USA Funds Workshops Help Alcorn State Focus on Retention

Retention is everybody’s business at Alcorn State University.

Two workshops that USA Funds^® presented to faculty and staff members at Alcorn State, in Mississippi, delivered that message of the all-around importance of student retention. The retention workshops — conducted for more than 260 staff and faculty members in August, before the school year began — focused on issues the school’s students face and ways to enhance the students’ experiences.

The most important outcome, according to Edward Vaughn, dean of the school’s College of Excellence, was helping faculty and staff understand that retention is everyone’s responsibility.

“If you’re a member of the campus police department or you work in the cafeteria, your response to a student can make a difference in whether that student stays in school or just goes away,” says Juanita McKenzie Russell, director of financial aid, who attended the workshop.

McKenzie Russell says the group discussed some common risk factors of students who don’t complete their program of study. They include the following:

• Financial difficulties.
• Poor academics or lack of academic preparedness.
• Home issues including jobs, family obligations and child care.
• Low self-esteem.

“The workshops opened our eyes and helped us understand some of the problems the students face and what role the university can play in retention,” McKenzie Russell says.

The university decided to form a retention committee to examine these risk factors and develop an action plan to help at-risk students.

“Alcorn State benefited greatly from these workshops,” says McKenzie Russell. “We brought a variety of people together to talk about this topic, and now they all realize that it isn’t just one person’s job to retain a student.”

Vaughn says the university plans to delve into retention issues more deeply to determine what students leave Alcorn State and why. “We want to know who is leaving and identify more keenly why he or she is leaving. Sometimes there are issues in the student’s homes that have nothing to do with the college experience,” he says.

About 3,500 undergraduate and graduate students attend Alcorn State, and all freshmen enter the school’s College of Excellence and complete their core curriculum there. About one-third of the students are first-generation students, and most enter college right after high school. Vaughn says the College of Excellence provides a student-support-services program that targets students’ needs and also offers developmental classes according to students’ needs.

Later this year, Vaughn says, Alcorn State plans to host another set of workshops to continue addressing retention issues. “We’ll develop a stronger action plan,” he says. “The focus on retention has become ingrained into the fabric of our operations.”

To learn more about boosting student retention, thereby reducing education-loan defaults, visit the USA Funds online resource “Solving the Retention Puzzle.” If you would like help in developing a retention plan for your campus, contact your debt-management consultant.