Reuben Wilson came to GW to study photography, but he left after a year and a half of classes. And GW will never know why.
Wilson, who is now enrolled at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said GW’s photography classes were rudimentary, re-teaching him skills he learned in high school. He said he plans to return to the District next year to study full-time at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, just blocks from where he spent his freshman year.
“I definitely didn’t feel like I was getting my money’s worth,” Wilson said. “I felt gypped a little bit.”
Wilson is one of hundreds of students who leave GW each year, but for the past two years, the University has not been able to accurately track why or where they go.
GW digitized its transfer process – allowing students to fill out paperwork online – in 2011. Until then, when students asked GW to send forms to other schools or cancel their housing, staffers reached out in person or left surveys on students' doors asking them where they were going and their reasoning.
“When transcript requests and housing check-outs moved online, we lost out source for soliciting information,” Cheryl Beil, associate provost for academic planning and assessment, said. She said it’s now “very difficult to know why students are leaving GW.”
In the past decade, the freshman retention rate crept up from about 86 percent in 2001 to 91.4 percent last year. This means that out of last year’s freshman class, about 200 students dropped out or transferred, which is on par with institutions similar to GW, like New York and Boston universities, which hover at 92 and 91 percent respectively.
Beil declined to provide the official number of students who have transferred in the past five years.
About 4 percent of students on financial aid drop out each year because they can no longer afford GW, Associate Vice President for Financial Assistant Dan Small said in August.
This year, the University started emailing students who leave and asking them to complete an online survey to get a fuller picture of why students were leaving.
But mostly, Beil said, the requests get lost in students’ email inboxes. She said she couldn’t say how many students transfer out of GW because “the number of students who complete the survey each year is too small to report in the data.”
She doesn’t think the reporting process will get any easier either, she said, adding, “It is difficult to get students to respond to a survey.”
Beil said the University submits data to the National Clearinghouse, which cross-checks names of students with other colleges to pinpoint the transfers. She said the process is not fully reliable because some students wait before transferring to another school, and some universities do not submit data to the clearinghouse.
Beil also said she could not provide the number of students who did not return to GW this semester because it was “too soon” to find out. The University uses retention rates to look at total numbers at the end of the year, she added.
Calculating the retention rate can still be “misleading,” Beil said, because the national agency only tracks full-time students and misses part-time students or students who take a semester off or transfer.
When GW collected data on a larger scale, students’ responses were broken down into types of transfers such as personal, financial or academic reasons. She declined to provide the breakdown of the responses.
Tracking why students transfer and drop out is also a national problem. Last month, the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment called out universities nationwide for not focusing more attention on keeping students in college, calling it a “hollow promise” in a 28-page report.
Director of the Center for Student Engagement Tim Miller said he began working with the Office of Institutional Research to find out why a student leaves after that report, realizing that many other colleges grapple with the same issue.
“I want to understand. If there is something we can do to make this an even better place for students – because I already think this is an amazing opportunity for students to be here – what can we do to make it even better,” Miller said.
He called house staff the “front line of retention” and said he wants them to help more students, especially first-years, make strong connections.
Miller has begun to explore factors that keep students at GW, like strong first semester grades – students who do poorly typically do not stay – and student organization involvement.
For freshman Haydn Booth, who transferred out his first semester, GW was just not the right fit. He was in the NROTC program and said his Thurston room was too loud, and he didn’t connect spiritually to any Christian organization on campus. He also had difficulty learning in large lecture classes.
Booth's attachment to GW’s Korean language program kept him in Foggy Bottom for a few months, but it wasn’t enough to keep him for four years. He now studies at Hood College in Maryland, where he said he is much happier.
“Every office knows who I am by first name, unlike GW where everything is automated and I didn’t like that as much,” he said. “GW was a positive experience but it wasn’t the right place for me.”
GW: Why do students transfer out?
ANSWER: To attend a ranked university.
Shazam!
Any time a student has a question about the GW student-academic experience, including transferring, don’t hesitate to contact a trusted faculty member, academic advisor, or a member of my staff in the Division of Student Affairs.
As you heard from Associate Dean Tim Miller, many of our staff serve on the front lines of our enrollment retention efforts. Our team is here to help.
Choosing the right college is a big decision and while GW won’t be a perfect match for every student, our ultimate goal is to help ensure you find the right academic, campus and community experience — whether at GW or otherwise — as you work to achieve your collegiate goals and aspirations.
If there is ever anything we can do to assist you in making GW a better place, or helping improve your experience in our campus community, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me or my team.
In short, stay in touch if we can help.
Peter Konwerski
email = peterk@gwu.edu or
twitter = @gwpeterk
Unlike most Hatchet articles, I think this is pretty interesting. But the title is slightly misleading as if we were questioning why so many students in leaving, when in fact we’re retaining more of our base.
From what I have seen many students transfer out because they dont get into the frat or sorority they wanted. GW has let greek life get so big even though we are not a traditional greek school. I have friends who felt they would have no social life in a “bad” fraternity or sorority and outright left the school.
I’ve never heard of someone here transferring out because they didn’t get into a frat.
If someone is that willing to transfer over petty non-sense like Greek rejection, LET them transfer out. We don’t need them here.
There are a couple reasons I hear most often, and some of them can be prevented by GW. One is that a student will change their major upon arrival to one that isn’t quite as strong of a program at GW, like from the Elliott school to a STEM major. Another is a student realizes they don’t like the city environment. Some don’t like the social atmosphere (often the too large presence of greek life), and others realize the education just isn”t worth the tuition.
I would like to see a comparison of these numbers to the number of students we receive as transfers. Transferring really isn’t such a bad thing, if unhappy and uninvolved students leave to make room for enthusiastic transfers.
Unhappy and uninvolved students don’t make good transfers out, imo, as the schools one is transferring to would want to see someone who will get involved.
I am involved in this process myself, and I would say the money is a large part of it, as well as some familial disharmony, and the DC environment isn’t quite what I’m looking for.
True.
Sometimes people don’t want to live in a city or just didn’t choose their ideal match.
The bottom line here is often money.
If you don’t receive ANY financial aid from GWU, like I didn’t, you’re paying $200,000+ (in mostly private student loans and a little cash) for a bachelor’s degree. It was less, but interest is huge.
Tell me how that kind of debt makes sense for a bachelor’s degree. No, my family isn’t even rich or anywhere near it (I wish), yet I received no aid from GWU. Not one penny. None. Zero. In fact, my family has fluctuating income, $0 in savings, $0 in retirement, $0 in college savings, average house with a mortgage, average cars, and fairly decent middle class incomes– but high expenses (healthcare bills suck). My parents couldn’t afford to pay anything to GWU other than my application fee and textbooks.
Try being an 18 year old kid having to come up with $50,000 a year for college at GWU.
And people ask why people want to transfer out? M-O-N-E-Y.
I have well over $150,000 in student loans.
I’ll be paying these loans back for the next 25 years.
Thanks, GWU.
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Because people here seem to do their schoolwork just to do their schoolwork. They most of the time do not seem invested or interested in it (Even if it’s their major!) They care much more about social things which can get frustrating and make them seem extremely superficial.
Basically they care way too much about all the wrong things.. they get so caught up in social glamor and the idea of a successful future that they lose touch with reality. Basically the bulk of the people here just ARE NOT down to earth..