While discussing The Exponent’s Nov. 18 coverage of our campus community in the US101 section I’ve had the pleasure of peer leading this semester, one of our campus’s oft-cited statistics hit home for me.
Historically, only half of MSU’s entering freshmen class has graduated within six years. Looking around my class of 17 students that morning, I realized what that means for the first time. Statistically speaking, only half--nine, to be optimistic--of the students I’ve come to know over the past semester will leave MSU with a degree.
Some of the students who choose to leave will transfer to other schools. Some will decide a degree isn’t necessary to pursue the life they wish to live. And some, of course, will resign themselves to the belief that they’re not cut out for the rigor of higher education.
Some students always have and always will make those choices, but the fact remains that our university community engages only half the students who enter our doors. We can and should do better.
A start would be for the administration to do more to create genuine interactions with students.
Nothing is more important in the creation of a community than open, genuine dialogue. While a few of MSU’s administrators, President Waded Cruzado among them, seem to understand that, too many do not.
The university’s professors must also do more to take responsibility for the quality of their instruction. Quite often, faculty seem to equate pushes to boost retention with pressure to ‘dumb down’ their courses in order to cater to less talented or less motivated students.
In doing so, they miss the point. While MSU has a fair number of extraordinary faculty members, a majority could communicate far more effectively. Too often, professors seem to approach their courses with a fatalistic attitude, assuming students’ success or failure rests on factors outside their control.
In truth, few things would increase the campus’s retention as much as a sincere effort by faculty to be better teachers. If the university wants to engage more students, particularly in the large lecture classes that fill the schedules of freshmen, instructors need to step up.
ASMSU needs to lead as well. In two years of reporting on Senate meetings, I can’t recall a serious discussion, much less concrete action, about the role of student government in making this campus a place students want to call home. If ASMSU wants to make itself relevant to the lives of more than a small minority of its constituents, there would be few better ways than to address these issues.
In the end, retention comes down to the quality of the relationships students are able to build within the university setting, something influenced less by top-down administrative policy than the way we choose to interact with each other.
If there’s anything I’ve learned serving as a US101 peer leader this semester, it’s that. Where I’ve been successful boosting retention on a personal level is where I’ve been able to meaningfully connect with the seminar’s students. That’s a lesson that could serve many at MSU well.
