UNM's division of Enrollment Management is working to increase student retention and graduation rates.
However, in the last decade, the University hasn't had a system for polling students to find out why they're leaving.
Periodic surveys conducted by UNM gauge student satisfaction, but students who leave UNM are not systematically surveyed, said Carmen Alvarez Brown, vice president for Enrollment Management.
"However, we encourage feedback regarding the student experience in all enrollment services and will soon have automated surveys for the purpose of evaluating our performance," she said.
Brown said exit surveys given by UNM and other universities across the country reveal the same three reasons for departure.
"Personal, including job or family obligations, financial and institutional.. The last of these can be anything from course schedules to advisement to parking," she said. "Only a small fraction of our student departures are due to academic problems, per se."
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Vanessa Shields, Graduate Project program specialist, said students she has talked to said they left because they were frustrated or were uncertain about their graduation requirements.
"There were four main reasons. It was inconsistent advisement, trouble getting into courses needed for graduation, the cost of tuition and parking," Shields said.
Inconsistent advisement
Student Carrie Wright said she sees how insufficient advisement could frustrate students. She said UNM should provide a step-by-step process outlining what students need to do to graduate.
"Just in general, the process is really complicated, and you can miss classes here and there and realize it when you're a senior, and then that extends the whole length of time that you're going to school," Wright said.
Student Jessica Pommy said advisers especially don't give enough guidance to students who haven't decided on a major, and this can waste time.
"As I changed my major along the way, I would have taken classes differently and I wouldn't have had so many extra classes that I have now," she said. "I think if I would have been told along the way step by step what kinds of decisions were going to affect which major, that would have been helpful."
Financial obligations
Brown said financial troubles lead some students to leave for a semester or transfer to community colleges and branch colleges, but she believes many return to UNM to graduate.
Pommy said that when some students leave, it's not financially feasible for them to come back and that the University needs to provide more financial options for them.
"I think there's an issue with the Lottery Scholarship, which is really great, but if you want to take a semester off, it's gone," she said.
Shields said there are financial resources available to students through the Graduate Project.
The project provides tuition-assistance awards, funded by the Regents' Endowment Fund, which pay up to $750 of the student's tuition. Students in the program also don't have to pay fees on tuition payment plans at the Bursar's Office.
To be eligible for the program, a student needs to have 98 credit hours with 30 credit hours received at UNM, a 2.0 grade point average, not have outstanding balances owed to the University, and have been gone at least one semester.
She said the Registrar's Office gives her a list of students who attended UNM during the spring semester but did not return the following fall semester.
She then contacts the students to invite them to join the Graduate Project.
More than 2,400 students have returned to the University through the Graduate Project, and more than 1,684 students have graduated through the program as of summer 2008, Shields said.
However, about 4,500 students have qualified to participate in the Graduate Project since it started more than 11 years ago, which means the project works for less than half of students who leave UNM.
The program helps students get re-admitted to the University, makes sure they know what courses they must take to graduate, and places them in lecture courses that might already be closed.
"Basically, we are here to help answer any questions that a student needs to help set them on the right path to graduate.. I think coming back through our program, we are able to spell things out for them and keep it simple - letting them know, 'This is what you need to do from A to Z,'" Shields said.
Looking forward
Students are not contacted when they leave UNM, but the University sends e-mails to alert them of when they can enroll for the semester, Brown said.
"Enrollment Management has implemented an aggressive communication strategy to reach out to those students who have attended in the past and encourage them to re-enroll," she said. "We welcome them back and emphasize the benefits of continuing their education to degree completion."
Wright said it would be nice if UNM pursued students who left before graduation but that it's mostly the students' responsibility to come back to school.
Pommy said UNM should be asking why students are leaving and seeing if there are ways it can improve the overall experience.
"I think it's an important question for them to look at, just demographically: What caused students to leave?" she said. "Is there something here that is causing perhaps certain students to leave more so than others?"
