Temple University will make student retention a focus in the year ahead with new programming for the first-year student experience and other efforts in the works as it seeks to reverse troubling trends in enrollment and matriculation.
Temple president John Fry and former interim provost David Boardman discussed the moves in an interview after the executive committee of the board of trustees approved a budget Wednesday that included a tuition increase and about 40 layoffs, the latest in a string of staff reduction efforts.
“We really want to mitigate any issues that we have around retention and really improve the success of our students through their journey through Temple,” said Boardman, who remains dean of Temple’s College of Media and Communication and the university’s chief strategy officer.
The move comes as the university copes with a slide in freshman retention. A decade ago, about 90% of freshmen returned for their sophomore year. By last fall, that percentage was 82%, and an internal Temple report that The Inquirer obtained in April showed there is concern the percentage will slip below 80% this fall.
Temple experienced a 27% decline in its U.S. enrollment over the last eight years, and falling retention is part of the problem. The school lost an average of $200 million annually during that period, the internal report said.
Employees from student affairs, enrollment management, and academic affairs have worked on the redesign of the first-year experience with support from the National Institute for Student Success, Fry said.
“This work has helped us identify barriers and create a more coordinated approach to orientation, advising, communication, and student support,” he said in a message to the campus Wednesday.
Boardman said the single biggest barrier is financial.
“There’s a very strong correlation here between the financial pressures on students and their ability to persist and graduate,” he said.
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Academic success in the classroom early on is another, he said.
“There’s … a very strong correlation between first-year, even first-semester, GPA and their ability to persist,” he said. “That is tied directly to these other sorts of strategies that we’ve been talking about in terms of making sure that students have the proper preparation when they go into the classroom and the proper support around them.”
The new first-year experience is still under development, Boardman said.
“It’s just a more coordinated approach to how we bring students on board, making sure that they have the right and ample advising even before they get here,” he said.
Fry said the university is awaiting results from an audit by the institute, which began as a result of Temple’s involvement in the University Innovation Alliance, a national group aimed at graduating more students from low-income families. The results are expected in early to mid-fall, he said, which likely will kick off a university-wide discussion on retention.
“That’s going to help us think about first-year experience, but many other topics beyond that regarding retention,” he said. “It’s going to be a real moment for us.”
Several new leaders who will be integral to improving student retention are joining Temple this summer, he said. They include Evelyn Thimba as vice president for enrollment management; Elizabeth “Libby” Wentz as provost; and Heather Servaty-Seib as vice provost for undergraduate education. They will join Jodi Bailey Accavallo, vice president for student affairs, who has been working on the issue.
The university also has aimed at improving its recruitment, admission, and support of transfer students, and that also has shown results, Boardman said. The university is using a more streamlined process for the transfer of credits, primarily from community colleges, he said.
“In this enrollment cycle, our transfer enrollments are up almost 100% from the previous year,” he said.
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