Measuring Educational Success Thru Retention

Measuring success in business tends to revolve around the amount of profit a company generates. Lots of other calculations are used to measure the performance of a business, as an investment professional will surely say, but put simply the goal of business is to make a profit.

Education has not achieved such a focal point for measuring achievement. While some would surely argue that student's grades are the ultimate measure of educational achievement, many have pointed out that grades are influenced by many factors. Simply put learning is not easy to measure.

To help provide some measures of performance colleges and universities have tended to adopt the following three key performance indicators (KPI): retention rate, graduation rate and employment rate.

I have recently become curious to know how student service programs influence these KPI's, especially since university executive (and governments) have adopted retention, graduation and employment rates as some of the primary measures of success. To help understand the KPI's one of my staff has compiled a list of KPI's for Ontario universities. We are now working to gain an understanding of how some student service programs influence these measures.

I thought I would share the retention rate information here that was collected on Ontario universities to help raise awareness and see if others in Student Affairs understand how their work influences retention rate.

• Brock University (2007) - 86.6%
• Carleton University (2007) - 86.7
• Lakehead Univesrity (2007) - 86.7
• Laurentian University (2007) - 83.4
• McMaster Univesrity (2007) - 86.2
• Nipissing University (2007) - 84.5
• Ontario College of Arts & Design (2006) - 85.6
• Queen's University (2007) - 94.7
• Ryerson University (2006) - 87.4
• Trent University (2007) - 81.5
• University of Guelph (2007) - 90.2
• University of Ottawa (2006) - 87.6
• University of Toronto (2007) - 90
• University of Waterloo (2007) - 88.5
• University of Western Ontario (2006) - 91.1
• University of Windsor (2008) - 80.1
• Wilfrid Laurier University (2007) - 88.9
• York University (2006) - 87.9

Book on Canadian Student Services Coming

Check out this post from CACUSS Reads to find out about a forthcoming book on Canadian Student Services titled Achieving Student Success: Effective Student Services in Canadian Higher Education by Donna Hardy Cox and Carney Strange.  Its due out in February.  

Canadian Higher Ed Groups

Most student affairs professionals are aware of the associations that help us share knowledge, learn and network. In some ways its analogous to student groups that can be found on every college or university campus. I thought I would share a list of links to some of the associations in Canada that come to mind in case some people are not aware of them:

• Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC)
  
• Council of Ontario Universities (COU)
  
• Association of Universities & Colleges of Canada (AUCC)
• Canadian Association of College & University Student Services (CACUSS)
• Ontario Association of College & University Housing Officers (OACUHO)
• Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO)
• Colleges Ontario
• Society for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education (STLHE)

Any additions?

Taking Orientation Online

I am fortunate to work with some highly committed and innovative people who produce some great programs, activities and services. One such area that has made great strides in recent years has been the orientation program. In fact, the O-team was approached by Academic Impressions to participate in a webcast so they can share some of the innovative approaches they used to develop their online orientation strategy this past year. The webcast is being offered in March 2010. Click here to find out more.

Painting the Picture of Higher Education's Future

Taken together the two article below paint one possible picture of the future for higher education. Jeffery Simpson's Tough times for public institutions provides a clear outline for one of the core challenges that colleges and universities in Canada, among other public institutions, must face in order to solidify their financial foundation. My Provost has made the same point on more than one occasion.

In Reigning in College Costs, Micheal Bassis describes a new model that he suggests will improve quality while cutting costs by leveraging new technology that is now available. Michael Bassis is the president of Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

To me it certainly seems like higher education is at the beginning or in the midst of some significant change if you consider the funding shortfalls and new technology available today that can (& will) enhance learning. One of my blog posts from this past February, called Student Affairs Needs Fundraising Staff, showed that funding for higher education in Canada has been falling for four decades and the recent recession would seem to indicate that it will not be reversed anytime soon.

The following quote from Bassis' article suggests that Student Affairs could have a place in his model because of our expertise in high touch interactions, "instruction combining online and face-to-face elements (called hybrid or blended learning) was more effective than either purely face-to-face instruction or purely online instruction. In short, the report documented that high tech plus high touch works best. " Student Affairs must make strategic choices to take advantage of this opportunity because, as Bassis points out "Ultimately, it is not the technology but the new practices that the technology enables which will revolutionize learning."

Are You Using Your Whuffie?

Was watching an episode of TVO's The Agenda a couple months back titled Wired 24/7 and one of the panelists was a Saskatchewan-born Marketing Consultant & author Tara Hunt. I had never heard of her before, but I was impressed with some of the things she had to say and I discovered that she had recently published a book. Curious to find out more I ordered her book which is called The Whuffie Factor.

After completing the first chapter I thought I'd share a few of my observations and thoughts on how I believe it can be applied to the work of student affairs professionals. Hunt has clearly written the book for business, especially those in marketing, but the concepts can easily be applied to higher ed.

She talks about using many Web 2.0 tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc. At first I thought she was not going to introduce many new concepts or ideas, but she started to share the little things people are doing to leverage the power of these tools. To many people these subtle changes in approach would not mean much, but its becoming clear to me that they can be quite powerful. For example, Hunt used her online network of people to help design the cover of her book. At first this may not seem like any great feat, but her approach increased her confidence in the message she was trying to convey, allowed her to leverage the expertise of others and she increased the sense of ownership others felt for her project. Outcomes many of us look for in our work.

She outlines whuffie as follows, "Relationships and connections over time lead to trust, which is the key to capital formation. The capital I'm talking about, though, is not of the monetary variety. It is social capital, aka whuffie, and a social capitalist is one who builds and nurtures a community, thereby increasing whuffie." This explanation seems pretty straight forward, but if we examine our approach to increasing whuffie in higher ed using Web 2.0 I think we would realize its not as easy as it may seem at first.

Let me wrap up this post by sharing one realization I've had about student affairs professionals using Web 2.0 to increase whuffie. One of the primary roles of a student affairs professional is to develop community at their school. In general this is accomplished by getting students and other community members together in a face-to-face environment. When it comes to using Web 2.0 we use it to support our traditional approach of bringing people together face-to-face. This is all fine and good, but Web 2.0 tools have a ton of potential to do more and create community in other ways. If you look at student affairs job postings today versus a few years back you likely would not see any substantial changes. Perhaps a phrase or duty has been added about using Web 2.0 tools, but no jobs have been posted with the purpose of creating a digital community. The unfortunate part is that their are thriving digital communities all over the internet, on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc, but Student Affairs professionals have tended to join these communities rather than create them.

For those of you following along on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn you can also read other posts at http://wepps.blogspot.com/

Product or Service?

I was recently writing a paper and I bumped into an issue that I have been contemplating ever since: Is education a product or service or should it be considered as a separate category?

This question is usually reserved for clasifying profit making companies. With the lines blurring between education and business I thought it might be interesting to share my internal debate with others to hear additional thoughts and ideas.

I usually consider a product to be tangible good that is exchanged for money whereas a service is something that is intangible that is given to one person or group for money. A quick google search reveals that service can be defined as "work done by one person or group that benefits another."

To my way of thinking education does not seem to fall nicely into either category. Nothing tangible exchanges hands, other than a degree or diploma at the end, so education is not a product. Staff and faculty certainly provide a service to learners and they share their knowledge, but students must actively participate in the process for learning to actually take place. Customers buying a service from a business do not have to put forward the kind of effort, if any, that students must put into their studies to make it worthwhile.

For these reasons it seems to me that education is neither a product nor service, but a separate category altogether. Do you agree or disagree?

For those of you following along on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn you can also read other posts at http://wepps.blogspot.com/