Student Success

Community College Boosts Retention with Student Pathways Redesign

• By Rhea Kelly
• 06/03/19

A multi-year campaign to improve student success at Lorain County Community College is seeing positive results. The Ohio institution utilized Civitas Learning's student success platform and suite of application to identify common barriers to student persistence and streamline pathways to completion, increasing full-time student retention by nearly 12 percentage points.

Data analysis from the Civitas Learning platform revealed key issues around time to degree, working-student barriers, and transfer-student needs, according to a news announcement, allowing LCCC to create new policies and student support programs to improve the college's academic pathways. And personalized predictive models helped LCCC advisers better understand each student and more effectively scale and tailor outreach and support.

In addition, LCCC students can use the platform to select courses and pathways that will get them to completion more efficiently. The college reports that students have saved $3.1 million in tuition costs from reducing the number of extraneous credits taken along the way to graduation.

"The hard work of our faculty, staff, advisors and students is reflected not just in growing national recognition, but, more importantly, in the improved outcomes of striving students year after year," said Marcia J. Ballinger, president of Lorain County Community College, in a statement. "Civitas Learning has been a power partner in this work, enabling us to reduce the sort of friction and barriers that historically prevented students from achieving their potential."