Morgan State University Business-School Students Set Retention Agenda

At Morgan State University in Baltimore, students are playing a pivotal role in developing a culture in the university’s business school that emphasizes professionalism, leadership and success.

Two years ago students formed the Board of Advisement, Recruitment and Retention. Eight-to-12 volunteers from each of the business majors serve on the board and have implemented several initiatives they say will help retain students, says Tiffany McMillan, director of student retention at the university.

Students in the Earl Graves School of Business and Management must do the following:

• Wear business attire two-to-three times a week, and men must not wear hats on any day.
• Attend mandatory workshops and seminars sponsored by the student board.
• Participate as freshmen in the “Chartering the Course Ceremony,” in which they promise to uphold the traditions of the school, strive to be scholars, conduct themselves in a professional manner, and affirm that they are leaders.
• Join and actively participate in a business-school club, such as the accounting club.

Freshman and sophomore students also have the opportunity to receive advice from juniors and seniors who have been trained to be peer advisers. These peer advisers help students with issues such as scheduling, time management, and navigating campus services.

“Business is all about competition and being aggressive,” McMillan says. “The student board’s theme is ‘plan, execute, take over.’ They want to plan to succeed, execute their programs, and dominate the campus-leadership positions in student government and the newspaper.”

At the end of last year, she notes, business-school students held 11 of the 15 major campus-government-leadership positions.

McMillan credits two conferences — including a USA Funds^® symposium for minority-serving institutions — with planting the seeds two years ago for the student-led retention efforts. She shared her school’s experiences at this year’s symposium. About 160 administrators representing Tribal Colleges and Universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic-Serving Institutions attended the 2007 USA Funds Symposium “Pursuing Excellence in Student Preparation, Access and Success.”

“In letting students set their own retention agenda, we’re finding that they want to do everything we thought they didn’t want to do,” McMillan says. “Students told us less is not best.”

McMillan says some students have problems when they come to college because they just plod along and are not focused on what they are accomplishing. “The student board thinks students need to understand the significance of what they’re undertaking right from the beginning.

“If you create an environment where the goals are clear and you’re out to accomplish something, you’re more likely to stay the course,” McMillan says.

The student board also decided it would not request funding for its activities from McMillan’s student-retention budget and instead has received corporate sponsorships to pay for workshops, ceremonies and other expenses.

About 6,700 students attend Morgan State, and more than 1,400 are enrolled in the School of Business and Management. Overall about 70-to-72 percent of freshmen return to the university for their sophomore year. The business school has a freshman-to-sophomore retention rate of 89 percent. McMillan says she won’t know the impact of the student-led efforts on retention until fall, but she says she’s received no complaints from students about the requirements.

“It can work, and it did work,” she says. “We have had rave reviews from faculty. When students felt more involved in the leadership of the school, their enthusiasm and engagement in other school activities went up.”

McMillan also expects the effort to have an impact on how students repay their student-loan debt. Nearly all students — 96 percent — at Morgan State use some form of financial aid to pay for their education. “These students in the business school are planning for success and leadership. They want to be the people who hire other people.

“That’s got to have some effect on how they repay their debt,” she says. “Really, we hope it will change their whole mindset of how they approach their debt and their responsibilities in their life beyond college.”