Many Enroll, Leave in 1st Year: Some Urge NCCU to Stress Retention

By Eric Ferreri, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

Mar. 12–DURHAM — As an impressionable N.C. Central University freshman, Kai Christopher hung around his dormitory lobby listening to older students debate the merits of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.

These vigorous conversations helped shape Christopher’s academic curiosity, and as he became older he felt a responsibility to bring young students into such debates. But Christopher, now a senior, thinks that environment has fallen victim to the university’s enrollment boom and other forces that pushed older students off campus. With less interaction between elders and underclassmen, Christopher believes NCCU’s intellectual prowess has faded to the point where “we have a bunch of knuckleheads running around.”

As NCCU looks for a new chancellor, Christopher and others want a leader to stress student retention as much as current Chancellor James Ammons emphasized recruitment. During Ammons’ tenure, enrollment at NCCU increased 50 percent, a significant increase that has won widespread praise.

“They do such a good job getting people here,” said Christopher, who raised the issue during a recent campus forum. “But it seems like work in vain because so many freshmen don’t come back.”

In 2006, about 30 percent of NCCU freshmen didn’t return for their sophomore year. That’s close to the national average, though a bit worse than the average for the 16-campus public university system.

The problem isn’t confined to NCCU, and educators are noticing. Last fall, UNC system President Erskine Bowles sounded an alarm on the matter, demanding that all public universities retain more students and improve graduation rates.

UNC system campuses measure graduation rates over six-year spans. At NCCU, just 44.9 percent of students who enrolled in 1999 graduated within six years; the system average was 59.1 percent. At N.C. State University, 70.5 percent of students graduated within six years; at UNC Chapel Hill, 83.7 percent did so.

NCCU is a historically black institution that ballooned to 8,600 students over the past five years under a growth mandate from the UNC system. While enrollment boomed, the average SAT score of incoming freshmen stayed essentially level. And the retention rate — the percentage of freshmen who return as sophomores — dipped from about 75 percent in 2005 to 70.8 percent last year.

NCCU’s new retention goal for the current freshman crop is that same 70.8 percent. Staying level this year, officials say, would be a first small victory as the university works to keep more young students in school. To do so, university officials are involving departments all over campus, an acknowledgement that a student’s finances, social life and study habits all play a role in classroom success.

“It takes a whole university,” said Beverly Washington Jones, NCCU’s provost. “It’s not just academic.”

Some local private colleges fare worse. The six-year graduation rate at Raleigh’s Shaw University is 27.8 percent, according to statistics compiled by the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that tracks such data. Saint Augustine’s College, also in Raleigh, graduates 37.5 percent of its students within six years, according to the same data. The Education Trust data, like the UNC system data, track students who enrolled in 1999.

Nearly 94 percent of Duke University students graduate in six years, according to the Education Trust data.

Students and administrators offer several explanations for poor freshman academic performance. Some students are intimidated by the college experience, while others are simply not prepared. Later on during college, students say they often struggle to get all the classes they need to graduate on time. Money — on campuses where tuition goes up each year — can also play a role.

Mukhtar Raqib, NCCU’s student body president, believes many freshmen arrive on campus naive and intimidated, and need someone to look up to. But enrollment growth has forced many juniors and seniors to live off campus. The void in dormitories and dining halls, he said, is noticeable.

“Upperclassmen, they gave you someone to gravitate to,” Raqib said. “They tell you the ropes, and how to study.”

NCCU officials agree. Among a battery of new initiatives aimed at retaining more young students, the university is now instituting a mentoring program, pairing freshmen with upperclassmen or faculty members.

Ideally, a freshman can foster a continuing relationship with an older student, someone to go to for advice.

“They’ve been where these students are trying to go,” said Bernice Johnson, NCCU’s associate vice chancellor for academic services.

Staff writer Eric Ferreri can be reached at 956-2415 or eric.ferreri@newsobserver.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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