Students Stick With It
More students are coming to UT—and staying at UT
The retention rate for first-time, full-time freshmen who began classes in fall 2006 is 84 percent—an improvement over the past rate of 81.7 percent and a big jump from the 75 to 80 percent rates posted during the decade prior to 2006.
More retention-boosting strategies are in the works. Provost Bob Holub calls retention one of the primary measures of institutional success.
“The best public universities have high retention rates,” Holub says, “and we aspire to be counted among them. High retention rates are also a sign that a campus is doing a good job educating its students.” A Retention Task Force, commissioned by Holub in December 2006, recently issued its report. The group reviewed research, looked at local and national data, and set two major goals:
- Improve UT’s first-to-second-year retention rate to the level of its Tennessee Higher Education Commission peer institutions.
- Improve the quality of the undergraduate experience at UT Knoxville.
The report recommends starting a Tennessee Teaching Learning Center to sharpen faculty members’ communication and teaching; improving academic advising; and more fully integrating undergraduate research into the curriculum.
A host of new Welcome Week activities greeted freshmen when they arrived on campus last fall. They were encouraged to sign up for one-credit First Year Studies seminars ranging from “Football Physics” to “Understanding Obesity” to “Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It.”
“These seminars bring students together with faculty members in their initial year, which will introduce them to the excitement of learning in higher education,” Holub says. “The seminars provide a counter to large lecture courses and facilitate student contact with tenured and tenure-track faculty members during their initial year at UT.”
Also during Welcome Week last fall, students were encouraged to attend college open houses and earn “passport” stamps—redeemable for prizes—for finding their classrooms prior to the start of classes.
The Student Success Center now requires at-risk students to attend academic success workshops and offers student-led study groups to help with particularly tough courses.
Those activities were launched, in part, to address results of a December 2006 survey of first-year students who were leaving the university. The top three reasons students gave for leaving: “UTK is too large and impersonal”; “I had trouble adjusting personally to UTK”; and “I did not feel like I fit in at UTK.”
Ruth Darling, assistant vice provost, chair of the Retention Task Force, and director of the Student Success Center, said those findings have guided UT’s efforts thus far—and will continue to help create other retention-boosting programs.
“We must think small,” Darling says. “We must create programs to address students’ successful integration into UT’s various academic and social communities. Students want to fit in and interact in meaningful ways with peers, faculty, staff, and the campus environment.”