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The University of Maine’s graduation and retention rates could use “a hair of improvement,” according to the University of Maine’s provost. Brainstorming approaches to this issue was the purpose of discussion in the first “town meeting” for the university community, held on Tuesday afternoon in the Totman Lounge.
“We’re here to really figure out how we’re going to survive as a university,” Provost Edna Mora Szymanski said to a standing-room-only audience. “I don’t think we have all the answers yet, and in fact, I think we’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg.”
The problem is a 58.6 percent-by-six-years graduation rate, Szymanski said, noting that a six-year figure is necessary because “surprisingly few kids graduate in four years.” In comparison to other universities in New England, Maine ranks low, as the University of Connecticut and the University of New Hampshire are graduating students at rates of more than 70 percent in six years.
“Part of being a top-50 public [university] includes having wonderful graduation and retention rates,” she said. “This is a big challenge in a state that is not a very rich state. Moreover, it’s a state that needs us to do it.”
Szymanski said that her office has been developing a strategic plan for recruitment and retention since she started as provost in August. The first part of that plan is better marketing of the university toward prospective students.
“We are better than the kids in Maine know, and that the people in New England know,” Szymanski said, citing that students at this university have excellent opportunities to work with faculty on research, and some of our majors have faculty who “clearly are the best in the nation.”
“We are modest and we don’t toot our own horn very often,” she said.
The marketing will focus on the 47 percent of Maine high school students who choose their four-year education out-of-state, as well as the high-ability students from out-of-state who pay more in tuition.
In order to improve student retention and graduation rates, Szymanski stressed that the colleges need to “effectively manage our enrollment so that students get the courses that they need when they need them.”
“When students come here, we have to figure out ways to honor the implicit contract that we have made when we admitted them,” she said.
Ensuring that students can enroll in introductory and general education classes is important to improving retention, as well as streamlining the registration process and improving student advising, Szymanski suggested. Already her office sent out an e-mail to students directing them to send their reactions to the registration process to the deans of their colleges.
“The response [to that e-mail] has been overwhelming,” Szymanski said.
The issue of student advising was discussed at length, and some audience members suggested that retention and graduation rates could be improved if students had more connections to the faculty and programs.
“The students we have here . they either know what’s going on, or they walk through the courses and they have no clue who the faculty are,” said Larry Latour, associate professor of computer science.
Szymanski suggested that the colleges work on building more programs to help first-year students build connections to their major. One such example is the College of Forestry, which offers a week-long forestry “boot camp” where first-year students spend a week on a camping trip getting to know each other and the faculty in their department.
At the same time, some faculty members expressed that their departments were already stretched too thin by budget cuts and lacked the support that they needed to provide these services to their students. Owen Smith, director of the new media program, said that they have 130 to 140 students in their “first-year” program, but by necessity the department instituted a portfolio review because it only has the resources to admit 45 students.
“How many students are we going to have to lose from the program because we don’t have the resources to keep them?” Smith said.
“That’s why we’re here; we’re looking for anyone with easy answers,” Szymanski responded. “When you sit down and do the math, there are an awful lot of problems here . . . When students start to migrate from one curriculum to another, we don’t move the faculty to another program.”
At the end of the meeting, Szymanski said that her office is working to collect more data on advising, resource allocation and instruction. The “town meeting” is the first of what she said hopes will be a monthly occurrence, the next one in January about the strategic plan, and a meeting in March returning to the topic of retention rates.
“I like the idea of having these town meetings monthly – in a bigger room, for sure,” she joked.
