Broadening the Funnel: An Approach to Improve Student Success Pipeline

The “admissions funnel” is a useful visualization of the key stages in the student admissions process where prospective applicants are admitted and subsequently enrolled to colleges and universities in the United States. Once students begin to enroll at the higher education institutions, a “student progression” funnel can be viewed as analogous to the admissions funnel for tracking the progress made by cohorts of students over time towards reaching their degree completion goals. Nationally, currently available bachelor's degree completion rate of first-time undergraduate students at the same institution within 6 years is at about 62%, while the retention rate of first-time undergraduate students returning to the same institution for their second year is at about 81%. These staggering statistics on key student success measures highlight the importance of fixing the leakage of the student progression funnel early on in hope for more students to realize their goals for successful degree completion. This article described a mixed-methods approach for identifying factors critical to student retention at one American STEM-focused teaching institution and the strategies and challenges involved in the attempt to broadening the student progression funnel for improving student success.