INTRODUCTION

Retention, Persistence, and Writing: Expanding the Conversation

Todd Ruecker, Dawn Shepherd, Heidi Estrem, and Beth Brunk-Chavez

"Colleges are Failing in Graduation Rates." "It's Bonus Time for Arizona University Presidents." "Keep Students, Earn More." These headlines have something in common: higher education's increased concern over student retention and graduation in recent years, a concern that has impacted colleges and universities in ways we could not have predicted a decade ago. For example, the majority of states now have funding formulas in place that weigh retention and graduation rates in determining funding allotments ("Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education" 2015). Perhaps not too surprising, university president compensation is now often partially based on reaching and surpassing retention and matriculation benchmarks. And in an interesting and perhaps somewhat predictable move, at least one institution, Coastal Carolina University, has implemented a new policy that directly links faculty salary compression raises to improved student retention rates (Mulhere 2015). The logic goes that with more students staying around to finish their educations, postsecondary institutions can maintain their enrollment and share a portion of the tuition dollars that go along with them. These are three examples, but one would be hard pressed to find a single state, even a single institution, that isn't "gravely concerned" about retention and graduation rates and is in the process of developing a range of strategic plans, action plans, programs, initiatives, and metrics to keep students enrolled and graduating in a timely manner. We wonder, however, how involved academic programs and their faculty are — or should be — in these conversations?

As teachers and scholars interested in improving student success at our institutions, this increased attention to retention and persistence is welcomed. As teachers of writing in postsecondary institutions, the four of us have been increasingly concerned about students in our classes who show up for a day, a week, or even a few months, and then disappear, sometimes because of unexpected family obligations or simply because they fall behind in the coursework due to an inflexible or overwhelming work schedule. We have explored how to work with students as individuals while thinking of ways to improve success rates across our writing programs. We are not alone. A search through the Writing Program Administrator's listserv (WPA-L) archives shows retention to be an ongoing interest of the composition community, a community who tends to teach small classes and has the opportunity to get to know the students who disappear. However, with the exception of work by Beth Brunk-Chavez and Elaine Fredericksen (Brunk-Chavez and Fredericksen 2008), Pegeen Reichert Powell (2009, 2014), and Todd Ruecker (2015), and some scholarship in basic writing (e.g., Baker and Jolly 1999; Glau 2007; Hagedorn 2012; McCurrie 2009; Peele 2010; Seidman 2012; Webb-Sunderhaus 2010), there has been very little published work that explores the ways writing program instructors and administrators can be involved in discussions of student retention and success and affect change not only at the programmatic level but also at the institutional and state levels.

But what is it that we mean when we enter conversations about retention? As you read this collection, you will notice that a variety of terms are used to talk about issues concerning this subject. When we discuss and analyze issues related to the retention of students in higher education, we use words like success, persistence, retention, "drop out vs. stop out," and others. The title of this collection captures two of the most prominent terms, retention and persistence. As editors, we use retention deliberately because it is the key term most often used in the popular media and in our own scholarship. Retention is an institutional approach — and one that perhaps too often loses sight of student learning, interests, and motivations while focusing on the statistical and financial importance of each retained student. Student persistence, though, is in many ways the mirror opposite of retention. This term is most often identified with Vincent Tinto's work; it situates agency differently than does retention and assumes that students have a variety of reasons for continuing in higher education, or not. Using both these terms, as we do in the title, reflects our belief that that continued student learning and engagement in college is a mutual responsibility that involves actions by both institutions and students.

Other terms commonly associated with retention/persistence discourse are involvement, engagement, and integration. Wolf-Wendel, Ward, and Kinzie (2009) define involvement as "responsibility of the individual student," (425) focusing on the energy they put into participating in the classroom and in other aspects of campus life. In contrast, engagement centers on the work that administrators, faculty, and staff do in "creating campus...