How the University of Guam Is Using Data to Personalize Student Stop Out Interventions

With an enrollment of about 3,000 students, the University of Guam is the largest university in Micronesia, attracting students from throughout the Western Pacific region and presenting unique retention challenges. “We are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and a lot of our students come from other islands in the region,” says Marlena Pangelinan, the University’s Vice Provost for Institutional Effectiveness.

That means University of Guam (UOG) adds some unique factors to the challenge of reducing the stop out rate, but the challenge still fits into a larger trend. A 2024 report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 40 percent of students who enrolled in U.S. colleges stopped out before earning their degree within eight years, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s annual Some College, No Credential (SCNC) report showed 2.1 million students stopped out in the 2022-2023 school year alone.

At UOG the majority of students who stop out are first-time freshmen, says Pangelinan: “That means they come in and we lose them right at the door.”

But the institution didn’t have much more data about stopped-out students than that. So when an opportunity arose to take the Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU) and Every Learner Everywhere’s Building an Academic Data Culture to Support Student Success training, Pangelinan saw a way to link the professional development support with her institution’s specific challenge. She was particularly interested that the program would involve a university-wide cross-functional team that included the CIO, the registrar, the supervisor for admissions and registration, the director for the Center for Online Learning, and others who represented student interests throughout the campus.

“We had never been able to sit down and actually document and measure the effectiveness of the different interventions we’ve been doing,” she says. “This had the potential to make big shifts in the way the organization approaches student stop outs.”

Data slipping through the cracks

Including a decade at nearby Guam Community College, Pangelinan has spent much of her career puzzling over the problem of why students leave school and what brings them back. Many at UOG certainly leave for financial reasons, while others relocate to the mainland United States for better educational or work opportunities. However, most of what was known about why students left was anecdotal.

“We didn’t have a consistent method for collecting data as to why students are leaving,” she says.

Pangelinan notes you wouldn’t necessarily know there was a stop out issue at all unless you dug into the data. On the surface, enrollment numbers at UOG seemed stable. But when Pangelinan looked deeper, it was clear that while UOG had been working to increase enrollment, they were losing more students than they realized.

“Here we are working to increase enrollment and help students towards completion,” says Pangelinan. “But we weren’t necessarily looking at the students we did not retain.”

Further reading: Practical Steps to Fostering Belonging and Instructional Transparency

Measuring what matters

UOG uses many interventions designed for specific cohorts of students and for enrollment, retention, and completion. But without consistent data collection on stop outs, the university didn’t know where to focus retention and re-engagement efforts specific to stop out cohorts. That became the focus of their work during the APLU training.

Right off the bat, the UOG team was impressed by APLU’s approach. Normally when people from UOG collaborate with institutions in the mainland United States, they have to get up at two or three in the morning for calls. But the APLU worked with their cohort to find a time slot — seven in the morning — that allowed the entire team in Guam to participate. “It was great,” Pangelinan says. “We appreciated being able to come to a working schedule.”

An early lesson was that good data depends on good definitions of terms. Some institutions define a student as stopped out if they don’t come back after one semester, while others don’t consider them stopped out until they’ve missed two semesters. Pangelinan prefers the one-semester definition, because it highlights how important it is for students to stay engaged and connected: “It’s easier to keep our students here than to lose them and try to bring them back.”

The next step was to set up a system to monitor the transfer pathway from when students enroll to where they go once they leave, especially if they stop out.

Further reading: Emerging Student Engagement Platforms to Streamline Student Support

Improving interventions with data

UOG will soon be updating their software system to give Pangelinan and her team better access to that kind of data, and they’ve already begun measuring data on this year’s incoming freshmen.

Along with collecting data, they’ve launched two intervention programs. First, to make it easier for students to navigate the university’s resources, they held an outreach event where representatives across the university were available in one room to give students a one-stop shop for information and resources to get them through the registration process.

Second came a re-engagement effort. Advisors across the campus reached out to each student individually to understand what had interrupted their higher education journey and how UOG could help them get back on track.

“My vision is to have a profile of each of the students who come through our doors, wherever they come from,” says Pangelinan. This would allow UOG to serve students based on their specific needs, whether that’s offering tutoring services, housing services, or even addressing food security. “That way we can take advantage of predictive analytics to be proactive instead of reactive to predictors of student success.”