Reengaging Students Lost Before the Census Date with Dr. Rita Karam

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Learn how to turn pre-census losses into opportunities for student re-engagement and retention.

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Community colleges lose a staggering number of students before they even show up in official retention data. For this episode, I interviewed Dr. Rita Karam of RAND Corporation. She and her colleagues at RAND examined this often-overlooked group across 15 colleges in California, Texas, and Kentucky. The findings? More than 60% of students are lost between application and census date, with the majority leaving due to a mix of personal barriers and institutional processes.

This episode unpacks the research and offers practical steps colleges can take to reduce these losses and re-engage students. Read the full study. 

Key Findings

• Enrollment leakage is real and large: About 10–15% drop after enrolling but before census. Another ~50% are lost between application and enrollment over 60% combined loss.
• Institutional processes matter: Complex onboarding, unclear handoffs, and overwhelming communication push students out just as much as financial or personal challenges.
• Financial aid is a critical barrier: Students often don’t realize aid requires a declared major or other criteria. Many are dropped when aid decisions aren’t resolved in time.
• Students want relational, not transactional, support: They seek caring, transformative relationships with advisors, not one-off transactions.
• Timing is crucial: Roughly 30% of students enroll within two weeks of term start, overwhelming advisors and limiting the quality of advising.
• Few colleges systematically track these students: Data systems are fragmented, making it hard to identify where and why students disappear.

Action Steps for Practitioners

1. Streamline Onboarding

• Reduce handoffs where possible; when necessary, make them clear and warm.
• Provide students with names, not just office titles, for key contacts.

2. Improve Communication

• Replace long, generic welcome emails with short, phased, and personalized messages.
• Use two-way text messaging to check in during the first two weeks. A simple “Do you need anything?” can make students feel seen and supported.

3. Address Financial Aid Early

• Communicate financial aid requirements (like declaring a major) upfront in plain language.
• Integrate financial aid checkpoints into onboarding, not as an afterthought.

4. Identify Student Needs Before Census

• Add a few questions to applications or intake surveys about basic needs (housing, childcare, food, transportation).
• Use this information to connect students to supports immediately.

5. Leverage Early Alerts Sooner

• Move early alert triggers from week 4 to week 1, using LMS login data and assignment submissions to flag at-risk students.
• Route alerts to advisors/counselors who can intervene quickly.

6. Re-engage Students Who Stop Out

• Call or text students who drop before census; some colleges recovered up to 300+ students in one term through re-engagement efforts.

7. Strengthen Advising

• Invest in advisor training and staffing to reduce caseloads.
• Shift advisor roles from transactional course selection to transformational guidance and relationship-building.

Big Takeaway

Losing students before census isn’t inevitable. By streamlining processes, personalizing communication, addressing financial aid proactively, and treating students as people, not just numbers, colleges can recapture hundreds of students each term and build stronger pathways to success.

Key Chapter Makers
00:00: Introduction
02:45: Why Students Leave Before Census
06:20: Institutional vs. Personal Barriers
11:10: The Role of Financial Aid in Early Attrition
15:30: Communication Breakdowns During Onboarding
20:40: Timing Matters: The First Two Weeks
26:15: Tracking Students Who Disappear
31:00: Effective Re-Engagement Strategies
36:20: Rethinking Advising: From Transactional to Transformational
41:50: Practical Steps Colleges Can Take Now
47:00: Closing Thoughts & Key Takeaways

About Dr. Rita Karam
Dr. Rita Karam is a senior policy researcher at RAND specializing in postsecondary education and workforce development, including education and career pathways, college-industry partnerships, adult education, and career services and advising. Her work focuses on student enrollment, retention, and transitions to employment. Using mixed methods, she evaluates how educational initiatives impact learning, completion, and employment, while considering program complexity and policy alignment. She regularly advises colleges and state stakeholders, and has testified on postsecondary education issues. Karam also serves on RAND’s Institutional Review Board.

About Dr. Al Solano
Dr. Al Solano is the Founder and Coach of the Continuous Learning Institute, where he partners with colleges and universities to strengthen student success and equity through sustainable, campus-driven practices. A strong believer in the power of kindness, Al coaches higher education teams using his signature framework—the “Three Cs”: Clarity, Coherence, and Consensus.

