A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
While coverage of protests at elite college campuses monopolized the last year of higher-education news, a more pernicious trend has gone largely unnoticed: At many American colleges, the likelihood of graduating is no more than a flip of a coin. Research has long shown that a student’s financial resources, family’s educational background, gender, and race/ethnicity are all linked to the likelihood of graduating, but our research team’s work has now revealed that an institution’s actions and culture matter as well.
Remarkably wide variation persists in graduation rates across colleges in the United States, with the bottom quarter of colleges averaging a 38-percent graduation rate and the top 10 percent averaging 80 percent. Our research sought to leverage this variation to uncover what successful institutions are doing to elevate graduation rates. We undertook a “positive deviance” study, identifying institutions that were achieving statistically higher-than-expected graduation rates, given their financial resources and the sociodemographic profiles of their student bodies, and then conducting in-depth site visits to elucidate recurrent themes.
We examined five institutions of varied institutional type (private nonprofit, private for-profit, and public), geography (Northeast, Midwest, South, West), and age since founding (from 15 years old to more than 150 years old). The institutions ranged in size from approximately 2,000 to 8,300 undergraduates. On average the five had a graduation rate that was 25 percentage points higher than their peers with like resources and student bodies. At each site visit, a multidisciplinary team of three to five of us conducted in-depth, in-person, semi-structured interviews and focus-group discussions. In total, we interviewed 172 people (roughly 30-40 people at each institution) composed of 44-percent administrators, 23-percent faculty, and 32-percent students. (Our research was supported by the Lumina Foundation.)
Each of the five positive outlier institutions had several key strategies that were alike. What we found was not the effects of a particular student-success program or following a student-success playbook such as adding more counselors, having pre-admission academic programming, or creating specific programs for student belonging. Rather, we found these institutions embraced broader efforts: They capitalized on unique organizational histories to confer a sense of purpose; they ensured goal alignment across the organizational hierarchy; they encouraged “voice,” meaning that front-line workers and faculty knew their opinions were valued; they manage setbacks effectively; and they maintained organizational ambidexterity in navigating opposing forces that shaped decisions. To focus on how your college can replicate the success these institutions enjoyed, here’s a closer look at each of the five characteristics they shared.
Capitalizing on unique histories to confer a sense of purpose. At each institution, faculty and nonfaculty staff talked about their institutional histories in ways that inspired a sense of purpose around graduation rates. For instance, some institutions were founded to give access to immigrant and non-English speaking, low-income populations with the express purpose of equipping them with an academic degree for social mobility. Others were founded to build the work force in rural areas where graduating students who were prepared for work was vital to the communities’ livelihoods. The interviewed faculty members and administrative staff endorsed their institution’s history and purpose and saw their efforts to sustain high graduation rates as part of their mission. As an academic adviser from a for-profit institution in the South said:
Even if access or achieving high graduation rates are not in the founding mission of one’s institution, identifying some part of its history or institutional culture that can be used to align resources toward student success can be a winning strategy.
Ensuring goal alignment. Alignment around the goal of getting students through graduation successfully was palpable at these institutions. Front-line staff, student-affairs professionals, senior administrators, faculty, and students at each institution knew this as an organizational goal and regularly tied their own roles — whether it was teaching, advising, preparing classroom technology, or transporting students — to student graduation. As a director of information services in a public institution in the Northeast described:
Leadership in institutions, including boards of trustees, can accomplish this by incorporating graduation rates into the strategic goals of the institution and regularly measuring and reporting out performance on this goal; management as well can set such goals as part of annual performance plans and collaborate with faculty to support their role in retaining students.
Encouraging “voice.” At the campuses we visited, we observed positive outcomes surfacing when members of the community believed that their opinions were valued by the institution. Individuals described feeling heard, and, relatedly, feeling motivated to express opinions and voice concerns. Key campus constituencies were proactively connected to appropriate feedback channels so that in order to get their complaints, inputs, and participation were recognized and integrated into institutional decision making promptly and effectively. Faculty in particular noted feeling that they were consulted and fully engaged in curricular design, classroom improvements, and student-support efforts. Front-line administrators noted being empowered to speak up if they saw a way to improve student retention. As one student-affairs administrator at a private, nonprofit institution in the Midwest told us:
Students also described being respected for their views and opinions. One student from the same institution remarked:
Across institutions, students and employees, including faculty, expressed feeling they could voice their opinions — even minority views — and that they would be taken seriously. This empowerment was in turn seen as generating greater attachment to the institution and motivation to achieve its goals, including sustaining high graduation rates.
Managing setbacks effectively. All the institutions had setbacks in their efforts to graduate students. In some cases, financial shortcomings required reorganization; others described new state regulations that constrained resources or programming. Still others found that new academic programs or courses initially had high student-failure rates. Institutions also dealt with substantial challenges such as untimely student deaths, leadership transitions, and local work-force reductions. But in handling these setbacks, we noted several adaptive patterns across the institutions.
First, upon detection of failures, the institutions employed data to assess the scope and probable causes of the situation. Second, they promptly convened multiple viewpoints, seeking external help from peers, professional organizations, or consultants when needed. Third, they were not afraid of changing courses of action and then evaluating the changes until the setback was addressed. This approach — using data, convening multiple viewpoints, having the courage to make changes, and undertaking ongoing evaluation — provided a road map for recovery that was apparent across these top-performing colleges.
Maintaining organizational ambidexterity in navigating opposing forces. People in leadership roles in higher education often find themselves wedged between competing interests. Boards are responsible for financial and market success while faculty are focused on professional success through research and educational innovation. The clarity and simplicity of top-down decision making runs headlong into faculty and student calls for inclusive, bottom-up processes. The high-performing institutions we studied reflected a pattern of organizational ambidexterity that allowed for the embrace of opposing, competing forces in ways that advanced organizational goals. These included the interplay between routine and stability versus innovation and change, or the desire to have bottom-up decision making, but at the same time needing decisive leadership from the top.
We also noted the melding of individual contributions and reward systems (particularly relevant for faculty tenure decisions) with the multidisciplinary teamwork needed to sustain high graduation rates. Such tensions on these five campuses were identified, but the culture of the institutions also encouraged seeing past such conflicts to the larger goal. A senior administrator from a public institution in the Northeast illustrated this ambidexterity:
As a provost of a public institution in the West told us: “It never works if it’s only desired by the faculty. It never works if it’s only driven by an edict from the administration. It works when you meet in the middle.” That perspective on managing tensions or polarities was apparent across the institutions we studied, particularly when it came to attaining higher graduation rates.
Although the educational mission of colleges can motivate investment in these practices, support for student-success initiatives like those listed above has traditionally waxed and waned — the financial incentives are less clear because tuition revenue is not dependent on graduating students per se, assuming the institution can still attract new students. Establishing more public reporting of graduation rates as a metric of college performance might help in motivating colleges to adopt these approaches. Graduation rate data are included in various metrics, like the College Scorecard and the U.S. News & World Report ranking system. But they are rarely adjusted for expected graduation rates given the student population being served, which limits the helpfulness of such data.
And, crucially, none of these five cultural interventions requires extensive financial investment. Rather, they require the prioritization of high graduation rates as a shared institutional goal, the empowerment of diverse voices, the embracing of strategies for managing setbacks, and organizational ambidexterity in the face of the dynamic and conflicting forces that are pressing on institutions of higher education today.
