The Development and Growth of Professional Coaching as an Education Retention Strategy

This chapter develops background, data points, research, and literature review context around the factors and the educational environment that led to the identification of processional coaching as a promising retention strategy at post-secondary institutions. The chapter begins with some background on the history of educational coaching and how it was initially defined and then chronicles the development of professional coaching as an educational retention strategy. The chapter briefly discusses the financial impact of low retention both from a student and an institutional perspective. The chapter then looks at graduation rates by institution and surveys online versus face-to-face graduation rates and the growth of online learning and its impact on student retention. There is exploration of how for-profit institutions and their growth created a conducive environment for the design and deployment of professional coaching in the higher education sector. The chapter also investigates how increased participation in higher education led to lower completion rates and how this dynamic eventually led to the development of new and innovative strategies around retention. Some background on the birth and ascension of online degree completion programs also helps to set the stage for later research related to retention and student success and how non-first-time students as the new majority are impacting the post-secondary education marketplace. Learning and motivation challenges for non-first-time students are also introduced and explored within the context of the development of coaching as a retention strategy.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schiffman ◽  
Karen Vignare ◽  
Christine Geith

Using a unique item included for the first time in the Sloan Consortium’s 2006 national survey of online learning, the authors analyze the reasons why higher-education institutions engage in online learning. Nine reasons are explored from contributing to extension efforts to returning a surplus. Eight of the nine reasons are found to vary in importance depending on the type of institution. Significant differences were found for associate-level institutions, for-profit institutions and large-enrollment institutions. The authors examine the findings for access and quality themes.


Author(s):  
Maci Cook ◽  
Justin Chimka

Gender and graduation rates of first time engineering college students have been analyzed as a function of academic and demographic variables in order to investigate the hypothesis that an advantage to women with respect to student success might be attributed to their socioeconomic advantages as a student population. The authors present descriptive, graphical, and model-based evidence to support their ideas about gender and self-selection driven by other demographic factors that leave a disproportionate number of women out of higher education, but create a group of female students more likely than their male counterparts to succeed.


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J Deming ◽  
Claudia Goldin ◽  
Lawrence F Katz

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest-growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit institutions account for the majority of enrollments in non-degree-granting postsecondary schools. We describe the schools, students, and programs in the for-profit higher education sector, its phenomenal recent growth, and its relationship to the federal and state governments. Using the 2004 to 2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) longitudinal survey, we assess outcomes of a recent cohort of first-time undergraduates who attended for-profits relative to comparable students who attended community colleges or other public or private non-profit institutions. We find that relative to these other institutions, for-profits educate a larger fraction of minority, disadvantaged, and older students, and they have greater success at retaining students in their first year and getting them to complete short programs at the certificate and AA levels. But we also find that for-profit students end up with higher unemployment and “idleness” rates and lower earnings six years after entering programs than do comparable students from other schools and that, not surprisingly, they have far greater default rates on their loans.


The research presented throughout this chapter and in Chapters 3 and 4 comes from a 2015-16 study of a US-based for-profit coaching company that was conducted as part of the author's dissertation and doctoral studies. The research was designed to examine, understand, and explain why students assigned to receive retention and success coaching were significantly more likely to remain enrolled at their institutions than students who did not receive coaching. One of the main elements of the research was to understand and evaluate the coaches' performance in the retention of students in online degree completion programs and to inform the larger, related problem of online course and program retention. As a further focus, the study was designed to inform and improve retention of the most difficult community of students, the non-first-time student enrolled in an online degree completion program. This chapter looks at the knowledge elements and components of highly impactful coaching.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter P. Smith

The United States is in a bind. On the one hand, we need millions of additional citizens with at least one year of successful post-secondary experience to adapt to the knowledge economy. Both the Gates and Lumina Foundations, and our President, have championed this goal in different ways. On the other hand, we have a post-secondary system that is trapped between rising costs and stagnant effectiveness, seemingly unable to respond effectively to this challenge. This paper analyzes several aspects of this problem, describes changes in the society that create the basis for solutions, and offers several examples from Kaplan University of emerging practice that suggests what good practice might look like in a world where quality-assured mass higher education is the norm.


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