Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave

Introduction: Paying Attention to the Discourse of Retention in Higher Education

DOI: 10.7330/9780874219319.c000 I n t r o d u c t i o n Paying Attention to the Discourse of Retention in Higher Education It is from the idea that we can and should succeed that failure is born. —David Payne 1989, Coping with Failure: The Therapeutic Uses of Rhetoric [College] was a major step, and it was something that I needed because God knows, if I didn’t have a taste of what college was like, I might still be on the streets because I wouldn’t know where to go back to now. —Helen1 In the fall of 2008, my two sections of first-year writing were positively electric with the excitement of the campaign and ultimately the election of Barack Obama. I had designed the course to tap into that fall’s election, and I enjoyed teaching these two particularly motivated, bright, cohesive groups of students. Two years later, in fall 2010, only eight of the twenty-four students from those classes were still enrolled at my institution. Our institution -wide retention rate for their cohort two years later was 52 percent, and our current graduation rate is 41 percent; neither are rates my college is satisfied with, but they are better than the distressing 33 percent retention rate among the students in my two classes (Columbia College Chicago 2013). In his first address to the joint session of congress in Feb­ ruary 2009, President Obama identified college retention as one of the major initiatives of his administration: “In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity—it is a pre-requisite. . . . That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the 2   pegeen reichert p owell highest proportion of college graduates in the world” (Obama 2009a). And a few months later, he announced the American Graduation Initiative, with the goal that the United States will regain its place as the country with the highest proportion of college graduates (Obama 2009c). Even before President Obama announced his education agenda, the powerful College Board established the Commission on Access, Admissions and Success in Higher Education, which created the College Completion Agenda. Among other efforts, the Agenda identifies criteria and makes recommendations for improving state policy and has set a goal that 55 percent of all twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds will hold an associate degree or higher by 2025 (College Board 2011). Around the same time, the equally powerful Gates Foundation identified college graduation as one of its top concerns, launching Complete College America, the central feature of which is the Alliance of States (currently there are twenty-nine) involving states that have committed to identifying and implementing state-level policies that will improve the graduation rate nationally and collecting data to measure progress (Complete College America 2011). But the discourse of retention is not just circulating among national-level policy wonks. This discourse is circulating within higher education as well. Increasingly, graduation rates have become a key factor in students’ decisions about enrolling in a college or university. These rates have been available for a while, ever since it became mandatory that institutions post them as part of the Student Right-to-Know Act, but they have become easier for students and their families, as responsible consumers , to find; for example, on the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, students can compare colleges or universities across several variables, including graduation and loan default rates (IPEDS 2013). More recently, in winter 2013, the White House launched the College Scorecard, which enables students’ families to search in a variety of ways for data on specific institutions, and which features most prominently the institution’s costs and graduation rates (White House 2013). This scrutiny on the part of students and their families Introduction    3 is, understandably, compelling colleges and universities to pay more attention than ever before to retention. The term retention in higher education refers to the ability of an institution to keep students enrolled until graduation, and the federal government maintains standards and definitions for calculating and reporting institutions’ ability to do so. (The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System is a reliable source for such standards and definitions; see IPEDS 2013.) However, in current discourse, retention...