Survey of Academic Department Chairs, Role in Student Retention Efforts

Survey of Academic Department Chairs, Role in Student Retention Efforts

3.93% considered it highly likely; 22.95%, likely. Department chair in engineering/mathematics were particularly likely to feel that online tutoring would be an important tool in their departments; other disciplines with a high propensity to believe that online tutoring will be very important in their department were economics/business, languages and literature, psychology and social work, and biological sciences.

40% of US department chair thought it would be important vs. less than 23% of Canadian/other department chair.

More colleges and universities are expanding the role of academic departments in retention efforts, and this survey looks at the reaction of department chair to these and related efforts.

122 department chair drawn from more than 100 colleges and universities provide data and commentary, enabling this report’s end users to answer the following kinds of question: what role to department chair play in retention efforts? How closely do the work with college and university retention officials? What percentage and kinds of departments mount their own independent retention efforts? What percentage have departmental tutoring programs? What is the role of online tutoring in their efforts? How successful have they been? What role have adjunct faculty played? How well coordinated are retention efforts? And much more.

Data in the report is broken out by departmental variables such as academic field, instructor size and number of years the department chair has served, as well as by institutional variables such as overall enrollment, tuition, public/private status and Carnegie class, among other variables.