Mississippi Retention Conference Aims to Improve Postsecondary-Education Experience

More than 200 Mississippi higher-education professionals and policy-makers attended the first-ever, statewide Mississippi Higher Education Retention Conference on Oct. 8 in Jackson, Miss. USA Funds^® sponsored the conference in partnership with the Policy Center on the First Year of College, Jackson State University and the Mississippi Association of Colleges and Universities.

USA Funds awarded a $100,000 grant to support the conference. The Policy Center on the First Year of College developed the conference’s programming.

The conference’s objective was to help Mississippi postsecondary educators increase student persistence and degree attainment, with a special focus on entering college students.

“The greatest hope of conference organizers was that we would affirm what was working well for student success on Mississippi campuses,” said John Gardner, executive director of the Policy Center on the First Year of College. “We hoped to leave the conference with the concrete vision for what steps we could go back to our campuses and take to improve student performance and resulting retention.”

Each campus team represented at the conference received complimentary copies of books written or edited by staff from the Policy Center on the First Year of College: “Challenging and Supporting the First Year Student: A Handbook for the First Year of College” and “Achieving and Sustaining Institutional Excellence for the First Year of College.”

The conference featured the following keynote speakers:

• Freeman Hrabowski, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research focuses on science and math education with a special emphasis on minority participation and performance.
• Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. He is a higher-education-policy analyst focusing on opportunities for postsecondary education and training, and the way public policy affects these opportunities. He has a special concern for populations that are underrepresented in higher education.

The conference featured breakout sessions about ways to improve the first year of college for Mississippi students. The sessions addressed the following topics:

• Best practices for challenging and supporting the first-year student.
• Retention matters: Building the academic momentum of new students.
• Defining and measuring first-year excellence.
• Twelve low-cost actions to improve the first year.
• Engaging and retaining today’s first-year students: Challenges and opportunities in the classroom and beyond.
• First impressions: The new-student view of college.
• Success-strengthening strategies: Hot topics in academic and student services.
• The role of financial aid in supporting retention, graduation and preventing loan default.

“USA Funds is pleased to sponsor this conference to enhance the postsecondary-education experience for Mississippi students,” said Henry Fernandez, USA Funds executive director, access and outreach. “Our hope is that this conference will help more Mississippi residents reap the benefits of higher education.”

Mississippi is one of eight states for which USA Funds is the designated guarantor of federal education loans. USA Funds also is the designated guarantor for Arizona, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Nevada and Wyoming.