Colleges and universities across the country are investing significant time and resources in improving student retention — especially as parents and students increasingly use retention rates as indicators of institutional value and return on their investment. Institutions are also facing policy and funding pressures that tie student outcomes more directly to institutional accountability. New initiatives are launched every day and support services expanded, often without the coordinated effort needed to produce meaningful change. For many institutions, retention remains largely unchanged — not because the work is not happening, but because it is not integrated into the day-to-day operations of the campus's most effective units. The challenge is not a lack of effort; rather, it is how the effort is organized and deployed.
Retention is often treated as a student issue, but in reality, it is a function of institutional design and the institution’s ability to execute that design in real time. How institutions structure advising, academic support, and other student-facing services ultimately shapes persistence. The financial reality is clear: student attrition directly impacts both outcomes and institutional stability. Each student retained is not only an academic success but a direct stabilization of institutional revenue, reinforcing the connection between student success and financial sustainability.
At Florida Memorial University (FMU), a small private four-year liberal arts university in South Florida, we found ourselves in a similar position. Best practices were in place, but coordination and collaboration across units were limited. Our first-year retention rate hovered around 47 percent, while multiple areas across campus were actively working to support students. However, these efforts were not always aligned, and students often experienced them as fragmented rather than coordinated efforts to support their success.
That realization led us to shift our thinking and view the university from the student perspective. We asked a simple question: If I were the student, what would I need from this institution to persist? That led us to reimagine how we approached the work — one that required administrators, faculty, and staff to rethink how retention shows up in our day-to-day operations. Retention is not simply a program or a set of initiatives. It is a function of how the institution operates and how effectively we create belonging, engagement, and proactive support for students.
The Shift: Moving Beyond Fragmentation
At many institutions, student success efforts are distributed across the university, often with varying levels of intentionality. However, for us, these units frequently operated within their own structures, priorities, and metrics. In some cases, student success outcomes tied to retention were not clearly embedded in how units measured effectiveness.
While this allowed for specialization, it created communication gaps, delayed responses when students began to struggle academically, and missed opportunities to engage students early. In this type of environment, responsibility for student success was shared, but accountability was not always clear because student success extends beyond the classroom to advising, customer service, and support staff who intervene before challenges become critical.
At FMU, we began to address this by focusing on three core principles: visibility, accountability, and coordination. Visibility means having access to student information early enough to act through real-time, data-informed decision-making. Through fourth-week reports, early-alert systems, and advising dashboards, we identify academic risk early rather than waiting for midterm grades to confirm what we would have already known.
Accountability means setting clear expectations. Advisors are expected to engage students consistently, and academic support is positioned as a normal part of the student experience — not a service students access only when they are experiencing difficulty. Coordination brings these efforts together. Advising, tutoring, faculty engagement, and student services no longer operate as separate activities. These units function as a single, connected system.
Building a Retention Ecosystem
To support this shift, we focused on building what we call a retention ecosystem — an approach in which each part reinforces the others and the work is embedded in the day-to-day operations of the institution. This included early-alert systems, proactive advising, centralized academic support, faculty progress reporting, and coordinated support across student-facing offices.
None of these ideas are new. What is less often addressed is how rarely institutions are structured to actually carry them out in a coordinated way.
When a student is flagged as at risk, that information should not remain in a single office. It should prompt coordinated action across advising, academic support, and student services. Faculty observations can inform broader interventions identified through advising, and students can then be connected to the appropriate support services. This creates a more proactive approach, rather than allowing challenges to remain isolated within individual courses.
This is what it looks like when the system works together. Our goal was simple: students should not experience academic difficulty without a coordinated institutional response.
More recently, this approach has extended into real-time re-engagement strategies for students who have stopped out or failed to register for the upcoming term. Rather than relying on passive outreach or delayed follow-up, our model emphasizes immediate intervention through coordinated communication and action. Advisors are not simply identifying barriers; they are working to resolve them in real time by connecting students directly to financial aid and housing while maintaining ownership of the interaction. This reduces the institutional friction that often exists between a student’s intent to return and the processes required to do so. In this model, retention is not just about early identification — it is about timely resolution.
Building Conditions for Sustained Improvement
Our work in this area is ongoing. Beginning with a retention rate of approximately 47%, the focus has not been on declaring a specific outcome, but on building the conditions that support improvement over time.
Preliminary indicators of progress suggest that when students are engaged proactively and academic concerns are addressed earlier, their connection to the institution strengthens. Through our coordinated efforts, we have observed behavioral changes among students seeking advising and academic support earlier, engaging campus resources more proactively, and demonstrating greater ownership of their academic progression. At the same time, advising teams are operating more proactively and consistently, creating clearer expectations and accountability for both staff and students. While long-term retention gains will require sustained assessment over multiple cycles, these early behavioral indicators are encouraging.
Retention does not improve because of a single initiative. It improves when institutions commit to alignment, consistency, shared responsibility, and reducing barriers to cross-unit collaboration. For institutions to sustain improvement, retention must become part of the institutional operating model. It must live within the daily work of the campus, not just in a strategic plan as an initiative to get to one day.
This is a necessary shift from programs to systems — one that commits to alignment, consistency, shared responsibility, and a more coordinated and flexible approach aimed at supporting student success. Retention must become interwoven into the fabric of the institution — not just a strategic plan that sits on a shelf to inform disjointed programming. Ultimately, institutions do not lose students solely because of a lack of support; they lose students when that support is not delivered in a timely, coordinated, and accessible way.
Dr. Frederick L. Hunter, Jr. is Assistant Vice President of Academic Services at Florida Memorial University, where he leads institution-wide strategy and operations related to student success, retention, and academic support.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Florida Memorial University.
