From 81% to 86.4%: SRU’s Playbook for Sustained Retention Gains

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The biggest gains in persistence and completion make headlines. But most institutions face a harder problem: what happens when progress stalls — or when early wins create pressure to keep improving?

That’s the situation Slippery Rock University (SRU) found itself in. After achieving its highest retention rate since 2004 , the question became: what comes next? How do you sustain momentum, deepen your use of analytics, and keep moving the needle when you’re already performing well above your peers?

Want to go deeper on how Dr. Rindy thinks about student success, work-based learning, and building a retention-first culture? Listen to his full conversation on the Signals in Higher Ed podcast.

ChallengeApproachResults

81 → 86.4%

Moving retention at a level where every half-point is
harder to earn than the last.

Institution-specific analytics, precise intervention by
student group, and a partnership that adapts to SRU’s goals.		86.4% first-year retention
— SRU’s highest ever, and #1
in the state system for
four-year graduation rates.

Where SRU Stands Today

SRU, a regional comprehensive institution in rural Pennsylvania serving over 8,600 students, has spent the last several years quietly doing something most schools struggle to do: continuously improving retention at a level where improvement is genuinely hard.

  • 86.4% first-year retention — the highest in SRU’s history, and well above the national average for regional comprehensives
  • #1 in the 10-university Pennsylvania state system for four-year graduation rates
  • Historically underrepresented students outpersisting their Caucasian peers in the fall 2023 cohort — a first in SRU’s history

“When everybody told us six years ago, you’re never going to be able to move a needle from 81 to 82% at a state school,” said Dr. John Rindy, Assistant Vice President for Career and Academic Progress. “This fall we are at 86.4%.”

These results didn’t come from a single initiative or a platform launch. They came from an operating model that keeps learning — and from a partnership that keeps pushing.

Three Lessons That Apply Beyond SRU

1. Implementation Is Just the Beginning

For SRU, going live with a platform wasn’t the finish line. It was the starting point. Real impact came after launch, when analytics became embedded in how teams made decisions every day.

That means integrating data into core workflows rather than treating it as a reporting layer. It means building data-informed cases for change that bring faculty, deans, and administrators into the conversation — not just presenting numbers after the fact.

“Last week I pulled down persistence predictions and academic standing,” Rindy explained. “I pull out all the advisors, group them by major, and send each chairperson a spreadsheet. Here’s your entire roster — advisement is coming up in a week. You can quickly see persistence predictions and academic standing and react to that as you’re advising students. I also look at our most powerful predictors and flag students who might fall into attrition categories according to those predictors.”

That kind of embedded, routine use of data is what separates institutions that get a retention bump in year one from institutions that keep compounding gains year after year.

A key part of SRU’s model is building “stop-doing” lists alongside new initiatives. Rather than continuously adding programs, the team uses data to evaluate what’s actually driving impact — and deliberately eliminates what isn’t. “Our stop-doing lists aren’t just ‘we don’t like doing that anymore,'” Rindy said. “It’s always: the data shows this is not particularly impactful. How do we change it or phase it out?”

That philosophy extends to faculty adoption as well. Rather than pursuing buy-in, Rindy focuses on demonstrating value first. “If I feed them the data they need to be better at what they do, eventually faculty come to me and ask, ‘Can I get access to some of this information real-time?'” he said. “You don’t have to pursue so-called buy-in — you get enrollment instead. People voluntarily see the value and ask for access. When faculty receive the data that I send, I get lots of emails of gratitude.”

2. Partnership Drives Sustained Value

Technology alone doesn’t improve student outcomes. People do. And getting lasting value from an analytics platform requires a partnership that extends well beyond initial setup.

At SRU, that partnership has been defined by something Rindy describes as genuinely rare in higher ed: a vendor that listens and actually changes.

“There’s a lot of arrogance in the provision of cloud-based services in higher ed,” he said. “This is our system, this is what you get. And yet Civitas (Learning) is always listening. You’re interested in organizations like ours that use it to the nth degree.”

That responsiveness shows up in concrete ways. When SRU’s director of customer development, Jackie Harris, began working with the team on expanding their custom data toolkit, she came to the first meeting already knowing which data sources mattered most to SRU — LASSI scores, housing and meal swipes, recreation center usage — without being asked.

“Who does that?” Rindy said. “What company remembers what’s important to you?”

When SRU encounters something in the platform that doesn’t work the way they need, it doesn’t get logged in a ticket queue indefinitely. “Sometimes even Civitas’ chief technology officer shows up and says, ‘Okay, show me this,'” Rindy noted. “And the best thing is when the CTO says, ‘Yeah, that seems like something we can do.’ Nobody does that. Nobody.”

