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Retention is always an issue for colleges and universities. There have long been obstacles to student success, and the pandemic only exacerbated many of these.

Recent years have seen institutions expanding efforts to intervene on behalf of students once signs of trouble emerge. One strategy has been to put students on academic probation. Not meant as punishment, academic probation notifies students that they are not meeting the minimum threshold for good academic standing, as determined by the university. 

Sadly, too often the result is the next step toward the door: academic separation.

The downside of all this was highlighted in  and its impact on four-year graduation rates. The study found that placing students on academic probation based on overall GPA reduced their odds of completing in four years by 40 percent.  also found that a majority of students who drop out of college had previously been placed on academic probation. ()

At �鶹Ӱ��, a new approach is demonstrating early success. It’s a mixture of more closely monitoring students and, when problems are spotted, the Academic Achievement Center employs any number of interventions to help them improve their academic standing.

We’ll let Lauren Folloni, executive director of the Academic Achievement Center at �鶹Ӱ��, explain.

“What it does is put standards in place to ensure that students are making progress toward degree completion in order to remain enrolled,” she said. “In other words, if a student’s GPA falls below a certain threshold, then that student may face academic separation. Before it reaches that point, however, we want to partner with our students to keep them on the right path, measure their progress with data and intervene when necessary.”

This process is meant to ensure the university does not continue to enroll students who are not making progress toward graduation without first providing support to identify and address their individual needs. Separating a student without offering assistance is not good for students, the university or society.

Ms. Folloni, who came to �鶹Ӱ�� in 2019, is chair of �鶹Ӱ��’s academic standards committee, which prescribes how academic standing, which includes academic separation, works on campus.

It became apparent to her and her colleagues as they looked at data going back to just before the pandemic up to the present, that the numbers revealed a fault line of sorts.

“One of the things that became pretty clear to the committee was that students of color were being disproportionately negatively impacted by the academic standing policy,” she said. 

In other words, when the committee looked at the data across the entire �鶹Ӱ�� student population, proportionately more students of color were facing academic separation.

“There was immediately a consensus that this is not acceptable,” Ms. Folloni said. “We needed to do better by our students.”

It was 2021 when the committee members began looking at the various factors suspected of causing the gap. Two years later, the new standards policy was introduced. The old policy, Ms. Folloni said was “centered around the needs or interests of the university, while with this new policy we’ve tried to go in the opposite direction and center it on the needs and interests of our students.”

The new direction includes early proactive academic support and intervention for any student who may be experiencing academic challenges, as well as the provision of holistic academic advising in the Academic Achievement Center, focusing on GPA recovery and academic success. Also, the data on student academic performance is carefully monitored to make sure every student on the edge of academic probation and/or separation is availed of this increased support in a timely manner.

A lot of work goes into these efforts, and it seems to be paying off. Before the new policy and approach took place in the fall of 2023, the total percent of �鶹Ӱ�� undergraduate students facing separation under the old policy was 2.6 percent. This past fall, it was .8 percent. From fall 2022 to fall 2024, the percentage of Black or African American students who were in danger of facing separation was 15.6. That number is now at 12 percent. For Hispanic and Latine students, the numbers over that same time dropped from 12.2 percent down to 11.3 percent. For Cape Verdean students, the percentage fell from 13.1 to 10.1.

The results show that the policy needed to be updated, not that there are particular groups of students who are more likely than others to fall into academic trouble. The efforts will continue to evolve as time goes on, and the impact will be felt by students, and the university at large.

“I think by doing this we’re shining a light on the fact that we have opportunities to better understand what our students need from us,” Ms. Folloni said. “Also, policy revision is one way for us to recognize inequities that still exist on our campus today. Once you’ve identified them, we can address them, and that leads to students being able to stay here and feel as though they belong here. When they feel supported here, they can succeed, complete their degrees and be welcomed into our alumni community.”

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