With decades of coaching experience, Al has worked directly with more than 50 institutions and trained thousands of educators nationwide. His widely used, practitioner-focused articles on student success strategies, institutional planning and implementation, and educational leadership are embraced by campuses across the country.

Al began his career in K–12 education, later serving in roles at two community colleges. A proud community college transfer student, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a doctorate in education from UCLA.

Transcript

Al: 0:01

Welcome to the Student Success Podcast. If you work in higher ed and want to learn ways to support students, check out today's episode.

Rita: 0:10

[Quote teaser] Colleges are losing around 10 to 15 percent of their students who enroll, who drop before they enroll and then they drop before the census date. So it's between 10 to 15 percent. But the colleges are also losing students from application to enrollment as well. So from application to enrollment I believe it's around 50 percent or so from those who applied and all the way before enrolling. So I guess if you want to look at percentage of students being lost from application all the way to census date, that's a bit over 60%.

Al: 0:54

Welcome to the Student Success Podcast, so tell us a little bit about yourself.

Rita: 0:58

Yeah, so I'm Rita Karam. I'm a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, which is a research organization. It's a private, nonprofit research organization. We conduct research and analysis to help improve decision making and policies across a variety of fields, and my specialty is in education and labor, and a lot of the work that I do is on post-secondary education.

Al: 1:30

So, Rita, so nice to have you on the Student Success Podcast. I've known you for many years and I've always appreciated the quality of your work, the quality of your research and your passion, and you and your colleagues recently produced a research study. The title of it is Lost but Not Forgotten: Community College Efforts to Track and Re-engage Students Before the Census Date. So take us through the beginning of this. How did it get started? What's your methodology?

Rita: 2:02

So this is a very interesting story of how it started, because it did not come. This idea did not come from us, my colleagues and I. Actually it came from Ascendium Foundation. We were having conversation with them on a variety of issues, including enrollment and retention, and they asked the question if we had research on students who dropped before the census date. Because you know, Al, there's a lot of research on student retention for those after the census date and retention and persistence from one year to the other, but not on this group of students. And we looked into it and at that point, I think at that time, we only found like one study at that time that addressed the student population. It was over 10 years old, it was addressing like one community college and that was it. There was nothing else since then. We did more research and we found like a couple of more addressing community colleges that were also old, but there wasn't much research on that student population.

Al: 3:21

So tell us, so everybody's on the same page on the definition of census date. What is the census date?

Rita: 3:29

So the census date is the official point, any term where a college or a university determines the number of students who are enrolled in their institution, and this is the official day and this is the official number of student enrollment that is reported to the state and federal government in the reporting. Students who drop before the census date do not show in these reports and they are not considered dropouts from the college and, as we have indicated in our report, for some colleges those students even disappear, like they're not necessarily well-tracked into their system as well. We ended up looking at the whole journey of onboarding, starting from application all the way up to the census date, and estimated the number or the proportion of students that are dropping out at these different stages of onboarding. And there is a reason why we did this and I can talk about that as well.

Al: 4:37

Wonderful, Just quickly, how many colleges did you look at? Approximate number of students.

Rita: 4:44

So this study had two components. The first component was looking at 15 community colleges in three different states. We selected California, Texas, and Kentucky. We did that because we wanted colleges in different parts of the country. We also wanted, you know, colleges that function on their own versus KCTCS, which is the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. They tend to have a more integrated data, data integration at the system level. So we wanted kind of to see if there's variation in terms of our findings and also within each college. We selected five colleges that varied in terms of urbanicity and rurality. I think that is a very important thing to be able to distinguish.

Rita: 5:41

And the goal is to from these colleges is to understand what is it that they're doing, you know, to track the student population, whether that student population is important for their enrollment.

Rita: 5:54

As you know, Al, student enrollment has been declining for more than a decade. The COVID years have intensified that decline. Yes, enrollment now is going up, but for most colleges it did not reach the pre-COVID student enrollment levels. So we wanted to understand if the colleges are focusing on the student population as a way not just to retain them, but also to increase the enrollment and also understand, you know, how they are interacting with the student population and what kind of engagement they're involved in. But then there was a second component and Dallas College is a close collaborator on the second component. And the second component is we wanted to go in specifically into one of the institutions to conduct more in-depth interviews that included students, because the first component included staff and directors, but not students as well, as we wanted to analyze their administrative data to understand what is the proportion of students that have been lost between enrollment and census, but as well as before census. Also, from application as well.

