How to Improve Student Retention With a Year-Round Strategy

For higher ed teams, retention can feel like a number you’re constantly chasing. It’s a signal watched by prospective students and their families, ranking bodies, accreditors, and your own leadership. When the number dips, the pressure lands squarely on the people responsible for tracking and improving it, often without a corresponding increase in resources or time.

In a National Student Clearinghouse study of nearly 2.62 million students who entered college in fall 2024 in the U.S., only 85.8% continued their enrollment into the spring 2025 term. Just 69.1% remained at their starting institution, while 8% transferred to another one.

Every departure, even when it reflects circumstances beyond an institution’s control, has a ripple effect. It can mean lost tuition revenue, a smaller returning class, added pressure on enrollment goals, and another retention metric that becomes even harder to improve.

The good news is that institutions have more tools than ever to influence that outcome. The most effective retention strategies are about identifying challenges early, understanding what students need, and reaching out before those challenges become barriers to persistence.

This blog explores several proactive strategies institutions can use to do just that.

Understanding Student Retention KPIs

Before going further, it helps to define the terms higher ed institutions use to measure retention.

• Student retention (the positive metric): Tracks how well a college provides the resources, academic support, and community engagement needed to keep students enrolled semester to semester and through graduation. High retention signals your institution delivers on its promise.
• College attrition (the loss metric): The percentage of students who leave a program without completing their degree, whether they transfer elsewhere, drop out due to academic or financial struggles, or pause their studies entirely. 
• Persistence (the “anywhere” metric): Whether a student continues their education anywhere, even if they transfer away from you.

The distinction between metrics matters because a school can have decent persistence numbers while quietly losing students to competitors. If your students are continuing their education but doing it somewhere else, that’s still a signal worth investigating.

The Expectations You Set for Students Influence Retention

The “expectation gap” describes what happens when the experience students expect based on an institution’s messaging doesn’t match the reality they encounter on campus. Somewhere along the way, your institution sends messages, through brochures, campus tours, social media, financial aid letters, and conversations, that promise something. A supportive community. Career outcomes. A particular kind of campus life. Those early messages shape the student’s decision to enroll in the first place, and influence whether they stay.

A student’s perception of your institution isn’t built by admissions materials alone. It’s built through hundreds of small interactions that follow.

Consider how much a first-year student experiences and receives an impression of your institution:

• An advising appointment. Was it on time? Thoughtful? Rushed? Didn’t happen?
• A faculty member. Were they attentive? Considerate? Helpful?
• A financial aid question. Did it get bounced between three offices? Answered quickly?
• The registration experience. Did it go off without a hitch? Was it too confusing or disorganized?
• A welcome message from their academic department. Did it highlight available resources? Introduce faculty? Was it absent?
• A chance to connect with other students. Or, did the student spend a semester feeling invisible?

Each of these moments either confirms or contradicts the promise that got the student to enroll. When the lived experience matches the expectation, students feel they made the right choice. When there’s a gap, doubt creeps in. And doubt, left unaddressed, is where attrition begins.

Why Retention Programs Often Intervene Too Late

Most retention programs are built around detection. Departments watch for warning signs, failing grades, skipped classes, missed payments, and then deploy support once those signs appear. This is valuable work, and no institution should abandon it. However, it’s inherently reactive.

Intervening at the warning-sign stage is like patching a leak after the basement has flooded. It helps, but the damage is already underway.

By the time a student is failing a course or has stopped logging into the learning platform, they’ve often already emotionally checked out. The academic struggle is frequently a symptom of something that started earlier. Perhaps a sense of not belonging, financial stress that made them pick up extra work shifts, or the quiet realization that the school they enrolled in didn’t feel like the school they were promised.

Treat retention less as an emergency response and more as an ongoing part of the student experience.

Proactive retention asks, what can we do in the first weeks and months, before any warning signs appear, to close the gap between expectation and experience?

Where Marketing & Communications Outreach Become Retention Tools

This is where higher education marketing and communications become retention tools and not solely recruitment tools. The messaging that brings students in should be honest, specific, and consistent with what they’ll actually encounter. Overselling the experience may boost enrollment in the short term, but it plants the seeds of disappointment.

Just as important is what happens after enrollment. The tone, timing, and clarity of communication throughout the first year, from orientation to registration reminders to check-ins, either reinforces belonging or erodes it.

Students who feel seen and supported by consistent, thoughtful communication are far more likely to stay. In a randomized university study, students who received weekly, two-way text messages from academic advisors, including timely guidance, support resources, and invitations to connect, were 3.08 percentage points more likely to persist in their college through the semester than peers receiving standard communications. Though it can’t be claimed as cause-and-effect, this study shows consistent, personalized outreach can make a measurable difference.

Four Proactive Strategies for Year-Round Retention

Getting ahead of attrition means building support into the student experience before anyone needs rescuing, from academics to financials to personal challenges. Let’s break down a few proactive strategies.

1. Use Predictive Analytics and Early Alerts

Rather than waiting for a student to fail a class or stop showing up, higher ed institutions can use data to step in early.

