Tables

In 1993, 2.4 million students entered college; of those, some 1.1 million will leave without a degree (Tinto, 1993). This is not a new trend. Data from the American College Testing Program show that the first-year attrition rate for all students in four-year public universities has remained largely unchanged over the last decade. In 1983, this rate was 29.1%; in 1992 it was 28.3% (Tinto, 1993). The other end of the undergraduate time-scale looks equally distressing. In 1983, the graduation rate at the same institutions was 52.6 % while in 1992 it had declined to 46.7%. The phenomenon of college attrition is even more exaggerated among certain underrepresented minority groups. Hispanics graduated at a rate of only 35%, and African [End Page 55] Americans at a rate of only 45 % (Brower, 1992), far below the rates for White students (Tinto, 1993). What kind of efforts at the college level can counter this trend? In this paper, we offer a typology of retention efforts to date that have been informed by a variety of presumed causes of attrition. We examine factors that promote student retention and success as a way of thinking about innovative and effective programs. We describe and report on the evaluation of one such program--student-faculty research partnerships--that bridges the academic and student services domains while at the same time being responsive to the institutional context. The causes of attrition are numerous, thereby leading to multiple retention efforts that concentrate on different factors. Indeed, Tinto's (1993) model of attrition identifies a variety of factors that ought to predict attrition, in accord with the variety of issues that face students as they move from high school through college. Broadly speaking, retention efforts that have addressed one or another of these factors can be classified into two categories. The first assumes that students who do not graduate were underprepared for college work at entrance; individual student deficiencies are thus seen as responsible for attrition (Boykin