Top UA officials have created two positions and formed a new committee as part of their effort to recruit minority students and improve retention.
Lynette Cook Francis has been appointed assistant vice president for multicultural affairs and student success. Lynne Tronsdal has been appointed assistant vice president for student retention.
The committee, called the Undergraduate Retention Coordinating group, is co-chaired by Francis and Tronsdal. Both say retention requires individual student attention, rather than treating all 37,000 undergraduates the same way.
This reorganization affirms the university's commitment to student retention, Francis said.
"It's the university's commitment to being a strong academic support so the university is known as a place not just interested in matriculation and recruitment, but retention," Francis said.
Patti Ota, vice president of enrollment management, said Francis' new position allows one person to focus on recruitment.
"There are parts of the university - multicultural student affairs, the assault center, athletics - all used to recruit students one at a time," Ota said. "The same is true for retention: They have a population they can get their arms around."
Francis said she wants to improve freshman retention from 78 percent to 85 percent in the next five years. That will coincide with new admissions standards to begin in 2006, granting the university the ability to control the makeup of students on campus.
"We're looking at national benchmarks and programs that lead to retention," Francis said. "It depends on how (students) were recruited how well they will be retained."
Tronsdal said a lot of effort is put into recruitment, but if more students stay at the UA, fewer will have to be recruited.
"Recruitment is expensive. When they leave, that's one more student you have to recruit to replace them," Tronsdal said.
In 1995, Tronsdal started the Finish In Four program to help students graduate on time. A few years later, she started Courses In Common to help students make connections with peers in their first year on campus.
The new vice president for multicultural programs will take the lead from smaller programs across campus and integrate what has worked for them in the past, giving students individual attention.
"I believe we can bring in many of the things we've learned with the multicultural centers to all students," Francis said.
Ota also sees individual attention as a key to keeping students.
"We can retain more students if we recognize them as individuals and give them the type of support they need," she said.
Alex Wright, the director of African American Student Affairs, said the center will begin exit interviews this year to further explore why students leave the university.
"Sometimes students change their mind because they had wanted to leave the university for the wrong reasons," Wright said.
He added that even the exit surveys proposed by Francis would help the university in understanding retention rates.
It is the responsibility of the whole university to pay attention to each student, not just the niches like athletics or cultural centers, Wright said.
But even if students have the opportunity to access these services, advising and exit surveys, and still decide to leave, Tronsdal does not want to leave them without support.
"If they leave because this isn't the right school, I want to make sure they find the right school," she said. "If they were valuable when we recruited them, why aren't they valuable when they leave?"