LSUS dramatically improving retention rates thanks to redesigned student support systems

LSUS dramatically improving retention rates thanks to redesigned student support systems

SHREVEPORT - LSU Shreveport is doing more than just breaking enrollment records, which it's done for the past five semesters.

The university is keeping more of its students as retention rates are climbing since the implementation of targeted student support systems in 2022.

The Fall 2023 cohort, the first cohort to experience the beginnings of system redesigns, has been retained at levels more than 10 percent higher than the previous four cohorts on average.

More than 72 percent of the Fall 2023 cohort persisted to the second year and nearly 65 percent remained enrolled at the beginning of the third year (Fall 2025).

Those numbers averaged 61.9 percent for second-year retention rates from the four previous cohorts combined and hovered between 61 and 65 percent over the past 10 cohorts.

For third-year retention rates, the four previous cohorts averaged below 48 percent, more than 17 points less than the Fall 2023 cohort's 64.9 percent retention rate.

"Every Louisiana university was challenged following the COVID-19 pandemic, and we wanted to do our part of meet the Louisiana Board of Regent's goal of having 60 percent of adults in the state to have a credential of value by 2030," said Dr. Helen Wise, associate vice chancellor at LSUS. "How were we going to do college differently?

"We laid out a plan to invest in Student Success that's become more detailed each year."

In addition, one-year retention rates of transfer students jumped significantly year-over-year (six percent to 69.2 percent) for the Fall 2024 Cohort.

LSUS's student population trends older than traditional college student populations and has large contingencies of first-generation students (53 percent) and students living within a 70-mile radius of Shreveport (69 percent).

The vast majority of students work at least 30 hours per week, and nearly half are eligible for federal grants.

LSUS started on a mission to redesign support systems to better meet the needs of a student population who balanced work, family and academics.

Angie Pellerin was tapped to lead LSUS's student success initiatives in 2022, relying on what she witnessed as the university's director of counseling services.

"We wanted to re-envision our first-year student experience, whether those students were freshman or transfers - we wanted a more holistic approach outside of just academics," Pellerin said. "What are the artificial roadblocks that we put up for students that keep them from persisting?

"What do students actually need to know, to think, to feel, and to do to manage situations that come up?"

One redesign came in the form of the First-Year Seminar class, which helps incoming students transition to college and encourages active participation in the academic and social life of the university.

Part of that seminar includes a peer leader program in which upperclassmen assist first-year students to navigate that transition through mentorship, adding a fellow student perspective to the existing support structure of faculty and staff.

The first-year experience also includes writing interventions and other evidence-based practices that help boost academic performance as well as foster stronger relationships among students, cited as a key factor in retention rates.

"We're almost an open enrollment school, and we had to build support around helping all of our students be successful," Pellerin said. "Most of everything we've done is targeted at that first year and even the first semester, but what we've found is that those interventions are having lasting impact into the third year (in the Fall 2023 cohort).

"The stuff we're doing at that foundational level is having a lasting impact, even though we haven't actively targeted specific barriers that second-year students are facing. We're in the process of doing that now."

One notable retention outcome is that LSUS is closing the persistence gap between students from low-income families and the overall student population.

After face-to-face students in the Fall 2023 persisted to the second year at 67.3 percent (63.4 percent for Pell-eligible students), the Fall 2024 Cohort had essentially no difference (70.4 percent for Pell-eligible students to 70.8 percent of the overall cohort).

First-generation students, students in which neither parent has a four-year degree, surpassed the overall numbers in the Fall 2024 Cohort with a 72.5 percent persistence rate to the second year.

Pellerin, a first-gen graduate herself, credited that increase to programs like Rising Scholars First Gen Success Program and SOAR academic recovery.

"Rising Scholars is a program where we worked with LSUS students from underperforming high schools - schools that received a C, D, or F from the Louisiana Department of Education," Pellerin said. "We have extra supports like two-week check-ins, writing consultations, supplemental instruction, peer tutoring and targeted academic recovery support.

"That recovery support is our SOAR program, which targets students on academic probation or at-risk of being on probation. We connect students to academic coaches who work one-on-one at key points in the semester to develop habits for long-term success."

Toward the beginning of the journey, LSUS was selected to participate in a new national initiative to transform the first two years of the college experience facilitated by the Gardner Institute.

Wise said work with the Gardner Institute and other external partners like Complete College America accelerated LSUS's progress in its redesign.

"These partnerships gave us a framework, and it helped us build institutional readiness and capacity," Wise said. "We recorded tons of our own data and benefited from other data in the cohort and from national data.

"We were already in the process of creating some of these systems - like four-week grade checks and other assessments and surveys that provided valuable information from our students. Our partners didn't come in and tell us what to do, but they led us through a process of self-discovery that accelerated our pace of change. We had contracts, we had deadlines, and we had deliverables that we had to meet."

One example of a system change is the implementation of the tutoring app Knack so students can access tutoring from peers well beyond traditional business hours in person. The result is that two-thirds of the students who accessed tutoring in the first 18 months of the program had never used tutoring services before.

Professional development and training has been invested in faculty members, particularly ones which teach common "gateway courses" like English composition and introductory math courses.

LSUS centralized its advising structure, which provided more pertinent advising to students, resulting in registering for coursework that better supports their specific academic area.

"The onus is on the University to make sure that we aren't putting up real or artificial barriers that are preventing students from getting what they need," Wise said. "And the onus can't be all on the student to figure out how college works outside their classroom - how to navigate college systems.

"There are a lot of non-cognitive barriers to students performing, and we sought to reduce and remove those barriers. We want to normalize help-seeking behaviors to build resiliency that connects students to our support systems in a way they can feel seen and supported."