Keeping Students at Cal State LA: Strategies for Retention

• Reflect on your current teaching practice. What is the best thing anyone has told you about your teaching? What are your success stories? What are your challenges? What are you interested in learning more about?
• Professional development is an ongoing expectation for any professional practice. College teaching is no exception. Faculty are never “done”. A lot has also changed about the classroom, including technology, since the COVID pandemic. What support do you need?
• Consult the Teaching Professional Development Plan and consider challenging yourself in new areas. Use the TPDP to identify new interests. Consider the ACUE Courses in Effective Teaching Practices.
• Make your classroom an active space. There are established best practices for teaching; over 1,000 studies have demonstrated that active learning is the effective and equitable learning strategy. Not sure how to build active learning in your classroom? Attend an Active Learning workshop.
• Are your students coming to class? Consult instructors whose students are attending. What are these faculty doing? Not doing?
• How much of the hidden curriculum in your classes is made visible for your students? Use the Transparency in Learning and Teaching framework to provide explicit structure and clarity to your assignments.
• There is support! Make an appointment to discuss your teaching with a colleague or mentor. CETL also offers peer coaching services (Dr. Kris Bezdecny).

• Use the following Equity-Minded Classroom checklist to confirm the student-centered behaviors you already practice in every class. Try a few more. Belonging matters deeply to student retention.
• Are your syllabus and course materials student centered?
  • Use the Student-Centered Materials Rubric to help you reflect. Make sure ALL students are represented in course materials.
  • Consider moving your syllabus online to Canvas (see below) and adopting the CETL Syllabus Template.
  • Use the Syllabus Checklist to ensure that your students have all the information they need at the start of the semester.
• Clear and organized course materials are a high-impact practice.

• Cal State LA boasts fantastic Canvas adoption rates by faculty and students. Is your Canvas course shell a good proxy for your course? Students are digital natives and want to see ALL materials findable online in one place--even for face-to-face classes.
• Consider taking the self-paced workshop Organizing Your Course to see the full potential of Canvas to act as a central hub for your class. 
• Consider participating in online or hybrid course development to give students additional flexibility and options. 
• Robust, well designed courses positively impact student success. The bar is set higher for online courses, where quality assurance design matters even more. The Cal State LA Office of Institutional Effectiveness analyzed student success data between Fall 2018 and Fall 2022. Faculty who redesigned courses as part of the Online Course Development Program decreased their rates of DFUs from 12.2% to 9.4% post training, a percentage decrease of almost 23%.

• Accessible instructional materials are an equity practice.
• Accessibility is key to realizing the University’s mission to promote a culture of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (EDIB). By ensuring course accessibility, faculty help promote EDIB in their teaching and create learning environments that benefit all students.
• ITS Universal Design Services offers faculty an easy to use, no-cost service to make digital instructional materials accessible.
• Learn more on the AIM for Student Success webpage.

• Are you teaching your students how to use generative AI? As gen AI advances accelerated last year, many students have begun to use tools such as ChatGPT, Grammarly, Gemini, and Copilot in courses—whether they are asked to or not. 
  • Students report that they feel unprepared for the role artificial learning will play in life after college. Ignoring AI risks widening the digital divide and hurts the very students we serve.
  • Our students expect that basic AI skills will be taught in college courses. 
  • Set clear policies about how and when students can use AI in your classes.
• Teach students how to ethically use AI for your classes!
  • Consider enlisting your students in helping you design your class policy.
  • Participate in the campus’s new AI certification program. 
  • Outstanding self-paced online courses are now available from CSU San Diego, CSU Monterey Bay, as well as ACUE. Go at your own pace.

The Center for Academic Success is available to all students at Cal State LA to help support academic growth. The Center provides students with a number of resources, including:

• Peer Tutors for courses who help review course concepts and work on problems and processes.
• Peer writing tutors who help brainstorm, organize, and review an essay for class, a personal statement for a scholarship, or a cover letter for a job.
• Student Research Consultants who help with research, brainstorming keywords, finding books and articles on a particular subject, or formatting citations.
• The PLUS Program that provides extra support for those enrolled in quantitative reasoning.
• The Peer Leader Program that connects selected incoming first-year students with students who have successfully navigated the college experience.
• Study Skills Workshops on topics such as time management, college readiness, test taking tips, and writing strategies.
• After-Hours Tutoring is also available for students.
• Student Resources are available on a number of topics, such as how to use Grammarly, introduction to writing and grammar, and reading comprehension for college students.

• Libraries uniquely connect students with people, resources, and space. 
• Remind students of the various Library study and meeting spaces available to them. 
• Consider the affordability of your course materials. Expensive textbooks and class materials can negatively impact student success. 
  • Look into the Program for Affordable Learning Materials 
  • Leverage Library Course Reserves. 
• Work with your Library Liaisons to curate Library materials well suited to your course.
• Schedule a Library information literacy session to supplement your instruction. 
• Seamlessly integrate Library materials using the Canvas integrated Reading List. 