• Early warning systems (EWS) track real-time attendance, declining grades, missed assignments, and drops in digital engagement.
• Targeted interventions use algorithms to trigger automated alerts that connect struggling students with advisors and resources before they slip through the cracks.

Frankel’s Tip: These alerts are only as good as the outreach that follows. A well-timed, warmly written message rather than a cold automated notice is what actually re-engages a wavering student.

2. Ease Financial Barriers

Financial stress is one of the leading causes of dropout, and it often hits before grades ever slip.

• Financial literacy counseling helps students understand loans, payment plans, and scholarship options before a crisis hits.
• Emergency micro-grants cover unexpected costs that might otherwise force a student to pause their education.

Frankel’s Tip: Many students don’t know these resources exist. Proactive, clear communication through a targeted campaign about aid and emergency support can often be the difference between a student staying and quietly walking away.

3. Strengthen Academic Support

Accessibility to academic support keeps students from being overwhelmed by difficult coursework.

• Structured tutoring or peer support can enhance free, easy-to-find peer tutoring and study groups. It helps foster connection and an inclusive, supportive campus culture.
• Faculty rapport and availability can be implemented through several means, including encouraging students to use virtual or in-person office hours, sharing campus resources, and asking for course feedback.

Frankel’s Tip: Support that no one knows about doesn’t get used. Promoting these services and rapport early and often normalizes asking for help and transforms the pursuit of success from an isolated struggle into a shared, collaborative experience.

4. Foster Community and Belonging

Students who feel connected to their institution are far more likely to persist to graduation.

• Mentorship programs pair first-year and transfer students with upper-class mentors who help them navigate university life.
• Inclusive orientation can be extended, engaging programming that introduces students to affinity groups, clubs, and resources early to ensure students feel welcomed to get involved.

Frankel’s Tip: Belonging is built through consistent, personalized communication. Segmented messaging that speaks to a commuter student differently than a residential first-year is one way you can make each group feel seen.

Before Implementation, Use Research to Identify Areas of Improvement

An invisible gap cannot be fixed. That’s why the most effective retention strategies should start with research into what your specific students actually need and want.

National data tells you the scope of the problem. Your own students tell you the shape of it.

Surveys, focus groups, interviews, and analysis of engagement patterns reveal where the promise and the experience diverge on your campus. Maybe first-generation students feel lost in the financial aid process. Maybe commuter students never find their community. Maybe a particular program’s advising leaves students unsure of their path. These are knowable things, and knowing them early lets you act before a student reaches the warning-sign stage.

Research also reveals what your audience responds to, so you can best inform a marketing and communications campaign. The message that resonates with a first-year, 18-year-old undeclared major living in dorms for the first time or a junior theatre major living off-campus differs in priorities. Understanding these differences lets you communicate in ways that actually reach students and reinforce their decision to stay at your institution.

Consider the Connection Between Academic and Non-Academic Touchpoints

Retention lives at the intersection of the academic and the personal. A student might be doing fine in their classes but feel completely disconnected socially, or thriving socially while quietly drowning in coursework. Institutions that treat these as separate problems, handled by separate offices that never talk to each other, may miss the full picture.

The strongest retention strategies align every touchpoint—advising, faculty, financial aid, student life, and departmental communication—around a holistic, shared understanding of the student. When these functions work from the same insights and send consistent, coordinated messages, students experience the institution as a cohesive whole that has their back, and can trigger a “just-in-time” intervention before they drop out.

Avoiding Summer Melt: When Students Quietly Decide Not to Come Back

There’s one more reason to think of retention as year-round: timing. The decision to transfer or step away often crystallizes during the summer, in the gap between spring and fall terms, when students are away from campus, reflecting on their experience, and often facing financial or logistical pressures. At the beginning of the blog, we pointed out that a study found an 8-percentage-point decline between spring and the following fall. If your retention efforts go quiet over the summer, you’ve gone silent at precisely the moment many students are deciding whether to come back.

Year-round engagement, especially through that vulnerable summer window, keeps students connected during the exact period when the drift tends to happen. Read more on preventing summer melt and non-matriculation in our blog, Why Enrollment Yield Is Slipping and What Institutions Can Do About It.

The Next Step? Build a Proactive Retention Strategy

There’s no single retention tactic that will keep every student enrolled. Some circumstances will always be outside an institution’s control. But there is a lot within your control. The expectations you set, the questions you ask, the signals you notice, the support you make visible, and the way you communicate when a student starts to lose their footing.

That’s the opportunity we see at Frankel. To uncover the student experience, and speak to that. What are students telling you? What are they not telling you? Where is there a disconnect between what your institution promises and what they experience? And what could change if those insights shaped your strategy, your brand, your communications, and the experiences around them?

We bring research, strategy, brand, and creative together to turn those insights into communications and recommendations that meet the students where they are. It’s how we’ve helped higher ed institutions for over two decades build experiences students don’t just choose, but choose to stay with.

Talk with our team today about uncovering the gaps and finding opportunities to close them. All it takes is a quick message!