When it comes to higher education, Utah State University is always interested in making converts, of course. But it's just as interested in making "re-verts" — getting students to return to the school after their freshman year.
And the moves the school has made are paying off handsomely.
Since the arrival of president Kermit Hall, the university has hired 100 additional faculty members, which has cut each class size by five students. Ten academic advisers have been added and "theme dormitories" now cater to students with shared academic interests. Orientation each year has been made more "student friendly," and select faculty members have been recruited to give incoming kids hands-on advice about plotting their path through USU.
The result is a retention rate of 75 percent compared with 61 percent just three years ago, putting USU on a par with schools such as the University of Utah, which scored 78.7 percent on the retention scale in 2003.
The changes haven't come cheap at USU. About a million dollars in private funds was spent to look at ways to bridge the gap between those freshman and sophomore years. But the money has been put to good use. It has gone into what bean counters would call "human resources," though students of the humanities might prefer the term "personalized attention."
Universities can be daunting places. Ask any freshman who has been forced to sit in an auditorium with hundreds of other young scholars while a distant authority figure drones on and on. The problem isn't that students feel like a number, but they feel lost and at sea. By putting so much emphasis on tightening the bond between students and faculty, USU has proved, once again, the Emersonian adage that success in education always begins with respect for the pupil.
Make a student feel like he matters and he'll be back for more.
Make him feel like a nobody and he won't.
In educating the young, Montaigne said, it is important to win their affection. Otherwise kids will simply become donkeys laden with books.
Any teacher worth his or her salt learns that truth the first year out. The good ones never lose it.
The rising retention rate in Aggieville shows that the administration, faculty and advisers are putting themselves in the shoes of the budding scholars there and are finding ways to make the startling — and often chilly — first year of college a little more personal.
In fact, we see a lesson in that approach for everyone.