UAB improves student retention with family engagement

Meredith Kahl, Director of Off Campus Student & Family Engagement at University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB), knew that positioning parents as partners would improve the student experience when she implemented CampusESP in August of 2019. But after seeing how families engaged with the system and her team’s communications, Kahl began to wonder just how much their parent engagement strategy was moving the needle.

Working with teams in UAB’s Family Engagement and Institutional Effectiveness and Analysis departments, Kahl’s goal was to determine if there was a true, statistical relationship between family engagement efforts and student retention for the first-year students that arrived at UAB in Fall of 2019.

The finding: students with higher family engagement were more likely to be retained. 

Let’s dig a little deeper into the data and the team’s three biggest takeaways.

1. As family engagement increased, so did GPA and student retention

UAB analysts looked at the overall engagement of families and classified them with a Total Parent Engagement score between 0-4; 4 being high engagement with communications and 0 being little to no engagement. 

So what constituted “parent engagement”? For this analysis, Kahl included a variety of types of programs and their reciprocal actions, such as email communication opens and clicks and attendance at Family Weekend.

This was merged with data from UAB’s student information system, Banner, to see how the students of the families in CampusESP were fairing.

When these scores were modeled against the students GPAs and retention rates, it became clear that the more engaged the family, the higher the probability of student retention and GPA.

2. For every one-point increase in Total Parent Engagement the student was 1.3 times more likely to be retained

The UAB analysts looked at a lot of data to prove statistical significance across all the results generated, but in the end the math points us to one key stat: exactly how much family engagement increases the odds of a student being retained. The results show that for all populations, the average student is 1.297 times more likely to be retained for every 1 point higher the Total Parent Engagement score attributed to their parents is. 

So a student with a Total Parent Engagement score of 1 is 1.297 times more likely to be retained than a student with a score of 0, a student with a score of 2 is 2.594 times more likely to be retained, and so on. 

3. Parent email click rates are significantly correlated with student retention

With the data clearly showing that higher family engagement would lead to higher retention, the next obvious question is how to achieve high family engagement. While UAB utilizes a number of communication tools to engage families, emails are the centerpiece of the strategy, and for good reason — 96% of families say email is their preferred method of communication for their student’s institution.

UAB analysts found that the strongest indicator of engagement was click rates within those emails. The click rates of families of retained students were significantly higher than those of students who were not retained. This increased engagement has been even more noticeable after COVID began. 

UAB’s findings are consistent with what CampusESP has seen at countless other universities — a strong family communications strategy leads to increased engagement and, in turn, higher student retention. Furthermore, when parents are able to access student academic and financial information, models consistently show student retention can increase up to 15%.

Interested in how CampusESP can help you quickly scale your family communications strategy and enable student success?