Student Success Programs May Provide More Benefit Than Costs

Student success” programs of various types – learning communities, first-year experience programs and the like – have proliferated on college campuses, driven by the reality that it’s easier to keep current students than recruit new ones. The programs are popular, but are open to scrutiny about their effectiveness – and cost effectiveness. A new report suggests that a majority of the programs have produced gains in retention that went a long way toward offsetting their costs. Most of the others did not have the necessary statistics to complete the analysis. (Inside Higher Ed, 01/06/10)

But there are cases where it is a lot less expensive to recruit a new student than provide services to a struggling college student. For example, many community colleges have more students who want to attend than there are classes or teachers.