Al: 7:28

Well, like I said from the beginning, you do quality work and this methodology across three different states, I'm sure you got some really good findings on this, so let's dig into some of the findings.

Rita: 7:40

So we so we have lots of findings, because I want to go back to what I said that initially we wanted to design the study to look only at the time when students enroll and then they dropped.

Rita: 7:57

So we started interviewing students who did drop before the census date. There's no surprise. You know students were giving us a variety of reasons personal barriers, financial you know they needed, you know, financial help, or they had help or they had, or they had transportation issues, or they had mental health or family issues. But as we were talking to the students, they also started mentioning processes that happened before they enrolled, right, for example, regarding their interaction with the advisors or their interaction with the financial aid advisors. And, as a result, we decided that we need to start expanding and understanding the institutional processes right, because the institutional processes have contributed to them dropping before the census dates. For this group of students and they are not the majority of students, but for this group of students it's really the combination of their personal barriers and their experience and their onboarding, starting from the application part, from the application timeline.

Al: 9:28

So when I work with colleges and they ask me to help them with onboarding, one of the first things I ask them to do is to actually register. And these are people with with doctorates who have worked in the college and every single time they can't believe just how difficult the registration process is as a barrier. So it's not surprising, right? And were there any other things that the students told you that was specific about the processes

Rita: 9:59

So one of the things the student told us is that they did not think they did not experience a process that is streamlined, right? So what the students experienced is that the colleges, they receive detailed information, welcome emails. When you know, when they apply, they also receive lots of information, right? I mean regarding lots of different, lots of different topics, and the students you know mentioned that it was very difficult for them to digest everything, and some of the students what they needed is like a personal, you know, interaction with someone to be able to talk to. That was also an issue for one reason the students also did not understand that there are different stages and that there are different handoffs, right? So whoever helps with the application and registration ready, like, did they do their vaccination for some of the states that have placement assessments? Did they take the placement assessments? Did they provide their high school transcripts?

Rita: 11:18

You know those are questions that are asked of different staff than, let's say, you know, what class should I enroll in? Right? And the students were unable to differentiate that, and so sometimes they would misdirect the questions to, or ask the questions to the wrong staff because they did not have that information, you know, and then they explained to us that they would get information that was not helpful or information that was not correct. But part of that is because they were asking the wrong person and not the right person. So the colleges did not necessarily make clear. You know that handoff stages and who should be who should they be contacting. You know for these handoff, you know which staff for these different handoff stages. There's about three of them in terms of the stages. I mean there's those who help with the registration ready, those who are enrolling students and then, after students enroll, sometimes they are also handed off to their academic advisor. So there's three different handoffs.

Al: 12:30

And during this process, often the students are ping ponged all over the campus and the handoffs are not always warm.

Rita: 12:41

Yes, the handoffs. You know this is a bit of, because I think it's a complicated issue. Our study has shown that around 30% of the students they enroll two weeks before the beginning of the term. That's a lot for advisors to handle and I think that's part of the well, that's part of the issue. First of all, you know advisors I mean, you know the advisor student ratio is is pretty low, uh. Second of all, if you have, like a a large number of students doing it last minute, you know that's also going to cut time from the advisor regarding how much they can spend and discuss things with them.

Rita: 13:32

So there's multitude of factors and, of course, there's another factor, probably that there are some advisors that are better at interacting with students than others. Some are good at making those relationships less transactional and more transformative. So those are a few of the reasons and, again, one of the things I'd like to point out for this specific study we were not looking at, we were really focusing on those students who were not satisfied and who dropped out. So I just want to make that clear. So if the finding seems, you know, going towards the negative side, it's not because the colleges are not doing a great job. You know good work, but it's because you know for a certain group of students, you know it's not enough what they're doing.

Al: 14:25

Right. Any other findings before we jump into the recommendations?

Rita: 14:30

Yeah, so there's a lot of findings, ok. So I want to say one of the regarding their financial aid status and also they do not know how to access the financial support that they need, so sometimes they drop because they don't have the finances. But many colleges also drop them. The colleges drop them if their financial aid decisions have not been made or they cannot show that they can pay for the term, and part of why this is an issue is because you know, when I mentioned the welcome emails, you know, welcoming them to the college, and everything that the steps that they need to take to be able to enroll to enroll financial aid is not part of, for the most part, is not included in those emails, because financial aid is not a requirement to enroll.

