Retention and Student Success in Higher Education

Citation

Barnacle, R. (2005), "Retention and Student Success in Higher Education", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 83-84. https://doi.org/10.1108/09684880510578678

The human capital approach to higher education ties a nation's economic prosperity to an educated labour force. In this equation, learning is instrumentalised such that the learner becomes an instrument of economic development, and success is measured accordingly. These discourses are highly influential in determining how retention and success in higher education are conceived, and in particular, how retention itself is framed as a problem. As Mantz Yorke and Bernard Longden note, a student's voluntary or involuntary discontinuation of their studies is viewed within the current higher education policy climate from a systems point of view, or in terms of the efficiency or otherwise of the distribution and utilization of resources.

One cannot address the question of how to improve retention in higher education without first addressing why it is a problem. In other words, it is necessary to ask what the conditions are in which attrition becomes an issue for higher education. While the authors of this book do this, they do not go far enough in my view. That is, they situate the debate regarding retention and success within the context of the human capital approach to higher education in which learning is tied to economic progress, but they do not examine its implications. Rather, while acknowledging the forces shaping institutional activities and priorities, they proceed, nonetheless, without questioning the way in which retention and success are being tied together by national funding agencies and accrediting bodies.

In many ways this is indicative of the institutional focus of this book. In the prologue, for example, the issue of retention and student success in higher education is addressed as of importance to policy makers, tax payers, and institutions. In approaching the issue of student retention and success in higher education from the perspective of the institution, the authors perceive the primary concern of the institution as the optimization of resource “inputs and outputs”. Accordingly, retention and success are treated as synonymous since efficiency is presumed to be the primary concern of institutions. My question is: is resources efficiency really the best marker of a good higher education sector and what are the consequences for education when institutions make it their overwhelming priority?

If the authors of this book do not address such questions it at least, in part, because their focus is practical rather than theoretical. The book aims at providing insight into higher education policy and practical remedies for the consideration of institutional managers in their efforts to improve student attrition. The book is a success in this respect, offering an international perspective on the policy front, theoretical perspectives from psychology and sociology, as well as practical strategies that can be implemented locally.

At the same time, however, the book contributes toward a tendency in the current climate to treat the issue of student completion as of more importance than the question of the aims and purposes of education. Government policy tends to treat the two as self‐evident, the only difference being that the former is perceived of as a problem whereas the latter is treated as unproblematic. The result is that the aim and purpose of education becomes, indeed, completion. But is this really the case? Surely, no one would advocate completion at all cost? It is not that the question of student retention should not be addressed. Nor that it is not relevant to the question of success. It is rather that the question of what constitutes a successful education needs to come first. In taking a so‐called institutional perspective the authors of this book equate student completion with success, which, of course, begs the question.

As it happens, my reading of this book coincides with having come across another book, by Nigel Blake and colleagues called Education in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, New York, NY, 2000). The two are very different but not unrelated. Blake and colleagues argue that in the scramble to meet ever more performance indicators institutions have made meeting targets their overwhelming priority, whereby success has become synonymous with meeting such targets. The question remains, however, does improving an institutions standing on a ratings table improve the educational experience of its students? Blake and colleagues doubt it does, and point to the dangers that can result when meeting measurable performance targets, such as completion rates, gets privileged over what aught to be an abiding concern with good education. They are concerned, in particular, with how efforts to address such issues may promote a sector where risk minimization becomes the primary driver of educational practice.

Yorke and Longden are also sceptical about the reliability of institutional performance measures, how they get used, and the tendency for them to be interpreted for largely political ends. The authors also advise against addressing attrition in isolation from broader teaching and learning and other issues. Yet, due to the institutional focus of their book, where institutions are seen as being primarily concerned with meeting the needs of external funding agencies, the question of what constitutes good teaching and learning is left unexplored, as if such matters were self‐evident. A book such as this is certainly useful, not only for addressing performance indicators but also for the very important task of ensuring that students are adequately supported in their bid to gain a degree. However, while everybody knows that the value of education cannot be reduced to a balanced ledger, in a system in which what is best for the student is subsumed by what is best for the economy, my concern is that it does.