The Process of Retention Intervention: 12 Powerful
Properties/Principles of Program Delivery – Joe Cuseo
HOW SHOULD RETENTION PROGRAMS BE DELIVERED?
1. STUDENT-CENTERED: The program is oriented toward, focused on, and
driven by a genuine concern for the needs and welfare of students (rather than
by institutional habit/convenience, or the needs/desires of faculty and staff).
2. INTENTIONAL (PURPOSEFUL): The program is deliberately
designed with the conscious intent of implementing research- and
theory-grounded principles of effective student learning and development, i.e.:
(a) active
involvement—program delivery promotes student “engagement” (depth of involvement)
in the college experience, and
(b) social
integration— program delivery promotes frequent, high-quality student
interaction with other members of the college community (peers, faculty,
staff), thus serving to socially “connect” students to the institution—providing
them with a sense of community membership.
3. PROACTIVE: Early, preventative action is taken that addresses students’ needs and
adjustment issues in an anticipatory fashion, i.e., before they eventuate in
problems that require reactive intervention.
4. INTRUSIVE: The college initiates supportive action by reaching out to students and
bringing or delivering the program to students (rather than passively waiting
and hoping that students will take advantage of it), thus increasing the likelihood
that the program reaches all (or the vast majority of) students who would
profit from it.
5. DIVERSIFIED: The program is tailored or customized to meet the
distinctive needs of different student subpopulations.
6. PERSONALIZED: The program is delivered in a manner that recognizes
students as individuals, and makes them feel personally significant.
7. COMPRHENSIVE (HOLISTIC): Focuses on the student as a “whole
person,” and addresses the full range of academic and non-academic factors that
affect student success.
8. SYSTEMIC: The program permeates multiple areas of the institution’s organizational
structure or system, ensuring that it functions in a “mainstreamed” or
centralized fashion, thus increasing its potential for having pervasive and
recursive influence on the student’s college experience, as well as a
reformative and transformative effect on the college itself.
9. DEVELOPMENTAL: The program is delivered in a timely, longitudinal
sequence that meets student needs and educational challenges which emerge at
different stages of the college experience.
10. DURABLE: The program is institutionalized by being “built into” the organizational
structure/blueprint and annual budget of the institution, thus ensuring that
the program has longevity and is experienced perennially by successive cohorts
of students.
11. COLLABORATIVE: The program involves cooperative alliances or
partnerships between different organizational units of the college—which work
in a complementary, interdependent fashion to increase the program’s capacity
for exerting a multiplicative or synergistic effect on student success.
12. EMPIRICAL (EVIDENTIARY): The program is supported and
driven by assessment data (both quantitative and qualitative) that are used summatively to “prove” program impact or value, and
formatively to continually “improve” program quality.