Can a Brief Intervention Improve Underrepresented Minority Students' Retention and Gpa in a Community College?

BACKGROUND

Within college systems, underrepresented minority (URM) students question their social belongingness. Interventions to affirm and cultivate social belonging can positively affect student behavior over time and may have broad relevance as university programs increasingly focus on retention. Given persistently high rates of attrition from higher education and the negative outcomes associated with attrition, there is a need to further evaluate the potential impact of social-belonging programs on student persistence and retention in higher education, especially URM students. Thus, this project presents results from a quasi-experimental pilot study testing a social-belonging intervention to improve retention among college students.

METHODS

The sample was drawn from students who were enrolled in the first semester of their first year at a mid-western state community college during the 2013 fall semester. The sample consisted of 128 students who self-enrolled: 63 students in the experimental group and 65 students in the comparison group.  

Students in the intervention classes received, as a group, a structured introduction via a 13-minute video: You Are College Material – You Belong. Social-belonging theory guided the development of the video. Featuring college students of different ages, races, and sexes, the video documents experiences associated with being a new college student and conveys four key messages: 1. every new student feels out of place at first; 2. each student worries about making friends; 3. all students worry that they are unprepared for college, and; 4. these feelings disappear after a brief time. Students in comparison group received no intervention. This study draws upon standardized administrative data (race, age, gender, GPA, re-enrollment) collected by the community college system.  

RESULTS

The sample’s average age was 24 years. Most participants were African American (76%), female (59%), and enrolled full time in fall 2013 (68%).

The administrative data show that 68.3% of intervention participants reenrolled in spring 2014 but that only 56.9% of the comparison group did so. Despite the 11.4 percentage-point difference, a chi-square test shows that the two groups did not differ significantly on the rate of reenrollment (χ² = 1.30; df = 1; p = .25). However, the results suggest that the intervention has another effect: For the fall 2013 semester, the GPA among intervention participants (M = 2.48; SD = 1.21) was significantly higher than that among the comparison group (M = 1.70; SD = 1.20; t = 3.47; p < .05; d= 0.65).

DISCUSSION

This social-belonging intervention is notable as a brief and comparatively simple program to improve persistence and GPA in higher education for URM students. Although there are structural inequalities between URM and other students, this investigation suggests that there are also academic barriers for URM students who don’t feel that they belong. A remedy for low persistence and GPA may be a social belonging intervention that leads to more opportunities to form relationships. This study suggests that social belonging interventions may serve as an important complement to college preparation and other activities for URM students.