This level of partnership matters especially for institutions without large in-house analytics or training teams. Support at SRU takes several forms:

  • Dedicated Director of Customer Development — A single point of contact with deep institutional knowledge who helps embed the platform into daily workflows and connects the team with peer institutions
  • Ongoing Enablement & Professional Development — Regular workshops, strategy sessions, and leadership convenings that bring institutions together to share what’s working
  • Annual Leadership Convenings — In-person gatherings where partner institutions share what’s working, learn from peers across the country, and connect with the Civitas team directly.
  • Partner Community — A network of 400+ institutions navigating similar challenges

“I just feel like you folks are part of our work group here,” Rindy said. “I don’t feel like you’re a separate company.”

3. Precise, Actionable Insights Are What Actually Move the Needle

At SRU, the most meaningful gains haven’t come from broad interventions — they’ve come from finding the specific, often small barriers that quietly derail persistence and removing or modifying them.

Paired predictor analysis has been central to this. Rather than applying national research benchmarks to their students, SRU uses institution-specific data to identify which combinations of factors predict risk for their populations. The results have been illuminating — and sometimes counterintuitive.

“The research says your first-gen students are always at risk,” Rindy explained. “But when you look at our administrative analytics, it turns out our first-gen and non-first-gen students are moving forward at nearly the same pace on a semester-to-semester basis. Had we just relied on research, we’d still assume that our first-gen students are persisting at significantly lower rates. But having surfaced more detailed knowledge about our first-gen students, we can more equitably distribute our resources and our retention experiments to various programs and populations.”

When SRU drills into persistence patterns for specific student groups — African American students, Hispanic students, students in particular majors — the powerful predictors often diverge in ways that aren’t visible in aggregate data. “When you look at the top five or six powerful predictors for our African American students and then look at our Hispanic students, they’re very different,” he said. “So profound that it makes you sit there and go: what’s the why here?”

That question drives SRU’s Academic Continuity Committee to investigate root causes and design targeted responses — rather than applying generic interventions that may help one group while doing nothing for another.

Exploratory students are a prime example of precise intervention at work. Across the Pennsylvania state system, about 40% of exploratory (undeclared) students leave college in their first year. SRU was performing better than average, but still losing students it didn’t need to lose.

Using dynamic groups from Civitas Learning’s Student Impact Platform, SRU built a structured “odyssey” program requiring exploratory students to meet with a career mentor, identify two to four potential majors, and schedule appointments with department chairs — all within their first semester. Rindy monitors declaration rates in real time through the platform, and reaches out directly to students who haven’t yet declared.

The results over the last two years: 78–81% of exploratory students declared a major in their first semester, with 84–85% retention to second year — up from roughly 68% before the program launched. Business undeclared students added to the program last year showed similar results.

Small financial barriers can have outsized effects. One of the most actionable — and unexpected — findings at SRU came from noticing that some students weren’t registering for the next semester because they owed small balances to the university.

“When I saw students couldn’t register because they owed just a few hundred dollars through no fault of their own, it inspired me to start a scholarship fund to close that gap,” Rindy shared. He now funds it out of every paycheck and has recruited colleagues to contribute. His goal: $50,000 within five years.

This kind of insight-to-action is only possible when analytics are precise enough to surface what aggregate reports miss — and when institutional leaders are close enough to the data to see it.

What It Takes to Sustain This Kind of Progress

SRU’s results are real and replicable. But Rindy is candid about what’s required beyond the platform.

“You have to have somebody who owns the system, who cares about the system, who’s excited, who’s approachable, who takes the work seriously but does not take themselves too seriously, who’s energetic,” he said. “You’re going to end up in a doldrum if you don’t have somebody who loves data and is willing to experiment.”

For institutions earlier in the journey, his advice is direct: start with why. Not “this is the right thing to do.” Not “we want to tell prospective students about it.” A specific, measurable metric you’re trying to move — and a genuine commitment to following the data wherever it leads.

“When I look at some of the research institutions I follow closely, I think: why wouldn’t our students persist at the same rate as theirs?” Rindy said. 

The answer, he says, starts with belief — and with consistent messaging that reinforces it from the first touchpoint through graduation.

“Do we expect our students to persist? To graduate? To be employed within six months? And do we consistently send those messages throughout their entire time here? At SRU, we do.”

And when progress feels slow? “Crawl, walk, run. It’ll take time and you will build expertise. You have to have patience, enthusiasm, and an experimental mindset. You cannot give up.”

While SRU has already exceeded its objective of reaching 85% first-year retention, Rindy shares an “unofficial number” that he has in mind: 

“I have a handful of years before I retire, and our work group would really like to see us approach 90% first-year retention. Some of our aspirational peers across the U.S. are doing it, and I study them very carefully. Plus, I can see it in our data; we can be an 89-90% school.”

Ready to build a partnership that keeps delivering?

SRU’s progress wasn’t the result of a platform launch. It was the outcome of an operating model designed to keep learning — built on precise analytics, cross-campus collaboration, and a partnership that treats institutional goals as its own.

Talk to our team about how Civitas Learning can help your institution do the same.


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