Listed below is a short piece I had prepared for our retention committee some time ago which contains some estimates and references for the relative costs of student recruitment relative to student retention.
Your question is very good one, the answer to which all of us involved in first-year programs and student retention efforts should have ready and waiting in our arsenal of arguments for institutional attention to student success.
- Joe -
RETENTION VS. RECRUITMENT: RELATIVE COSTS AND BENEFITS
One of the earliest published arguments for the cost effectiveness of retention as an enrollment management strategy, relative to student recruitment, was provided by Astin (1975) who noted that, "In four-year institutions, any change that deters students from dropping out can affect three classes of students at once, whereas any change in recruiting practices can affect only one class in a give year. From this viewpoint, investing resources to prevent dropping out may be more cost effective than applying the same resources to more vigorous recruitment. More important from an educational standpoint, changes that help students complete college, represent a real service to them, whereas successful recruiting efforts may simply change students' choice of institutions" (p. 2).
In the early 1980s, references appeared which estimated the cost of student recruitment efforts-which require substantial institutional expenditures (e.g., hiring of staff, travel funding, and advertising costs). Kramer (1982) estimated that recruitment costs ranged between $200-$800 per student. In contrast, other publications report that increasing student enrollment via retention efforts is 3-5 times more cost-effective than recruitment efforts, i.e., the cost of retaining one already-enrolled student approximates the cost of recruiting 3-5 new students to the college (Noel, Levitz, & Associates, 1985; Rosenberg & Czepiel, 1983; Tinto, 1975). In addition, students who are retained to graduation are much less likely to default on their student loans than students who drop out-due, in large measure, to the fact that graduates are more likely to find gainful employment (Levitz, 1993).
References
Astin, A. W. (1975). Preventing students from dropping out. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Kramer, M. (1982). Meeting student aid needs in a period of retrenchment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Levitz, R. (1993). Retention is dollar-wise. Recruitment and Retention Newsletter, 7(1), p. 4.
Noel, L., & Levitz, R., & Associates (1985). Increasing student retention: New challenges and potential. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Rosenberg, L. J., & Czepiel, J. Z. (1983). A marketing approach for customer retention. The Journal of Consumer Marketing, 1, 45-51.
Tinto, V. (1975). Dropout from higher education: A theoretical synthesis of recent research. Review of Educational Research, 45(1), 89-125.
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