UW Oshkosh Chancellor Andrew Leavitt said that 93% of the university’s fall undergraduate student population returned for the spring semester, a benchmark the school was aiming for to improve declining retention numbers.
“It’s all about students’ progress and success,” Leavitt said in his Feb. 3 email announcement. “Thanks to all the students and faculty and staff members who concentrated on a strong spring registration and ensuring as many Titans as possible return and are ready to thrive this semester.”
The university’s retention rates dropped largely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, UWO held a 67.8% retention rate for first-year, full-time students, meaning that nearly one-third of students didn’t return for their second year at the university. Prior to COVID-19 in 2019, this number sat at 71.7%, according to a UWO financial assessment document.
Fall 2023 saw the retention rate increase to 72.3% for first-year students.
The Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management & Marketing, Amber Evans, said that the recent improvement in enrollment is a massive success for UWO.
“I’ve been doing enrollment management work for the last 25 years at different universities, and most of the time, we’d say that a 1% increase is a monumental feat,” she said. “With our first-year students, we’re over 3.3% more than we had last year at this time. Our overall is almost 2% more than we’ve had in the past.”
Evans said that within the 93% number Leavitt mentioned, the biggest area of improvement was with first-year students, and students who are still freshmen but who have been attending the university for more than a year.
“That means that we’re providing support to a group of students who are most at risk,” she said. “To me, that’s a massive accomplishment.”
Evans said that the benefits at play are multifaceted. While her focus lies first and foremost on the students, she said it’s also important to consider the long-term sustainability of UWO.
“More students also equals more tuition dollars, more segregated fees dollars, which means that there’s more resources to invest across,” she said. “It’s only one semester, so you’re looking at this as about $500,000-ish in just tuition and fees, more than we would have had last year at this time. So it’s two-fold.”
The Vice Chancellor for Enrollment & Student Success, Erin Grisham, said achieving this benchmark was a huge accomplishment made possible through a large collaborative effort.
“Our team worked really closely across campus, collaborated with our academic affairs partners [and] with faculty to help set up a new student support team, so that every new freshman was assigned a staff member who was their success team lead and also a peer mentor,” she said.
Students being assigned peer mentors is just one of the ways the university tries to improve the student experience, Director of the New Student and Retention Programs Alicia Stuedemann said.
From the beginning, students are introduced to UWO through the Titan Takeoff orientation. After that, new students can attend welcome week, which Stuedemann’s team helps to run.
One of the events hosted during welcome week is called “dinner on the lawn,” which Stuedemann said she and her team have been putting on for the last few years.
“Our first night that students are back on campus, students are eating outside on the lawn together with other students,” she said. “There’s a DJ that plays out of the top of the roof of Reeve.”
For this semester’s spring welcome week, Stuedemann said she and her team collaborated with other staff who helped run the Clash Collective Pop-up Thrift Shop, which gives away items to students in order to help them meet their basic needs.
“We are hoping to continue that event in the future, but something that I would really love to see is a permanent thrift store on campus,” she said. “I think helping students meet their basic needs also helps with retention.”
The thrift shop saw 619 students within two days and gave away 3,443 items.
As students progress in their freshman year, they’re assigned a peer mentor from Stuedemann’s team, as well as a team lead in Navigate — an app and website for students, faculty and staff that provides various services aimed at helping students succeed.
Through Navigate and assigned peer mentors, Stuedemann said students can get the help they need to be successful, such as talking to them about their college experiences as well as the resources available on campus.
Stuedemann said in their sophomore year, students transition to a navigator; a professional staff member working in her office.
“They help students with appointments, including encouraging them to enroll in classes, having one-on-one appointments with them [and] talking to them about resources on campus,” she said. “And then in their junior and senior year, we really hope that their faculty advisors will help with that wrap-around care. But our offices are always here for students if they come in and want to have a conversation.”
Stuedemann said she believes that her peer mentors have helped students better connect to experience and life at UWO, both inside and outside the classroom.
“We have 10 peer mentors who work in our office, who help communicate with students about re-enrolling in classes and have those conversations about finding community and belonging on campus,” she said. “That has been huge. I think that peer-to-peer connection for students really makes a difference.”
There are many other people who work to improve the student experience at UWO too, such as Brent Blahnik, the director of admissions.
He said the admission office’s main way of improving retention comes by helping prospective students and applicants, as well as admitted students, better understand what to expect when they decide to go to UWO.
“Part of the reason why students stop out or don’t attend is if their expectations … are not met by the experiences they have once in higher education,” he said. “So our role as an admissions team is to really help students understand how UWO is beneficial to their future and achieving their aspirations and goals, and what that’s going to look like.”
A large part of this involves engaging with the broader community so that they better understand how a degree from the university can help them.
“We’re doing not only a lot of messaging campaigns through email and text message and things like that, but we’re doing a lot of high school visits where we’re actually sending staff into those schools to meet with prospective students,” Blahnik said. “We’re doing express admission events where we’ll sit down in a school with a high school senior, help them complete the application to UWO, answer their questions and they can leave those meetings with their admission documents in hand.”
He said that a lot goes into improving the UWO experience so that it continues to be a school best-tailored for students.
“[This means] continuing to expand on our personalization … making students understand that they’re valued as an individual and they can contribute to the UWO community as an individual,” Blahnik said. “Higher education is not for everybody and that’s okay, but we want to use our limited resources on those students we can partner with to provide the best, highest quality education in Wisconsin.”