Rita: 15:41

So one of the things that we recommend is for the community colleges is, first of all, to start sending customized messages to different groups of students, you know, but also to start including, you know, main points of the financial aid, like when are the timelines? What kind of eligibility criteria are there? I mean a few of the colleges. One of their eligibility criteria for financial aid is that students need to be declared have a declared major. Not all colleges, a few of the colleges, but if those students in those colleges did not know that, then they're not going to get their financial aid and, as a result, they're going to drop. So that's one of the major findings of why students are dropping before the census date things related to financial aid.

Al: 16:38

Because financial aid is so big. I'm just wondering is there a state or it's all over the place among the 15, but is there a state California, Kentucky or Texas that does a better job at the financial aid aspect?

Rita: 16:54

No, it's just not. It's not state related, I think it's college, it's at the college, yeah. So, for example, we have colleges, for example, who if you do not declare a major, that's it. You know you're not going to get financial aid for that term unless you know you declare a major. But other colleges have done it differently, right? So, for example, they allow students their first year, they will allow the financial aid to go through for the first year, because then the students during their first year are supposed to through their first year student success courses you know can explore, you know what they want to major in. So some colleges are doing it differently. I think other colleges are allowing students to defer, you know, till the following term as well. So the colleges really vary in how they're dealing with the financial aid. But it's not a state issue, it's not a system issue necessarily.

Al: 17:56

It's at the college level. Got it. Because it could be a policy issue for states to then try to resolve for a more fair play for students, right so, but yeah, got it. So you got the the advisor issue that by the time they get to them there's just a flood of students. We've got the financial aid aspect. What are their findings?

Rita: 18:20

So the other aspect is also the identifying student basic needs early. So colleges are doing a great, great job in serving their students, and those are the students who are enrolled after this, who are part of the census enrollment group, right, and so during the semester they might survey them regarding basic needs, what is needed. But what we found is for for the group of students who are dropping out, okay, they needed, they would have made a different decision if they were aware of what services that the colleges have that they could utilize for their own individual challenges. And so and the colleges are, most colleges are not doing that, and so one of the things that we recommend is that to start gathering this information early on in the process. You know, by the way, in the application I mean, the application is really at this, it's a state application, right, each state has its own application, and it allows colleges to add a few questions. So what we recommended is for the colleges to add, you know, five to 10 questions, whether in the application or at different times, so that students can, you know, tell them exactly, you know, what their basic needs are, and so by that time they they get to the advisor. The advisor has that information to have a meaningful conversation and to connect them right, to connect them to the services that are available and make the students feel that they are part of a community that cares about them. So part of it, I believe, is maybe a better data collection of basic needs, of what the students need, and then do it doing it at an earlier stage, not after the census date, not after the census date.

Rita: 20:40

I think the other thing that we also recommend is the early alert.

Rita: 20:46

You know colleges have early alert systems, but the early alert systems are implemented after the fourth week of and this is, like you know, after the census date, right? So one of the things that colleges can start thinking about, if they collect information on student basic needs early and if they can get information on who because they will know from the application whether students are not decided, have undecided majors and if they're able to bring that information into the early alert system right, then those alerts can be generated very early and implemented during the first week of the term, okay, and then those students could be immediately referred to advisors as well as counselors to discuss, you know, those two main issues that we think are contributing to student loss. I think the colleges could leverage their online courses, they could leverage their learning management system to identify students who are not engaged early on, which is, in the first few weeks, not few weeks in the first week and that does not require faculty to take any absences, right, because this is really a technological technology.

Rita: 22:10

If a student does not log into their learning management system the first week, then that student should be referred to an advisor, or we recommend that that student is referred to an advisor to ask why If a student did not do their assignment or did not log into their online course. That's also another way and that really does not put much pressure on faculty to take, you know, absence, absences, because we want to reduce, we want to reduce burden on faculty.

Al: 22:42

So thank you, Rita. There's so many findings, so many recommendations thus far. I'm learning so much. What else did you learn?

Rita: 22:50

We learned that there are few colleges that are paying attention to the student population and I want to kind of highlight a bit the practices that they're doing to minimize the loss of the student population.

Rita: 23:07

So one of the colleges has and doing this in a very targeted way, you know is texting every student during the first and second week of the term to ask them if they need anything.

