Identifying and supporting high-risk students are critical to increasing retention and persistence. What makes some high-risk students able to succeed, while others attrit? This article argues that early success in college courses is a key factor in resilience among high-risk students. Enrolling students in skill-appropriate courses during their…

In 2004, Sanlo published a proposed method to examine the lives and experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual college students and their persistence to graduation. Transgender students were not included except with regard to their identifying as a sexual minority. To date, neither further articles nor research of a similar nature have been…

Retention literature and concepts warrant examination through the lens of queer theory, a poststructural body of thought about sexuality and gender, to understand their implications for queer students. Five themes found in the retention literature are addressed from a queer perspective: framing retention as an economic and labor problem; campus…

For years, our prevailing view of student retention has been shaped by theories that view student retention through the lens of institutional action and ask what institutions can do to retain their students. Students, however, do not seek to be retained. They seek to persist. The two perspectives, though necessarily related, are not the same.…

This article contributes to the literature addressing the needs of increasing student enrollment and retention across university campuses by identifying programs where progress can be made to improve the student retention rate and increase university enrollment. This article derives from a provisional program that began in the fall of 2009 at a…

Theoretical models designed to predict whether students will persist or not have been valuable tools for retention efforts relative to the creation of services in academic and student affairs. Some of the early models attempted to explain and measure factors in the "college dropout process." For example, in his seminal work, Tinto…

This study investigated qualitatively how undergraduate students experienced the Great Recession at a flagship university in the South Eastern of United States and how this experience relates to their retention. Results indicate that the Great Recession has significantly impacted students' engagement and commitments. We argue that student…

A strong body of research has documented the supportive environments of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and their impact on facilitating student success. Notwithstanding the consistency of these findings, recent reports and empirical research have highlighted the problems that HBCUs are experiencing with Black male enrollment,…

One of the most urgent issues facing institutions of higher learning in the United States today is the problem of college student retention. The purpose of this article is to provide a theoretically and empirically supported argument for stating that there is one potent force for retention of college students that has been as yet largely unmined:…

Early alert systems offer institutions systematic approaches to identifying and intervening with students exhibiting at-risk behaviors. Many of these systems rely on a common format for student referral to central receiving point. Systems at larger institutions often use web-based technology to allow for a scalable (available campus wide) approach…

This article traces recent policy developments relating to full-time undergraduate student retention within the English higher education system. It focuses specifically on the changing government policies and strategies designed to influence institutional behavior to promote widening participation while attending to the student experience and…

In this study, we explored predictors of community college re-enrollment after Hurricane Katrina among a sample of low-income women (N = 221). It was predicted that participants' pre-hurricane educational optimism would predict community college re-enrollment a year after the hurricane. The influence of various demographic and additional resources…

There is an impressive amount of quantitative evidence documenting positive student outcomes of learning communities in terms of retention and academic performance (Hotchkiss, Moore, & Pitts, 2006; Tinto, 2000; Zhao & Kuh, 2004). While this quantitative information significantly contributes to our knowledge about learning communities, it…

Many factors can influence a student's decision to withdraw from college. Intervention programs aimed at retention can benefit from understanding the factors related to such decisions, especially in underrepresented groups. The Institutional Integration Scale (IIS) has been suggested as a predictor of student persistence. Accurate prediction of…

This article reports the findings of an exploratory analysis of state policy climates for college student persistence and completion. We performed an analysis of more than 100 documents collected from 8 states chosen largely on the basis of their performance on past "Measuring Up" reports. Our analysis of governors' state-of-the-state…