FROM: Interim President Joseph S. Wood
October 11, 2007
Dear Colleagues:
While we work to reorganize and to align resources with what we do best, we have also undertaken some strategic investments to reduce costs and enhance potential for new revenues -- specifically we are investing in more effective marketing, recruitment, and retention. I address retention here and will address marketing and recruitment in subsequent Moving Forward newsletters.
One of the greatest opportunities -- and challenges -- facing USM and our peer institutions nationally is retention, defined as the percentage of first-time, full-time, regularly admitted degree candidates who complete their freshman year and return for their sophomore year. The national average for our peer institutions is 75 percent, compared to USM’s retention rate of 68 percent. We must dedicate ourselves to improving our retention rate to the national average and surpassing it.
That effort will generate significant benefits for our students in terms of ensuring their success, and represents a huge opportunity for USM to ensure its fiscal sustainability.
I have reported on and documented this issue of retention to the faculty for several years, and the minutes of the Faculty Senate reflect these reports. Individual colleges and schools have increased attention to the matter, and several programs have instituted creative responses to ensure student success and progression. General Education, which goes before the Faculty Senate for its first reading in early November, is a major faculty-led initiative, one that will revitalize our Core and help ensure student success by engaging students in a coherent series of multi-disciplinary courses throughout their time at USM. (Visit http://www.aacu.org/aacu_news/aacunews07/june07/index.cfm for more information.) The Early Student Success staff, to cite another example, has launched a program that encourages faculty and staff to establish mentoring relationships with first-year students during their first six weeks on campus, a critically important time in which to engage them.
But we all have much more to do in terms of community building, early intervention and expanded advising if we are to improve our retention rate. A number of reports documenting what we have learned from surveys of our students and from the literature on retention will be available to inform our work.
Here is the bottom line: Without a higher retention rate, we will continue to lose tuition revenues and face increased recruitment costs because of time and effort needed to replace those students who leave prior to graduation. Moreover, there are programmatic implications because resources have to be committed to lower-division coursework, and consequently are unavailable to add depth and enrichment to our majors.
We must, each of us, reinvest our energy, time and resources toward this target of 75 percent and beyond. It will represent a major step toward enabling us to do what we do best: engaged learning that transforms lives and communities.
Sincerely,
Joe
For more information, please click on http://www.usm.maine.edu/mcr/update This site includes the breakfast speech; the latest digest of ideas e-mailed to movingforward@usm.maine.edu; our work plan; and notes from the recent series of town meetings.
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