Rita: 23:25

This is not about academic. This is just like a check-in message to show them that they care and to tell them do you need anything, whether academic or non-academic support? You know, and we are here for you, and I think this is a really good practice. Okay, because first of all, now the students have someone they can connect to and email or contact and feel that the college cares about them. So one of the colleges is doing that. Two other colleges and this college is focusing on doing this early in the semester so that the students don't drop before the census date. Two other colleges have focused on the students who already dropped out and have they engaged with external vendors, who then calls the students who dropped out to understand the reasons for why they dropped out and to re-engage them again into subsequent and, you know, encourage them to enroll in subsequent semesters. So those are actually good practices to think about.

Al: 24:39

Did you have the time to find that, the things that they were doing to bring them back, re-engage, to have them enroll are they pretty effective or they still have a long way to go?

Rita: 24:52

We have data from one college and it was pretty effective. I believe it was around 800. It's a large college that dropped out in one term and they were able to bring in, I believe, like 300 or so back, 300 or 350 back. That's a good amount.

Al: 25:19

Yeah, that's significant. I mean, we look at it in raw numbers, but you know these are people.

Rita: 25:27

Right. One of the findings that will lead to that leads to a recommendation is I think it's very important to start thinking about majors and careers early, not during, not just at the application, because again, as I said, for a few of the colleges, being undecided is affecting the financial aid, decided is affecting the financial aid or we found it was affecting the financial aid in our sample. But, as you know, there's a lot of, for example, partnerships with high schools. Right, you have the dual enrollment, you have P-TECH, you have a lot of other kind of other kind of partnerships that community colleges have with high schools. School students do the financial aid or, you know, do the academics, you know, or provide the dual enrollment, you know curriculum and so forth. But also maybe the counselors from the high school and the counselors from the college can work together and help the high school students start exploring you know their careers, start exploring different kind of you know their careers, start exploring different kind of you know fields. So by the time they apply they already have a pretty good idea of what they want.

Rita: 27:03

So if those things can start earlier, I think that would be a good thing and also I think that's a good opportunity for community colleges to also let the student know about their value, about their educational value, because sometimes students are not applying to one college, right, they're applying to a four-year university, they're applying to community colleges and the community colleges might not be their priority, okay, and they might be waiting to hear from the four-year university and when they do they decide, you know, they're not going to continue enrollment at the community college.

Rita: 27:44

And so one of the things that we think is that if the colleges who are partnering with high schools invest in having their having students, high school students understand regarding their program offering and what their value is, okay, and and and how they and how students can then transfer into four-year universities. Because you know at the, you know in the beginning, you don't necessarily have to take your, your general education courses at a four-year university. So we feel that there is room for the colleges to start, maybe behaving more like, maybe marketing better their offerings to high schools.

Al: 28:33

So there was this thing Rita called guided pathways. I laugh because yes.

Al: 28:42

See, the thing about higher ed is especially community colleges. They're asked to do too much A. B, there's so much bureaucratic inertia. It's very difficult to enact change, to change antiquated practices, and then, soberingly, there are too many people in the system that just want to maintain the status quo. And the reason I mention this is because if campuses had and many have done a good job, but for the most part, if they had actually implemented the Guided Pathways framework and every year worked to continually improve, clarifying the path for students, helping them enter, helping them stay, ensure learning, everything that you touched on would be addressed as a continuous improvement type of process.

Al: 29:36

I have a question for you about AI, because I'm beginning to hear a lot from colleagues, from educators, students even, that with AI, for example, a student now, provided the information is correct, a student can upload to AI the college catalog along with the course schedule and even the information from Rate my Professor and say give me a schedule of classes for fall. Also, I have these needs. I have an IEP from my high school and I'm having issues with housing and so forth. Does this college offer any resources? So, in other words, AI is becoming more and more like an assistant. I think a lot of too many people use it for research, like they would for Google, like research, like search, and I don't think that's great yet, but it could serve as a great assistant to people and I'm just wondering what are your thoughts on that.

Rita: 30:51

That's a very you know. I've never thought of AI being used like that and you're saying students are using it.

Al: 30:59

Yes, they're becoming, especially now that ChatGPT 5.0 has come out. The functionality and how much it knows is just astronomical.

