A ‘wildly intrusive’ way to help older college students get their degrees – The Hechinger Report
An experiment at John Jay College to get seniors over the final hurdle to graduation is worth watching
The John Jay College for Criminal Justice is known for training New York City’s future police officers and as Dara Byrne rose through the ranks of the college’s administration, she noticed a mystery right on her campus: why were 2,000 seniors, with only one year left to graduate, not enrolling in the fall?
“Students in that 90-credit zone, really close to graduation, were leaving,” said Byrne, when I talked to her by phone. “I couldn’t understand why because it’s counter to what you would think. You’re almost there. You’ve got only three, four, five, eight classes left.” Many of these students intended to return. “But data showed that very few of them came back to us,” Byrne said. “Thousands of students a year, never getting a degree.”
In 2018, Byrne and her colleagues decided to play detective using predictive analytics, which tracks student data to predict who is likely to graduate or not. In addition to being dean of undergraduate studies, Byrne has a second job as associate provost for undergraduate retention and it is her job to make sure John Jay’s students — mostly low-income and many the first in their families to attend college — graduate. Typically, colleges work on improving graduation rates by investing more in students when they first arrive on campus. But Byrne’s observation convinced her that she needed to turn this model around and nurture older, non-traditional students at the end of their college careers.