Student success relationship management and planning models: Part one

With just a few months left in this school year, it’s a great time to talk about your student success relationship management model and how your retention and graduation planning efforts match. Some of you may have read Strategic Enrollment Planning: A Dynamic Collaboration, published earlier this year by Noel-Levitz. In Chapter 12, which I had the pleasure to author, I briefly touched on the concept of milestone management, which I learned about from reading an article from Leinbach & Jenkins (2008). The article, Using longitudinal data to increase community college student success: A guide to measuring milestone and momentum point attainment, helped me better understand the student success lifecycle and the implications for retention and graduation planning.

Top of funnel parallels

Over the past few years, I have been developing my thoughts regarding student success relationship management and have come to believe that there are many parallels to top-of-the-funnel management in student recruitment. What do I mean by top of the funnel? Admissions directors for years have been managing “milestones” as the student enters into your enrollment funnel. For example, when admissions offices attempt to convert an inquiry to an application to an enrollment, they are managing measurable milestones. They coordinate relationship management strategies in order to eventually yield a class. We call these measurements conversion and yield rates.  My thought is that if a class has been “yielded,” then the students success relationship management model should be designed to “re-yield” the class each term until graduation or completion.

Re-yield…is that what you do as a student success professional?  Let’s talk about this idea.  Is re-yield really any different than what we call retention?  Does a series of re-yields equate to graduation and completion?  I think so.

Student success relationship management: a retention and graduation planning model

Student success relationship management models come in all shapes and sizes depending on the type institution. Basically, we are all attempting to manage pathways to graduation or completion based upon some model of student success relationship management. Here is a simple model:

If you’re like me, you immediately had some aha! moments and maybe even formed 29 questions about the model and what it might mean to your school. Let’s see if some of our aha! moments and questions match. First, I wondered if the colleges I consult with really have an understanding of their student success relationship management model, or, at a more basic level, even consider their retention planning efforts as a student success relationship management model which parallels the top of the funnel. So I tried it out with one of the colleges I consult with. Their vice president for enrollment said, “Yes, that’s the model we use, but I never thought of it like that and I’m not sure the rest of the campus gets it.”

Second, I pondered, does the model apply to all students? So, my thoughts ventured back to Leinbach and Jenkins (2008), and I concluded that their ideas about milestone achievement and momentum analysis still apply, but the pathway a student enters can be different. Not all students enter the same pathway to graduation and completion. (I will expand on pathways to graduation and completion in a forthcoming second post of this two-part blog.)

Third, I asked myself whether schools slotted the right student success relationship management strategies in the right part of the model. In other words, do current strategies at your school really serve to support re-yield of your class during the intake process, during the first year, and beyond? Which retention management strategies should be in each part of the model? What are the measurements along the pathway that we should be concerned about? Again, stay tuned and you and I will walk through this and unfold it together in my next blog post. I would also really like to hear your thoughts which might inform that second post and might get you a nod and recognition.  Wouldn’t you like to see your thoughts in the next blog? If so, send them my way.

So, the three major points that I would conclude with in part one:

1. Student success “managers” have a lot to learn from the practices that admissions offices have used for years. Retention is re-yielding the class term after term; therefore, an accumulation of re-yields leads to graduation and completion outcomes.
2. The relationship management model used at the top of the funnel is very similar for student retention and is many times referred to as the communication plan/flow by admissions officers.  In student success relationship management, we attempt to manage milestone achievement throughout the student lifecycle (pathways to completion) and we call our communication plan/flow names like orientation, academic advising, and degree planning. I’ll attempt to expand on the idea of pathways to completion, milestone management, and associated measurements in my next blog post.
3. Finally, I want your ideas to include in part two. Send me your thoughts about your student success relationship management model and perhaps I’ll include your views in the next entry. In the meantime, start the conversation on your campus about what your student success relationship management model is. Try to determine if the rest of the campus gets it…you might be surprised.