Rita: 31:10

You know well. First of all, I don't know how AI has been trained. I mean, just because you're uploading things you know, it's not clear to me how AI is making the decision right, like what the criteria is or what the parameter right? Ai is not perfect, but I guess maybe the question I'm having is why our students are doing that, when it seems to me that the colleges have mapped out Right, like the education pathway, the educational plans for students, right, I mean, you know, if you're going to do this major the first year, this is what you need to take. Ok, and probably the first year they cannot enroll on their own, they have to enroll with an advisor, but then it's. But my understanding is is that the paths are made a bit, that they are quite defined, but that's my understanding. So I'm not so sure what benefit they're like, I'm not exactly sure what other kind of information they're getting. That's not in the educational mapping that the colleges have. And also, and also like, if students want to change majors, like, like, like, I mean that's another thing. Like many I mean all of us, I mean I changed my major.

Rita: 32:33

I was a chemistry major that ended up being sociology. Right, I mean, all of us. I mean, I changed my major. I was a chemistry major that ended up being sociology. Right, I needed to talk to someone, like I believe, like I should. Yeah, I needed to talk to an advisor.

Al: 32:42

Yeah, two things. Colleges did work during the last five, six years throughout the country on creating what are called program maps, and they did. The problem is that they never really brought them to life. They they're like five clicks away on a webs ite. Advisors don't always use them. Every student is not handed one, and that's why they want to see advisors to go. Ok, I'm interested in this. What classes should I take? But if they can't see an advisor because the ratio is so, so high, some of them are just going, you know, I'm just going to prompt, I'm going to do the parameters on AI, upload the the college info and let it assist me. And since I can't get an advisor because of the ratio, come again November to know about my classes, I'm going to prompt it again because I changed my major. I think that's kind of where things are heading. I'm not saying it's right or wrong either way. Students find a way, especially when the technology is becoming much more available.

Rita: 33:50

Yeah, and I don't know if it's, and I'm not going either way right, I think for me is where I think we need to do first is try to kind of figure out are the responses AI giving them? Were they correct? I guess, like I think maybe that's the first thing we need to kind of figure out, like, did it delay students from finishing their certificates or degrees or did it help? I guess, maybe to me as a researcher I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying it's bad, I do not know but I think the first thing I would want to do is kind of research that because it can be helpful to advise. It cannot replace an advisor, but it can be helpful to advising students as an add-on. And I don't know where I stand on this, because as a researcher I need to do that research. But you give me an idea for the next research.

Al: 34:55

There you go. That's why I appreciate you, because you look at this and already looking at it from I need to study this. I can tell you right now that it's pretty accurate.

Rita: 35:05

Okay, you can Okay.

Al: 35:06

It's, it's pretty, now it's not going to be perfect, even even AI a year ago, I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe it cranked this out. I just, I can't believe just how, and I think part of the reason, Rita, is that there have been billions of prompts and billions of things already uploaded and its knowledge base is so incredible that, for example, I prompted the other day as I'm having a meeting working with a team and they're like we need to create a survey, and I gave it the parameters and it cranked it out in five seconds. Now, was it perfect?

Al: 35:42

But we were able to tweak that survey to meet our needs, anyway, this is a great next research project and I don't want to kind of take you like on another road here, but I just kind of wanted your sense of technology giving all these issues that you studied.

Rita: 36:00

It's interesting and also it's interesting on what does that mean in terms of the advisor's role? Right, I mean it's now the advisor for a specific group of students is just going to be a validator, right? Like you know, the students will figure it out. Maybe the advisor will take a look and just validate, as opposed to meeting with the students. That would reduce, that would reduce the, that would change the responsibility and also reduce maybe the pressure advisors might have.

Al: 36:30

Yeah, because what they can do is already. I know some of the UCs are working on these bots to do what I'm saying. Yeah, but they're training the bots so that they give right information, and so what's happening is that the other things that you mentioned, Rita, the basic needs, the need to you know, reach out to them, check in on them.

Rita: 36:56

Then humans can really do more of that work instead of the other work, right, yeah, and I think that's really where I wanted to go, that this is not about replacing advisors, but maybe changing what advisors do and directing advisors' roles and responsibilities to something else to ensure that students continue and persist. That's, I think, where I was going with that one, but I see that all the time, like even with radiology, right. Like now, AI can read X-rays, like with very high accuracy, and so the question I have what does that mean in terms of the role? You know? Then, what do radiologists do? Now, right, like this is like the first thing that comes to mind.

