Student Retention

Retention is a marketing problem too.

Retention numbers live in academic affairs and institutional research at most colleges, and marketing isn't in the room when they get discussed. That arrangement doesn't match how retention works. The conditions that most strongly predict whether a student persists are set during recruitment and onboarding, by the people who wrote the emails and built the forms.

What I've built

At Forsyth Technical Community College, persistence data comes to my team as well as to academic affairs. When students from a program we recruited hard don't re-enroll in the spring, that's a marketing review and not only an advising one. We look at what we promised, what the first six weeks delivered, and where the two stopped matching.

I want to be careful about how much credit marketing takes. A college's retention rate moves because of financial aid, transportation, child care, course availability, and whether a student's supervisor changed her shift. Marketing owns a slice. My argument is that the slice is real and currently unassigned.

Here's the uncomfortable version. The better your recruiting gets, the more students you've brought in who your systems were never built to hold. Every campaign that works hands a problem to somebody downstream who didn't get a vote.

I'll be honest about the limit of my own authority here. I can change what we promise and how fast we respond. I can't change how many advisers we have, or whether the bus runs to the campus at night. Some of what determines retention sits with the state budget, and pretending otherwise would make this page more satisfying and less true.

What I argue

The recruiting promise is a retention variable

A student decides whether the college is trustworthy long before she meets an adviser. The email that said we'd help, the form that asked for everything twice, the deadline nobody explained, the call that never came back. Those set an expectation, and every one of them was built by marketing.

Persistence data belongs on the marketing dashboard

Marketing can't fix persistence alone. The reason to put the number in front of the team anyway is that a team which never sees the spring figure will keep optimizing for the fall one, and those two pull in different directions more often than anybody admits.

Be suspicious of the campaign that outran the system

A program that fills past what advising can carry is a decision somebody made without the people who have to absorb it. The fix is boring and structural: recruit at the volume the college can actually hold, and say so when it can't.

The first six weeks decide most of it

By the time a student is struggling in week ten, the conditions that got her there were set long before. Early momentum matters more than almost anything that happens later, which means the interventions worth funding are front-loaded and unglamorous: a real person reaching out in week two, a schedule that doesn't collapse when one section fills.

Ask what you promised the students who left

Exit surveys ask why a student stopped. Useful, and incomplete. The question that changes marketing behavior is what the college told her before she enrolled, and whether any of it turned out to be true. Nobody enjoys that review. I've never run one that didn't produce something to fix.

Writing on this

Belonging Is the Only Product Higher Education Has Left That No One Else Can Sell

No platform teaches you phlebotomy and also notices when you stop showing up. Being known is the durable advantage, and it's the one most institutions fund last.

Marketing's Accountability Doesn't End at Enrollment

The organizational seam where students fall through, and what marketing can do once it accepts the seam is partly its problem.

Where this shows up

Sessions on this usually put marketing people and student success people in the same room, which is often the first time that's happened at that institution. The consulting work is diagnostic: tracing where the promise made during recruitment stopped being true.

Every college I know can tell you its retention rate. Far fewer can tell you what they promised the students who left.

Related subjects

Student experience

The conditions that decide whether she shows up in August get set months earlier.

Enrollment marketing

What you promise during recruitment is a retention variable.

Work together