At the University of Arizona, nearly 2,000 students are placed on academic probation each semester—and nearly a third of those students don't stay enrolled for the next term. Completing a school-provided support program can help students stay enrolled, but many fail to get matched with a program, or match but never attend. ideas42 partnered with the University of Arizona to develop a set of behaviorally-informed solutions to help more students on academic probation engage in support programs and persist to the next term.

Our approach

Our partners told us that getting students in the door of their assigned support program is the biggest problem—once they attend an intake session, they’re more likely to complete their program. So we focused our solutions on the early stages of the probation process. We implemented five main changes designed to increase the number of students who complete their self-assessment to get matched with a program and to increase intake attendance.

The Results

We launched these interventions in Fall 2023 and tracked changes in students’ engagement compared to previous semesters. While many different factors likely contributed to the positive results we saw (other changes were made during this timeframe, and student engagement has generally been trending upward back to pre-COVID levels), our approach is promising.

Specifically, we saw a huge improvement in intake session attendance: 99% of students matched with a program attended an intake session, compared to only 17% the previous year. We believe this is largely due to pre-scheduling appointments, which made the process significantly easier for students. Pre-scheduling appointments was not easy—staff had to look at each student's course schedule to pick a feasible time—but it shifted the hassles off of the student, and the impact on attendance made it worthwhile.

Completion of the initial step of the academic probation process—the self-assessment that matches students with a support program—also increased, but only marginally. During our implementation period, we were only able to revise emails sent by program staff; we expect that additional revisions to communications and subsequent reminders could help further.

Ultimately, we were most interested in whether more students on academic probation would get off academic probation and stay enrolled. We were excited to see an increase in term-to-term persistence.

Persistence is, of course, impacted by far more than our five interventions, especially since we focused on the early stages of the probation process and a subset of all students on probation. Though we were unable to conduct a rigorous experiment that would control for these factors, our results are encouraging and demonstrate that behaviorally-informed communications improvements can have meaningful impacts on student persistence.

Want to try this at your school?

• Access communications guidance and templates to help students schedule and attend required appointments with advisors, coaches, and more.

• Email us at education@ideas42.org with any questions.