Al: 37:41

Our world's going to change in like five like right now, we have the highest unemployment rate for recent college grads. Well, part of it is this administration's policies, but the other aspect is that AI is doing a lot of the entry level work and doing it quite well. So I think, as a society and I work with faculty on this is that this is becoming more. It's here to stay. It's exponential. How do we leverage it? How do we adapt? The reality is we are going to see some things that are obsolete or the way our job descriptions are going to be changed so drastically. Right, but yeah, I think what you identified here because, as you mentioned earlier, higher ed has not really look, let's be honest. Right, enrollment means funding, and if we don't keep enrolling and getting students into high value programs and deal with all this stuff that you have identified, we're just going to keep bleeding students.

Rita: 38:46

And again, what you just touched on also is really one of the things that I think I did mention. But students who dropped out kept saying that they do not want a transactional relationship. They want a transformational relationship. Right, you have always a group of students that might require more, that need more support, you know, from advisors than others. Right, depending on the background, you know, if you're a first generation college goer, you don't have all the information to navigate the system. Right, and that's what they're seeking from advisors, and I'm all for figuring out ways that advisors can provide that transformational support that the students are seeking. And if that means, as you said, use AI for certain things so that advisors can do other things, go for it.

Al: 39:45

And it's because community college students spend most of their time in the classroom. If that first week or two the faculty is throwing down the law, making their syllabi look like contracts, not making it very engaging, and that plays a significant role. I remember when I was a re-entry student I went to community college and it was very interesting. At the Veterans Center there was a list of faculty and they called them friendlies.

Al: 40:21

And friendlies for veterans means they're not the enemy right, they're the ones who are friends. But the reason we have the list there is not because they're easy, it's not because any of that is because we just wanted to know who are the faculty who care, right. So if I went to my first class and I had a faculty say, well, look to your left and now look to your right, those people are probably not going to be there because I only give one A, I mean that kind of attitude, students don't feel a sense of belonging and so I think faculty play a critical role in that and keeping them before census right or after census. Before census right or after census.

Rita: 41:01

It's you know, it's for or after census. It's very interesting because the before census, the faculty issue never showed up, remember, like they decided to drop before they even experienced the faculty. That much, right? No, they dropped out. I mean, they enrolled, they showed up, they showed up to some classes, right, but they never told us anything about the faculty.

Rita: 41:25

What some told us is that they did not think that the courses that their advisors gave them was relevant to them. Think that had to do with the conversation, because probably the advisors were telling them, hey, you need to take this and this and this, right, but there wasn't a conversation of why and how. That feeds into the few of them who told us that it wasn't about they did not understand how everything fits right and so they didn't understand. Understand is this needed or not? And I think part of it also is, you know, at one point, because, again, as I said, you know, enrollment happens last minute. There aren't enough resources for advisors, not a lot of advisors. They might end up just telling students you know, these are the courses, without having that conversation. And those students I told you about wanted to have that conversation and in fact a couple of them told me they went to another college where they were able to have that conversation.

Al: 42:27

So they moved, yeah, yeah, when I first started, my first community college was five minutes away and when I started talking to the column counselors, this person was literally, she never looked at me, was literally putting on her makeup, her lipstick while talking to me, and I felt like, wow, okay, and they lost my financial aid package.

Al: 42:53

And this was back in the day before it was all done on online and I ended up driving 35 minutes to the other one where I had a very different experience, right. So those little things, you know, make all the difference. So, as we start wrapping up, I'm wondering that, let's say, you're presenting to a group of community college educators, from president down to I shouldn't say down to the research analysts, and what are what's like two or three things that you want to leave with them, like elevator speech style, so that, like they know, okay, when I go back to my campus, I really got to think of these things much more, be much more thoughtful about it, really dig in and ask good questions of our teams to see what we can do about this.

