Worth Reading

Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action

Vincent Tinto. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 2012.

Why do countless student success and retention efforts fail to realize their aims, despite the best of intentions? 

In Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action, Vincent Tinto offers a spirited and thoughtful response to this vexing problem: institutional action typically stops outside the classroom door.

He writes:

When institutions and those who work in them seem unable to enhance the success of their students, it is less for lack of good intentions than for lack of knowledge about the appropriate types of actions, practices, and policies they should adopt...I have come to appreciate the centrality of the classroom to student success and the critical role the faculty play in retaining students.

Tinto goes further. He points out that knowing why students leave is not the same as knowing why students stay and succeed. With this distinction in mind, he proposes a framework for institutional action where students’ classroom experiences are central.

A distinguished professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University, Tinto first published his theory on student retention in 1975. From then until now, he has probed the troubling breach between access and success, especially for first-generation and low-income students. He has also devoted considerable energy coaching two- and four-year institutions across the country to shift attention away from “fixing” students to figuring out how institutions can effectively support and teach all students present.

The framework Tinto proposes discusses four conditions for student success: high expectations, support, assessment and feedback, and involvement. He illustrates each condition with case studies tied to institutional policies. Finally, Tinto outlines a ten-step call to action, each step followed by sage advice on how to plan for scalability and sustainability.

Learning community practitioners will appreciate the wisdom of his first step: “Institutions should establish a cross-functional team of faculty, support staff, and administrators whose task it is to oversee institutional planning and action for student success.”  Collaboration across campus turns out to be vital; aligning institutional actions—getting one’s institutional house in order— is a pre-requisite if students are to complete college.

True to his initial observation that what happens in the classroom is pivotal to student success, Tinto is especially attentive to what students experience. He draws on more than three decades of research on the effectiveness of learning communities (see selected references below) to make the argument that all first-year students should have the experience of learning in community with others. He recommends that institutions “should establish learning communities for all-first year students in ways that provide for interdisciplinary, contextualized learning.” For students who place in pre-college classes, learning communities should link one or more basic skills classes to a college credit-bearing course.

Tinto insists that because “success is constructed one course at a time,” faculty need to become knowledgeable about research on learning and the implications of this research for teaching. He calls on institutions to invest in ongoing faculty development programs which, whenever possible, should include adjunct faculty.

If you are someone who looks to the end of a book before deciding to read it, Tinto’s last sentence may help you make up your mind: “Lest we forget , the goal of retention is not only that students stay in college and graduate, but that they learn while doing so.” This book is truly noteworthy; we imagine it being read and discussed by learning community practitioners and others on campuses across the country who value arguments for campus change that are grounded in evidence-based strategies.

Classrooms as Communities: Exploring the Educational Character of Student Persistence
Vincent Tinto. Journal of Higher Education, 68:6. November/December 1997. Subscribe

Learning Communites, Collaborative Learning, and the Pedagogy of Educational Citizenship
Vincent Tinto. American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) Bulletin. March 1997.

Building Learning Communities for New College Students: A Summary of Research Findings of the Collaborative Learning Project
Vincent Tinto, Anne Goodsell-Love, and Pat Russo. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, National Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. 1994.

Building Community
Vincent Tinto, Anne Goodsell-Love, and Pat Russo. Liberal Education, 79:4. Fall 1993.

Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition
Vincent Tinto. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1987.