Student Clubs, Virtually: A Reply to an Inside Higher Ed Editorial

Nick Punt

Last week, Steve Kolowich from Inside Higher Ed did a nice write up on the role that online communities play in accommodating for the loss of community online students have by not having an on-campus experience. The article did a fine job of documenting the wide-spread phenomenon amongst online universities and community colleges alike.

At Inigral, we can attest to the validity of this “lack-of-community” phenomenon from experience not only from the clients that we work with, such as the Maricopa Community College District, but also from the dozens of conversations we have with the higher ed community each week. Our belief is that community is one of the most influential factors to a student’s persistence at an institution, and has the largest effect (outside of financial reasons) on student retention as well.

This is confirmed by a study by ACT, called What Works In Student Retention?  According to the results of their Factor Analysis, three of the top five institutional factors in student attrition are social in nature.

It’s one of the reasons that our product development process at Inigral is driven by trying to influence key metrics like student retention and persistence. We spend a large portion of our efforts analyzing the needs that postsecondary offline structures (like Freshman Interest Groups) solve for, and translate that need into today’s web 2.0 toolset as offered by Facebook. It’s only within this context that today’s technology can be leveraged to it’s best potential in order to accomplish a school’s business goals, and meet students where they are in the process.