Rita: 43:49

I would suggest starting with things that are probably maybe easy to do, which is, first of all, streamline that onboarding process. Reduce the handoffs if possible. If hands-off cannot be reduced, then communicate to the students you know exactly regarding the hands-off, and provide names right, not office names. Provide names of counselors, advisors, whoever it is that they can contact. So I think that's one of the things that I would, you know, I would say that they should do. I think the other thing, too, is invest in building the capacity of advisors, whether through professional development or whether through having more advisors, and I think it's very important. I mean, that piece which is the relational piece with students, I think is very important and I think there needs to be more development of those skills or nurturing of those skills, so that the staff can have, you know, good conversation with students. I think the other thing, too, is the amount of information is a lot of information that the students get. For some students, that is OK, right, but for those who are having personal barriers, it's too much pressure on them. So if the welcoming emails and all of this information are provided in more, smaller portions, at different times and more digestible, I think that would be more helpful, I think, using text messaging maybe depending on the generation, okay, but with the younger generation, text messaging, any two-way text messaging, probably is the most efficient way, and if they can work with students on that, I think that is, I'm sorry. If they can work on building those two-way systems with students, I think that would be helpful. I think that the other thing that I would suggest also is the financial aid. The financial aid is very important and this is really why either students are dropping out, they enroll and they drop out before the census date, or the college drops them out Right them out right, and so providing information on for each institution. It's not just the FAFSA right, it's not just the form. Each institution has its own eligibility criteria. You know some people and they're you know, and so that needs to be communicated in a very simple way to students early on, so to ensure that they are doing the forms, they are providing the documents that they need to provide in time, so that the decision is made, okay, before the start of the term.

Rita: 46:51

The other thing, too, which I think is I'm going to go back which I think is I recognize it's more difficult to implement, but it's really building a case management teams, similar to the meta-majors, right, like you have for each meta-major. Maybe this onboarding can actually adopt a kind of like this kind of case management meta-major models, right? So, for those who are applying, let's say, for one of the meta-major models, right? So, for those who are applying, let's say, for one of the meta-majors, here is the team that you communicate with for the onboarding, right? So, here's your coach, here's your financial aid person, here's your, you know, advisor, right, and do it, you know, based on those meta-pagers you know.

Rita: 47:42

And then for the undecided students, they have their own, they would have their own team. So those are some of the things that I would suggest. Oh, and then the other thing too, is it's really important to for the messages not to be generic. So, you know, you mentioned veterans, right, al? Okay, you mentioned veterans, right, al Okay, the emails that go to veterans should be different than the emails that might go to, let's say, students just coming from high school, or the emails that go to adult learners should be customized. So, again, think about customizing those messages and those emails and to different student population.

Al: 48:25

Beautiful Rita. I've always appreciated your work. Oh, did you have something else?

Rita: 48:33

No, I mean, the only thing is is probably we did not talk about how many, what percentage of students colleges are losing. Yeah, you know, and I think that was probably the first question we answered and we really worked with Dallas College on that and answering that, and my colleague, also worked on that, and we found that and this was substantiated actually with other colleges who told us that they have reports that show similar percentages. So colleges are losing around 10 to 15 percent of their students who enroll, who drop before, yeah, they enroll and then they drop before the census date. So it's between 10 to 15 percent.

Rita: 49:34

However, but the colleges are also losing students from application to enrollment as well, right, so from application to enrollment, I believe it's around probably around 50% or so, okay, from those who applied and all the way before enrolling, and so I guess, if you wanted to look at the percentage of students being lost from application all the way to census date, that's a bit over 60% right.

Rita: 50:11

Now, some of the loss from application to before enrollment makes sense, right, because you know students apply to multiple places Right, because you know students apply to multiple places, but still there's, but still we believe that it's a group of students that is important for colleges to understand why they're losing them and at what point in the pipeline you know where is the leakage happening, and so that's one of the things that our report also addresses. It also addresses how to track these students, because some colleges, a few colleges, track them, but many of the colleges are not tracking them because, as because you know, different pieces of information are in different data systems and so there needs to be synchronization of these data systems, and that's very difficult to do.

Al: 51:05

So many findings and recommendations and tying it here actually, in the end, is fine to create a sense of urgency. You gave us percentages, and these are sobering percentages, and so if colleges are able to take your recommendations and operationalize them, I think a lot of colleges are already working on a lot of these things. It's just a matter of making them more cohesive, improving processes. Thank you so much for this study.

Rita: 51:39

Al, thank you so much. I enjoyed talking with you. I always enjoy talking to you, and so, yeah, that was great.

Al: 51:47

Thank you for participating in the Student Success Podcast and I look forward to your next study on the role of AI with community college students.

Rita: 51:57

Do you want to collaborate on that?

Al: 51:59

Let's do it, let's do it.

Rita: 52:03

All right, you always give me ideas. Thanks Al.

Al: 52:06

Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Student Success Podcast. You can subscribe to the show and newsletter on the Continuous Learning Institute link below and, of course, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.