Lilly retention grant reaches five-year mark; ‘Retention Matters’ debuts

By Susan Williams

Student retention at Indiana University is serious business. It always has been, but since that spring, when the Lilly Endowment awarded IU an $8 million grant specifically for the purpose of helping students stay in school across all its campuses, student retention has assumed an even higher priority.

Photo by Paul Martens
Charlie Nelms, IU vice president for student development and diversity, consults with IU Bloomington sophomore Tiffany Crowe, who served as IU’s “president for a day” March 5 as part of the IU Student Foundation’s Switch Day scholarship fund-raiser. While Crowe consulted with upper-level administrators throughout the day, IU President Myles Brand attended Crowe’s classes.
See archived pictures at:
http://www.homepages.indiana.edu/032902/text/photocorner.html

“Student success is the essence of what a university is all about, and retention programs enable us to enhance our ability to make students successful,” said Charlie Nelms, IU vice president for student development and diversity, and Bloomington’s vice chancellor for academic support and diversity. “In my view, the measure of excellence for a university is not how high we set the bar for admission, but our ability to help students rise up to exceed that bar as they progress toward graduation.”

Heading toward the Lilly grant’s five-year mark, a new feature in the retention effort appeared for the first time at the end of April, a newsletter called Retention Matters. Sent to approximately 9,000 IU full-time faculty, administrators and professional staff involved with retention, the newsletter has been developed as a vehicle to increase communications about what matters with respect to increasing student academic success, according to Nelms.

“It is an opportunity for us to learn from each other’s experiences, rather than from failures and through trial and error,” he said. “Also, sometimes it’s important to celebrate our successes. It takes a lot of work and commitment to run any one of these retention programs, and it’s important to honor what we’re doing.”

And, according to IU’s “Lilly Success Grant Fourth Annual Report,” which came out last November, IU is doing a lot. The report notes that “despite the fact that the high school graduation rate in Indiana has dropped just over 7.7 percent since 1983, and nationally, the number of high school graduates has decreased by 5 percent from 1998 to 1999, IU has increased enrollment and retention. For example, between fall 2000 and fall 2001, enrollment increased by just over 2.6 percent, while the freshman class increased by only 1 percent. More importantly, since the beginning of this grant, IU has awarded 409 more baccalaureate degrees than predicted when the grant was written in spring 1997.”

And according to Nelms, there are incidental benefits in being more focused on retention.

“Improvements in retention have relieved some of the pressure to recruit great numbers of students each year,” he said. “We have embraced the credibility of IU with parents and other constituents, and we feel good about saying to students and their families that IU cares about them, as these programs demonstrate. That’s very important. It’s a major portion of why Time magazine singled IU out for recognition last year.”

As IU moves toward the end of the Lilly grant, the question is how to continue funding retention programs. But, said Nelms, there is more good news.

“The Lilly effort enabled us to show ourselves and others what is possible,” he said. “The IU Trustees have recognized the importance of sustaining these initiatives and have set aside 1 percent from the tuition increase to ensure the continuation of the successful Lilly initiatives and other retention programs. Finally, the new planning grant from the Lumina Foundation to explore the creation of a center on retention will help us long-term in our efforts to create and sustain a culture of student success on all our campuses.”

First ‘Retention Matters’ newsletter features reports on programs around the IU campuses