Two decades ago, Xavier University could only count on three of every four freshmen returning for sophomore year. Even fewer made it to graduation.
Today, though, close to 9 of every 10 students who start freshman year at the Jesuit university in Cincinnati makes it back the next fall. Seven in 10 will graduate in four years, and another one will likely graduate in the two years after that.
The quality of students Xavier admits hasn’t changed, nor have its academic standards. The biggest difference is one man – Adrian A. Schiess, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel — and his day-in, day-out devotion to keeping students at Xavier.
Since 1990, Schiess, a former professor of military science at Xavier, has been the university’s full-time director for student success and retention, an on-campus guru whose job responsibilities all lead to the same goal: helping any student who wants to be at Xavier stay at Xavier.
“There’s no magic to retention,” he says. “The key is hard work and a position like mine — having someone who has focused responsibility from the university to guide and steer efforts to keep students here.”
At other colleges, Schiess says, retention is an afterthought. “All the enrollment management people are really thinking about is admissions and financial aid. They might say, ‘You get them, you pay for them and you keep them,’ but they end up taking the third part as a given — but it really isn’t.”