WKU News

Dear Colleagues,

I recently received our preliminary fall-to-spring retention data, and we have much to celebrate as an institution. Overall, 90.9% of our fall first-year class returned this semester - a full two percentage point increase since last year and a 4.6 percentage point increase since the fall 2017/spring 2018 academic year. Better yet, this represents the highest fall-to-spring retention of our students since the university began tracking this data over a decade ago, a substantial gain pointing to the effectiveness of our student success initiatives.

We experienced improvements across the board, including among those first-year students traditionally underserved by higher education. Our low-income students returned to campus this spring at a rate of 88.6%, compared to 86% last year and 82.2% in 2017/2018. Among our first-generation students, 87.1% returned this spring, compared to 85.5% last year and 80.9% in 2017/2018. Perhaps most impressively, our underrepresented minority (URM) students returned at a rate of 90.3% this spring, compared to 85.7% last year and 80.4% in 2017/2018. In just four short years, we moved the needle nearly 10 percentage points for one of our most vulnerable student populations. We have dedicated significant resources to closing the achievement gap among our students, and these numbers confirm that we are increasingly providing students with the resources they need for success. Helping students, who for so long have been underserved by higher education, perform as well as their peers is something of which we should all be proud.

Finally, this year we opened our First Year Village, which serves as the home for many of our Living Learning Communities (LLCs). While not new to WKU, our LLCs, offered in all five academic colleges and also as interest-based options, welcomed a considerable expansion last fall with almost 650 students, or approximately a quarter of our first-year class, participating. 

The retention data for students who participated in LLCs during the fall semester is impressive, with 95.2% returning this spring - 5.9 percentage points higher than those students not involved in an LLC. We anticipated that the launch of our First Year Village and expansion of our LLCs would provide a considerable boost in the success of our Hilltoppers, and these metrics clearly demonstrate that achievement. We must now turn our attention to engaging even more students in our Living Learning Communities because we know they work. I invite you to join me at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, February 23, in the lobby of Regents Hall where we will cut the ribbon on our First Year Village and celebrate the extraordinary success of our LLCs.

Each of you play a key role in our students’ success. Thank you for your dedication to your work, to our institution and to our students.

Go Tops! 

Best,

Timothy C. Caboni