For the past six years, freshmen retention rates at Mississippi State University have remained stable in the 82 to 84 percent range, but MSU officials are always looking for ways to improve.
David McMillen, director of the Pathfinders freshman retention program at MSU, said while retention could be looked at from a semester-to-semester standpoint, the main national metric which MSU calculates and reports is how many of the university’s full-time freshmen in one year return for their sophomore year.
Phil Bonfanti, executive director of enrollment, said a student’s transition from high school to college life can be difficult for academic and social reasons.
“Academically, this is obviously going to be more challenging because universities are designed to push you further, but then you also have the social challenges, which is the freedom of being away from home and being away from your support network of friends, family and the community in which you’ve grown up,” he said.
When it comes to monitoring retention, MSU’s biggest challenge is trying to identify at-risk students, a task which Bonfanti said is not easy.
“If they’re having academic difficulty and we wait solely for grades, our first indication of that won’t be until midterm,” he said. “Even then, we don’t always get reported midterm grades. If they’re having difficulty with the lack of a support network or managing their greater freedom, that’s even harder to spot sometimes.”
Bonfanti said the freshman on-campus housing requirement that was implemented in 2008 was a university effort aimed at improving retention.
“If we have a student on campus, we can keep an eye on them better and more quickly find out if they’re in trouble,” he said. “The other reason we ask them to live on campus is because they tend to more quickly create a new support network because we put them in a larger community setting with people who are creating community activities.”
As for the Pathfinders program, McMillen said its overall purpose is to remind freshman students that regular class attendance is the key to academic success in college.
 ”What triggers Pathfinders is an instructor will go on Banner and update their class attendance roll,” he said. “When somebody gets a second absence in a class, their name automatically comes to us.”
After a student’s name is sent to Pathfinders, trained resident assistants, who are employed by the Office of Student Affairs, will visit the student at his or her residence hall room where they will briefly discuss the importance of attending class in a non-confrontational manner.
“There’s not any in-depth counseling; it’s just kind of a wake-up call,” McMillen said. “The intervention is usually one or two minutes unless the student shows a desire to ask questions. We just want to show that somebody’s interested in them and wants them to do well, and if they’re having a hard time, they should see who they can talk to that can help them.”
McMillen said while the intervention done by Pathfinders since its inception in fall 1998 has helped improve retention and graduation rates, the act of faculty taking attendance is what tends to make students look at a class differently.
“Our retention rate before we started this intervention program was around 75 or 76 percent, but now it’s up to around 82 to 83 percent,” he said. “Our graduation rate went from around 50 percent to over 60 percent, which is a huge increase.”
Last year, freshmen who had four or more absences in one or more classes by midterm of the fall semester had an average first-year GPA of 1.3, while those freshmen who did not had an average first-year GPA of 2.8, McMillen said.
While MSU does not have a designated officer on campus, Bonfanti said retention is something the administration monitors closely and always wants to improve.
“We want the best students to come here and we want them to succeed, and the most immediate measure of that success is retention,” he said. “We have a high retention rate and a respectable graduation rate for a public institution, so for us, it’s not that we feel we have a problem; it’s just we can do better.”
Jerry Gilbert, provost and executive vice president, said MSU wants to make sure students are getting proper academic advising and feel a sense of comfort and well-being during their time at MSU.
“If they feel comfortable and connected to the university, they are not as inclined to drop out,” he said. “We want to raise our retention and six-year graduation rates to a higher level, and we’ve set our retention goal at 88 percent and our graduation rate at 65 percent.”