persistence of students who had a low commitment to education and students with parents with low levels of formal education (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1979).

Bean’s Model of Work Turnover to Student Attrition; Bean and Metzner’s Model of Student Attrition

In 1980, John P. Bean proposed a new paradigm of student attrition using a 1970 work turnover model by James L. Price. Using Price’s organizational work studies on organizational attributes and reward structures, Bean proposed that a similar model could be constructed to explain student satisfaction and persistence. By 1982, Bean constructed his Attrition Model to include a theory that emphasized that the establishment of close peer-to peer relationships by students within the institution was more effective than the creation of faculty-student relationships. The model has shifted over the years, both in 1985 and 1987, when Bean partnered with Barbara S. Metzner. The 1985 model applied to non-traditional students, and suggests once again that this population of students is not so affected by the integration into the academic institutional culture as by external factors such as family responsibilities, work schedules, and finances. In this study, the target population cannot be specifically defined. There are general characteristics of the population such as delayed enrollment after high school, postponement of college entry due to military service, part-time attendance, working full-time, being married, having dependents (as in the case of single parents), or changing careers in mid-life due to industry downsizing and the necessity of returning to school for training. Traditional students’ life trajectories are different from those of nontraditional students, so reasons for student attrition are different. While the traditional student may drop out due to low satisfaction with the institution or education, stress, a lack of goals or academic direction, and low G.P.A., a non-traditional student may also drop out for external reasons mentioned, as well as lack of career goals or low academic achievement. Bean and Eaton's (2000) model of work turnover in work organizations, when applied to students at educational institutions, linked retention with past behavior, normative values, attitudes, and intentions (Bean & Eaton, 2000).

In a study at Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC), the student population was surveyed, using the "Faces of the Future" instrument from the American Association of Community Colleges (Chapin, 2008). The survey sample included non-credit students. The college discovered through the survey that many of its students were first generation college students, had low or minimal financial resources and were minorities. According to AtD, these students were considered at-risk and their academic success rate was of great concern to the college (Chapin, 2008). Also noted in this study was that in 2000, there were challenges in the migration of information from its Legacy system (common information management system) to a new Datatel system. The inability to accurately transfer student data from one system to the other resulted in incomplete, and therefore inaccurate or incorrect, student performance data available between 2001 and 2003.

The learning college concept also was initially promoted at this institution at this same time. Using the North Carolina Community College System's 1999 implementation of performance standards to document student success, GTCC began the practice of evidence-based decision making in twelve areas ranging from progress on basic skills, to student retention and graduation.

In 2000, the National Center for Education Statistics reported in their national study that among the students in a 1995 group that persisted to graduation, 10.3% were Caucasian and 5.2% were African-American, revealing a significant gap in the graduation rate(s) (Chapin, 2008). GTCC reported having a significant minority population of 35% that also experienced performance gaps similar to other community colleges with large minority populations. Between 1997 and 2003, GTCC reported that Caucasian students’ graduation rates were consistently higher than the graduation rates of African-American or any other minority students. According to the study, graduation rates for Caucasian students averaged at 47% higher than the graduate rates for African-American students, 17% higher than rates for Hispanic students, and 43% higher than rates for Asian/Pacific Islander students. Not mentioned with the graduation rates were the specific numbers of students in each demographic group that could have affected those rates. However, since the numbers were consistent over a longitudinal period of seven years, there is a pattern of consistency that lends validity to the GTCC report. The study indicated that AtD wanted the college to initiate processes to better engage students in institutional practices that would lead to increased student success (Chapin, 2008).

In 2004, GTCC received funding for becoming a part of the National Achieving the Dream project. The examination of the impact of Achieve the Dream on student success included data from before and after its implementation, and documented its success through 2008. In 2009, Guilford Technical Community College earned the designation of a leader AtD college. To date, Chapin's study on the impact of AtD on student success at a community college is the only one to document its effect as a participating college. Other limited studies have been done on certain topics that are of interest to AtD, and many are documented at the Center for Community College Research (CCRC) at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York.