CARBONDALE - Graduates may not be the only ones leaving Southern Illinois University Carbondale for good this weekend. There are a handful of students, in the middle of their college careers, who will be seeking an education at other universities next fall - if they seek one at all.

It's an unpleasant fact of campus life that you just don't win over every student by the end of the freshman year, but it's a fact administrators don't mind talking about, because they are actively discussing ways to improve what's known as retention rates at SIUC from year to year.

"Retention, I think, is one of the thorniest student issues to deal with. It's about as diverse as a student's reason to enroll in the first place," said Larry Dietz, SIUC's vice chancellor for student affairs, who up until this year also was responsible for monitoring and managing student enrollment and retention. The responsibility of enrollment has moved to Provost and Vice Chancellor John Dunn.

Dietz is now focusing solely on student life issues while students are physically on campus, but the aspect of enrolling students and then keeping them at the university for four or more years pervades the entire spectrum of his refocused job. Figuring out why a student stays or leaves a university really can depend on a number of issues, but Dietz said the answer mainly falls in one of two categories.

"What we find is about half of the students who do leave do so for academic reasons. For the other half who leave ¦ sometimes they tried education and it wasn't for them, sometimes it's the family they came from took a job somewhere else and they took the whole family," Dietz said.

SIUC also has some unique aspects that factor into retention, he added.

"Our legacy has been to serve students who are good students but may have attended a high school that may not have prepared them as much as possible. We view part of our mission as taking students where they are and working with them to graduate. And when you have a larger gap as they are coming in the door, you have a bigger job ahead of you."

Dunn said SIUC's retention is about average for universities nationwide. It stands at 70 percent. Dunn said his short term goal is to improve that rate, pushing it somewhere closer to 75 percent. Ultimately, he said SIUC should aim for a retention rate nearing 80 percent.

"I don't think it would be realistic to talk about 100 percent, but I think we can improve on our 70 percent," Dunn said.

To improve, Dunn said he is looking to the individual college deans and faculty within the departments to make efforts toward keeping students on campus.

"The academic units are reaching out to the students for two things - to confirm to them how important it is and how pleased we are that they are here and¦if there is anything we can do to help them," Dunn said.

"It's also important that people, not only faculty but also staff that play a critical role in how they respond to and react to the students. That includes everyone, all the way from our bookstore employees, to those who handle the food and our cashiers. We have so many people who are genuinely friendly, and we've always been known to be a friendly campus."

Dunn said such aspects have worked in SIUC's favor before and could be a key selling point in the future.

caleb.hale@thesouthern.com

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