For many college students, a poor relationship with an advisor, an annoying roommate, a dissatisfying dorm experience or a difficult course are part and parcel of college life. But as student affairs administrators across the country can attest, even such everyday challenges—left unaddressed—can lead students to drop out or transfer.

In addition to the potentially severe consequences it poses for students and their families, student attrition is increasingly a top-of-mind business concern for universities, for whom losing a handful of students may represent revenue losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Through its FYRe™ (Freshman Year Retention) and related programs, which integrate a suite of unique Web-based tools with custom content and research services, GoalQuest is helping colleges and universities identify and address students at risk. The key to the programs’ success is simple: provide students an ultra-convenient, confidential path to reach out to existing academic and personal support services that they might otherwise ignore.

Academic support resources like writing workshops, math labs and tutoring programs are hardly new fixtures on campus. In fact, most universities provide help on everything from time management strategies to nutrition advice to personal counseling. In most cases, the help is out there, but too few students take advantage.

Enter GoalQuest, a four-year old company with a proprietary technology that delivers a series of interactive Web-based sessions, each designed and written to help students assess themselves and potential problem areas. Through fun, engaging editorial features, “social-norming” polls, attitudinal surveys and progress reminders, the software encourages students to identify issues and solution paths.

Participants can choose to send confidential queries to campus support resources, or they can solve their own problems by utilizing a wide range of interactive FAQs that help determine their next steps. Using GoalQuest’s real-time reporting tools, university personnel (typically student affairs executives and “first-year experience” faculty) track student progress and monitor attrition risks on a daily basis with sophisticated robotic search agents, such as GoalQuest’s Enrolligence™ Alerts.

Case Study: Loyola Marymount University
Loyola Marymount University does not have what most would consider a retention problem—almost 90% of LMU freshmen return for their sophomore year. Indeed, U.S. News & World Report ranked LMU number three among Western Master’s Universities, in part for the institution’s impressive retention history. When LMU partnered with GoalQuest, it wanted to impact student experience as a first step toward increasing its already solid retention numbers.

As a student-centered university that accords great importance to the care of its students and to their individual attention, LMU sought a communications vehicle that could advance student mentoring, academic achievement and campus involvement. LMU realized that strengthening students’ social and emotional connections to the university could make a real difference. The school chose GoalQuest’s FYRe tools partly to increase awareness of campus-wide happenings (particularly weekend events) and acquaint students with the school’s rich history.

LMU’s FYRe program, Mane Points, engaged students with expert-written features like “Get Involved,” “Living in a Diverse World,” “Roommates 101” and “You’ve Got Problems, We’ve Got Solutions,” all the while connecting freshmen to a dynamic Web-based calendar of relevant events and a catalog of support services.


About GoalQuest
GoalQuest, Inc. is a New York City-based software company specializing in innovative solutions for the education market. Since its inception in 2000, GoalQuest's proprietary software tools have assisted colleges and universities across the country in their recruiting, enrollment yield, retention, parent and alumni communication efforts. GoalQuest's proprietary Enrolligence™ index delivers real-time engagement data to schools, providing them with unprecedented communication intelligence for more informed decisions. NASPA (National Association of Student Personnel Administrators), the nation’s leading organization for student affairs administration, policy and practice, recently approved GoalQuest’s suite of retention and student assessment tools. For additional information about GoalQuest, please visit the company's Web site at http://www.goalquest.com.