Study: 6 Behavioral Changes Affect Student Retention, Morale on College Campuses

The recipe for a college student’s success can include many factors, including early intervention, one-on-one support and easy-to-navigate institutional practices. A new study now points to the value of caring practices and how intentional behaviors that promote connection in the classroom can make a difference in student achievement.

Research from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College evaluated the Institute for Evidence-Based Change’s (IEBC) program Caring Campus to understand the costs and outcomes of the intervention.

The study found Caring Campus work builds relationships between faculty members and learners that foster feelings of belonging, as well as benefits the overall campus climate through encouraging collaboration and positive change among stakeholders.

The background: Caring Campus was developed by nonprofit group IEBC and seeks to shift an institution’s culture to establish greater care for students and other community members. The program addresses students’ feelings of belonging at their institution, which is tied to engagement, involvement and academic achievement.

“We see a tremendous amount of research … really it started with Tinto in the ’80s and ’90s, all about the fact that students don’t feel connected and they need that sense of belonging,” says Brad Phillips, IEBC president and Caring Campus coach. “The challenge is that much of that work is about putting the responsibility on the student.”

Caring Campus, on the other hand, asks faculty, staff and administrators to re-evaluate how they engage with students and take intentional steps to use behaviors that demonstrate care, Phillips says. The program is in place at 150 colleges and universities across 26 states.

One facet of the program, Caring Campus Faculty, targets professors who have demonstrated consistent measures of student retention and success in their classes to identify behaviors that can be modeled campuswide for large-scale change.

“On the faculty side, you know, no administrator can tell a faculty member what to do,” Phillips says. “So what we do is we call it ‘likes with likes,’ meaning we work with this faculty group to then work with their colleagues.”

The CCRC evaluated Caring Campus Faculty from 2019 to 2023, conducting virtual site visits at four community colleges, interviewing four IEBC coaches and 13 Caring Campus liaisons. Researchers also collected survey data from faculty members and students at two participating colleges.

How it works: College leaders interested in undertaking Caring Campus first hold an interest meeting with IEBC staff to evaluate the institution’s readiness to engage in the process before starting the program. Leaders also complete a short readiness assessment, which helps inform the coaches if the institution is prepared to begin the endeavor.

Once launched, Caring Campus has five phases:

1. A leadership orientation with the IEBC coach to plan out the process and establish requirements of implementation.
2. From there, institutional researchers generate faculty data to identify instructors who have demonstrated success in their courses over the past three semesters. IEBC staff review data and select a group of faculty to interview (with the number of faculty varying based on institution size).
3. Selected faculty participants meet with the IEBC coach three times in person or six times virtually during the semester, introducing them to the Caring Campus program, outlining behavioral commitments and creating a campus implementation plan.
4. After faculty participants reshape the commitments to fit their college’s culture and climate, they meet with college leadership to present their implementation plan and gain support for their efforts.
5. Participants continue to meet monthly to monitor progress, evolving into a standing committee of the college, and IEBC keeps in touch with leadership to assist in institutionalization and track students’ progress.

What’s different: Rather than being an additive initiative, Caring Campus is about six behavioral changes that inspire others, Phillips says.

The behavioral commitments include welcoming students to establish a sense of community, learning students’ names, meeting with students outside class, creating a detailed syllabus with classroom policies, implementing regular assessments and providing students with flexibility and situational fairness.

This work continues that cycle by creating deeper connections between the learner and the practitioner.

“When we start off our meetings with faculty, one of the things we ask them is, is there someone in your life that has helped you become an educator? It’s almost always a faculty member that’s changed their life,” Phillips says.

Researchers, through interviews and site visits, also learned colleges join because they feel the program can impact student persistence and completion, many believing it can increase equitable outcomes.

The program has been appealing, too, for its low costs and potential to impact revenue meaningfully, as well as assist other organizational priorities such as supporting faculty members. The college pays for coaching costs, which are often covered by grant funds, making personnel time the greatest resource devoted to this work.

On the ground: Making Caring Campus a reality, researchers and Phillips have learned, involves several factors and practices.

• Most institutions found agreement in adapting and applying Caring Campus behaviors, particularly learning and using students’ names, creating one-on-one connections, and implementing assignments and assessments. Situational fairness, however, is a more controversial commitment, particularly given the background of the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted students’ learning and personal lives. Students see the value of instructors providing them with flexibility for extenuating circumstances, but some faculty members worry about equality for all learners.
• Expanding Caring Campus principles to the entire faculty population can be a challenge, with some campuses finding it difficult to recruit instructors to engage while others have an easier time drawing their colleagues into the fold. Adjunct faculty members are more difficult to engage, because their contracts may limit the hours of participation on campus, and they can lack dedicated office space to work with students outside the classroom. Some rural campuses have had to adjust Caring Campus into an intense three-day training to accommodate faculty needs, Phillips shares.

• Top-down leadership and reinforcement of Caring Campus principles is key. Most college leaders use large campus gatherings, like convocation, to inform the campus community about Caring Campus, recognizing the efforts of those involved and informing stakeholders about the program and how it ties to institutional goals. Others open every meeting with a “Caring Campus moment” to put students at the forefront of university goals, Phillips adds.
• To ensure that Caring Campus is sustainable and continues past the coaching process, institutions engage their leadership, encourage faculty ownership of the program, integrate Caring Campus with other initiatives, use data to monitor progress and incentivize participation.
• Among the three colleges studied, early data from Oakton College (see box at left) shows students who completed a course with a faculty member who engaged in Caring Campus were more likely to retain compared to their peers who did not. College leaders say the intervention has also helped create connections between faculty members across the college and improve problem-solving conversations.

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