Impact of First-Year Initiatives on Retention of Students: Are There Differences in Retention of Students by Ethnicity and Gender?

Project Succeed is a campus-wide initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Its focus is to improve the 5-year graduation and retention rates and close the achievement gap for Under-Represented Minorities (URMs) across all majors at San José State University (SJSU). In addition, SJSU has a high percent of first generation students. We have several thrusts under this project: block scheduling, Faculty/Staff Mentor program, expanding Peer Educators, developing a First Year Experience Program, and developing more student living learning communities. This project is in its fourth year and we have analyzed each project effort with respect to its impact on the retention of freshmen and sophomore students. In this paper, we will analyze the overall results of our efforts as well as describe the retention rates of URM students in our project. We will compare the retention of students participating in block scheduling with students not active in our project to see if there are differences in retention and academic performance for engineering majors