Slippery Rock University Achieves Highest Retention Rates Since 2004 with Data-Activated Strategies

Slippery Rock University (SRU), a regional comprehensive institution in rural Pennsylvania with over 8,000 students, realized the need to expand its enrollment strategy to prioritize student retention alongside new student admissions. As higher education struggles with questions about its value, effectiveness, and affordability, it’s crucial to balance keeping current students and attracting new ones. They needed a clearer understanding of students’ challenges and more accurate insights into which initiatives best support them.

SRU partnered with Civitas Learning to adopt a data-informed approach to student success, leading to the highest retention rate since 2004. With real-time analytics, they make more informed decisions and use insights to tailor outreach for specific student groups. This targeted strategy enhances decision-making for both students and initiatives, allowing for more effective allocation of resources and time.

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“The Civitas Learning Student Impact Platform provides our academic life coaches and our academic continuity committee with invaluable information fostering early intervention and informing persistence experiments that provide students with the support they need to stay on track to completing their degrees.”

— Dr. John Rindy,
Assistant Vice President for Career and Academic Progress
Slippery Rock University

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Challenge: Uncertainty Around What Interventions and Resources Impact Retention and Completion

Previously, SRU administrators and staff relied on historical data for their decision-making and planning, leaving them without visibility into the real-time needs of their students. Like many institutions, the focus was on how many students they were attracting and less on how many students were persisting. They needed insight into which students required guidance and when to effectively prioritize student outreach and facilitate a successful student experience. Several obstacles contributed to this challenge:

• Siloed Information — Collaboration with other stakeholders remained difficult due to workflow inefficiencies and a lack of supportive tools to coordinate student academic success.

• Reactive Support — Relying on lagging indicators like mid-semester progress reports and final grades limited the ability to quickly identify students needing assistance, making it difficult to effect meaningful change.

• Limited Communication—Generalized communication failed to address the unique needs of specific student groups, making it harder to evaluate the effectiveness of programs and outreach. 

To match students to the programs and services that offer the best support, SRU realized a need for improved visibility into their students’ challenges and a better understanding of which initiatives work best. To reach students while their support can still make a difference, they searched for a student success platform to help staff proactively identify students needing help and facilitate effective engagement and support.

Strategy: Use Actionable Insights to Uncover Barriers Faster and Connect Students to the Most Beneficial Support

SRU needed to quickly identify barriers and connect students with the most effective support while providing more actionable data to faculty and staff who engage with learners daily. Using actionable insights such as shifts in persistence likelihood, LMS engagement compared to peers, and powerful predictors offered by the Civitas Learning Student Impact Platform, they could understand factors influencing student outcomes and identify precise opportunities to improve them. 

This approach provided academic chairpersons and faculty with real-time insight into student performance, allowing them to effectively address challenges at the ground level. This approach enabled SRU to move beyond one-size-fits-all practices and proactively engage specific student groups.

With these in-depth insights, they can effectively personalize action and tailor interventions by:

1.Monitoring for Real-Time Changes in Student Performance — Persistence predictions are continuously updated using current academic behavioral data, offering a more accurate assessment of student risk than general models that rely on national trends. This real-time insight allows academic life coaches to contextualize faculty alerts alongside other success metrics, such as persistence predictions, to quickly provide individualized support.

2. Tailoring Interventions with Powerful Predictors of Student Success — SRU surfaces key factors influencing student success, known as Powerful Predictors, for specific student groups. Academic success team members can make an action plan to support students who fall below a certain tipping point and create a dynamic group of these individuals to monitor their progress over time.

For example, they found that Exercise Science majors with a GPA of 3.0 or lower and 45 earned hours were less likely to persist. This prompted proactive outreach to connect these students with career resources and support. Similarly, undeclared business majors received targeted programming to clarify their academic paths, linking them with career services and alumni in various business fields to help them narrow their focus, resulting in a notable shift in first-semester retention of business undeclared students from an average of 85% to over 95% in one year. 

““We can be very direct about who we’re helping. We have limited resources and must ensure we’re applying those resources to the students who need us the most.”

— Dr. John Rindy,
Assistant Vice President for Career and Academic Progress
Slippery Rock University

3. Creating Capacity for Proactive Support with Connected Workflows — Incorporating connected workflow tools to create efficiencies in daily tasks is critical to providing successful services at scale. Leaders and frontline academic success staff at SRU rely on integrated calendars, appointment notes, and email and SMS communication tools to efficiently and effectively engage with students, ultimately allowing them to make a more significant impact. 

4. Identifying Academic and Systematic Barriers with Course Insights —Using the Course Insights capability, SRU identifies specific curricular challenges, such as performance in the “FRYST Seminar,” which provides essential resources and technology to help build academic skills. If a student earns less than an A in this course, it triggers SRU to offer timely support, as performance in this foundational course often signals a higher risk of poor performance in other classes.

5. Review Programs and Initiatives to Enhance Persistence — Consistent evaluation of programs and initiatives — not just at the end of the term, but during the term — reveals crucial insights for student success teams to intervene. This ongoing assessment helps them determine which information, resources, and experiences benefit students the most. They can then target specific groups and promote behaviors that lead to improved outcomes.

For instance, analysis showed that living on campus, compared to commuting, increased retention by 1.8% from Spring 2019 to 2022. Similarly, participation in student organizations boosted persistence by 1.9%, while engagement specifically in fraternity and sorority life demonstrated a 4.9% persistence boost among participants. These insights prompted SRU to proactively market the benefits of these activities at the start of the academic year to encourage participation and enhance overall persistence.

6. Building Data-Informed Cases for Change — SRU can develop data-informed cases that help stakeholders align on decisions and measure their effectiveness in real time. Monitoring dynamic groups of students that change based on persistence prediction or last advising appointment sparks meaningful conversations among stakeholders. 

Outcomes: Data-Activated Strategy Leads to a 3% increase in Retention

SRU delivers proactive student success at scale using institution-specific analytics seamlessly surfaced in connected workflow tools. They can provide tailored outreach and support while breaking down barriers to student outcomes. 

“Where siloes and barriers previously existed, we’re now starting to see people want to share, discuss and collaborate in a way that isn’t territorial but is productive for student success,”

—Emily McClaine,
Associate Director for Academic Success Design
Slippery Rock University

This approach comes from using data to educate and empower better decision-making, ensuring information is shared across departments to work together to better address student needs. As a result, they have achieved remarkable progress:

• 3% increase in overall retention from 2021 to 2023, the highest level since 2004.
  
• Improved outcomes for specific student groups, including Black and Hispanic students, out-performed their peers by nearly 3% in the fall 2023 cohort.
  
• Identifying key programs and activities that enhance persistence, such as living on campus, which boosted retention by 1.8% from Spring 2019 to 2022, and participation in student organizations, which increased persistence by 1.9% from Spring 2020 to 2022.
  
• Creating a persistence-driven culture that utilizes data to inform decision-making and support student success.