Student Success & Retention

There’s a lot of discussion at the moment about the financial sustainability of UK universities, particularly as international recruitment becomes (even) less predictable. But here’s something I’ve never completely understood. Universities can spend enormous amounts of money recruiting students – marketing teams, international offices, agents, recruitment fairs, scholarships and conversion campaigns – then the student arrives and retention can somehow become somebody else’s problem. Having worked in student services and student success for much of my career, I’ve always thought this was slightly odd. If you recruit 3,000 students but lose 10% unnecessarily, that’s not just a student-success problem, it’s a financial one.

There’s another side to this too. In a highly competitive market, pressure to hit recruitment numbers can encourage increasingly aggressive practices, but recruiting students who aren’t properly prepared, can’t realistically afford to continue, or haven’t fully understood what they’re signing up for isn’t sustainable growth. It can mean withdrawals, bad debt and, most importantly, students being set up to fail. Of course some students will leave for perfectly legitimate reasons, but perhaps we need to think about recruitment and retention as one continuous process: recruit the right students, set realistic expectations, support them properly when they arrive and spot problems early. At a time when universities are fighting increasingly hard for every new student, perhaps one of the most sutainable strategies is actually to look after the ones you’ve already got.