The dashboards maintained by the Office of Institutional Effectiveness provide historical data on your own courses, including equity gaps, DFW rates, and demographics of your course-takers. You can compare grade distribution, DFW rates, and gaps in the courses you taught with those of other instructors who taught the same courses.

• Revisit your course completion rates on the Instructor-based DFW Dashboards. Please refer to the Dashboard Guides for information on how to use and interpret the dashboard data. For questions about the dashboards, please email [email protected]
• Data can tell a story.
  • By exploring the five tabs in the Instructor-based DFW Dashboards, you can uncover stories about historical trends and student performance in the courses you taught.  
  • What story does your data tell? Take a holistic view of your student success data, as it represents the impact your class had on each of your students.

• It is always a good time to have peer discussions that establish community practice and shared expectations around teaching.
• Is your department ready for constructive and inclusive conversations on student retention? Consider doing some of the following:
  • Make space for regular department discussions about students, about teaching excellence, and about the quality of the curriculum.
  • Conduct a departmental equity audit or impact analysis. 
  • Collectively identify departmental values.
  • Consider how and where justice, equity, and inclusion are or aren't built into the learning outcomes and curriculum.
  • Take steps to revise departmental mission, outcomes, policies, and practices to better align with equity, inclusion, and departmental values.  
• Not sure how to start the conversation broadly? Have a look at the following Good Meetings checklist and the Managing Difficult Conversations handout.

• Lecturers matter. The degree to which lecturer faculty are supported mirrors student success.
  • Include lecturers in any department discussions.
  • Introductory and lower-division General Education courses, most likely taught by lecturers, are ground zero for retention efforts. These are often the courses that have the highest DFW rates:
    • Consider coordination of gateway (commonly offered, multi-section) courses which impact university retention broadly.
    • Department teams which house a course with DFW rates above 20% should consider participating in the Critical Course Redesign for Equity and Student Success program.
    • Departments can work with the Center for Academic Success to align tutoring support with these courses.
  • Individual instructors who teach in the first-year curriculum make a big difference to retention. Great instructors, especially those with robust instructional professional development, can help you ensure student success in your first-year curriculum. If you teach first-year classes, thank you! Our students need you.

• Students often question the value of GE (non-major courses) and are eager to get on to coursework that will lead more directly to their careers. Is it time to revisit and revise any of these courses?
  • As an Hispanic Serving Institution and member of the community, we can commit to career education in the classroom--an impactful practice for our Latinx students. 
  • Consider student perceptions of GE coursework.
  • Department teams should consider participating in the Critical Course Redesign for Equity and Student Success program.
  • Students who stay in college elect to do so because a professional or career goal has been met. Discuss with your department how to embed career relevance into coursework at scale. Consider becoming a Career-Engaged Department.
  • Students have changed since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Students continue to struggle emotionally and mentally. Demand for online and hybrid courses has increased, and continues to remain higher than before the pandemic.

• Are you a Chair? You are critical to the process.
  • Review the Department Chairs’ Toolkit and its resources to support retention strategies.
  • Participate in the monthly Chairs Training workshop series through the Office of Faculty Affairs.
  • Encourage first-year instructors to participate in teaching professional development activities, and to continue to pursue professional development over the course of their teaching career. Use the Teaching Professional Development Plan to help guide them.
  • Department Chairs, faculty in additional leadership roles, and future leaders can request CETL’s facilitation workshops.

It is good to gather data from a variety of sources (not just friends or anecdotally). Here’s what we know so far about continuing student trends that impact the classroom:

• Enrollment declines and the so-called enrollment cliff are here: Nationally, undergraduate enrollments were down roughly 2.25 million students (12.9%) from Fall 2013 to Fall 2023.
• The CSU experienced a drop of enrollment of 15.8% or roughly 69,000 students during the same period— 2013 to 2023. In addition, the state faces an impending demographic enrollment cliff in Fall 2025 – expected to persist in California, and Los Angeles County through 2035. Undergraduate enrollment in the CSU will only grow slowly.
• Cal State LA undergraduate enrollment is down nearly 4,400 students (18.2%) since 2018.
• College-age students, the source of our transfer population, are leaving the community college system.
• There is no one reason why students leave college--but when they leave us, they usually leave college for good. They do not transfer or attend another school.

• What good models for retention already exist in the College? Who are your success stories?
• What information may be missing from the conversation? What data do you need? College leadership can help connect the dots to ensure as full a retention picture as possible.

• Don’t be afraid of difficult conversations. To start the broader conversations about retention issues, see the Managing Difficult Conversations handout.
• What support does your department or program need to have these broader discussions? The Provost is funding lunches for any department or program interested in curriculum development that supports retention.

Is your department or program reorganizing, consolidating, or contracting? The Curriculum Retreat Planning Worksheet may be helpful if you are interested in curriculum redesign.