How NOT to Dropout of School with Evelyn Van Til

The Careers Without Four Years Podcast

It’s graduation season but the truth is, most people who enroll in college dropout, never getting the degree they signed up for. How can you beat the odds and maximize your investment in a college or certificate program?

In today’s episode, you will learn:

• How to organize your schedule so that you take classes in the optimal order to succeed academically and graduate on time.
• How to leverage the innate desire in all people to help one another to get support, increase accountability, improve your grades, and lower stress.

Studies show that there are three general reasons people drop out. Thirty-eight percent say they ran out of money. About thirty percent are not academically prepared to do post-secondary work, and the remainder has personal or family challenges.

My guest today is Evelyn Van Til. Evelyn is currently a Strategic Partnership Manager at American Student Assistance, a national nonprofit changing the way middle and high schoolers learn about careers and navigate education-to-career opportunities.

Almost in passing Evelyn recounted an experience she had during her tenure at The Ohio State University. I felt that this was something that more people, and by this I mean a LOT more people, especially students or prospective ones, should know about.

While at Ohio State, Evelyn achieved something extraordinary: in just two years, she turned dropout rates on their head and cut the time to graduation in half. When she came on board, her program had a 90% dropout rate, when she left, 91% of students graduated and time-to-graduation rates dropped from an average of 7-9 years to a very reasonable 4-5 years.

How did she do this? It turns out that the way students organized their classes and themselves had almost everything to do with whether or not they graduated and how fast they did it.

First, Evelyn reduced confusion about schedules, replacing vagueness and uncertainty with focus and confidence.

On the administration side, Evelyn worked with instructors, focussing on how she could help students pace their classes and providing a four or five-year framework for graduation. Beginning during orientation, a time when many students wander around with only a vague sense of how to set up a schedule, Evelyn provided guidance in the creation of schedules. She cleared up some common misconceptions about when to take required courses.

Second, she leveraged the innate desire of people to help one another.

When possible, Evelyn enrolled students together in their chosen fields of study. She encouraged them to ask for “study buddies” and to develop accountability partners and study groups.

Many of her students had never been on their own. So they needed to learn how to be accountable for their success, beginning with showing up for classes regularly. Having a buddy to check with increased attendance. Having study partners and groups allowed students to reinforce their learning by explaining it to others and/or to get the help they needed.

All this social organization undoubtedly reduced stress.

Links:

Facts and figures about college graduation dropout rates: https://educationdata.org

American Student Assistance https://www.asa.org

Evelyn van til https://linkedin.com/in/evelynvantil

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