This may be college, but we're still taking attendance

When Walter Diehl looks around the lecture hall each morning before his freshman zoology class begins, the professor ticks off names on a list - and may find 15 or more of his 180 students missing.

That part of taking attendance is pretty standard. But what comes next makes Professor Diehl's class and other freshmen classes at Mississippi State University seem almost revolutionary.

First, Diehl reports the absences to a special tracking program called Pathfinder, which funnels the names into a database. Next, any freshman who cuts classes more than twice is identified for an ever-so-gentle chat with school personnel.

Then, in brief discussions in their dorm rooms, a resident assistant gives the missing-in-action freshmen a pamphlet with campus phone numbers and resources to help them with studies. But the student also gets a pointed reminder: Cutting class can damage or derail a college career.

"Class attendance is a major predictor for us of college success," says Ty Abernathy, a social scientist with the program who trains resident assistants not to be too overbearing. Nobody wants a return to in loco parentis, the model of the 1960s, when colleges acted "in place of the parent" in overseeing student life.

So far, the simple and relatively cheap three-year-old attendance plan is getting good results: Grades are moving up - and so is class attendance. More freshmen are returning for their sophomore year. But the real payoff, researchers say, will come a few years from now, with expected higher graduation rates.

"As long as students are staying in class and making better grades, they should be able to graduate," says David McMillen, a professor of sociology who heads the program and first persuaded faculty and administrators to give it a try. "We think it will work, but we won't really know about the bottom line until 2004."

Mississippi State's unusual program is part of a much larger hunt for ways to solve one of the biggest problems afflicting American higher education: 1 of every 3 college students won't graduate.

That might seem surprising. Today there are a record 15 million students enrolled on American college campuses. It certainly looks as if the nation's higher education system is firing on all cylinders - producing the highly educated workforce the nation desperately needs.

It turns out, however, that while most schools are great at recruiting students with glossy brochures featuring lush campus scenes and posh dorm rooms, it's a different story when it comes to getting kids to graduate.

About 65 percent of all US citizens aged 25 to 29 who started college end up with nothing but maybe a student loan to show for their effort, according to Thomas Mortenson, a policy analyst at the Center for the Study of Opportunity and Higher Education, a Washington think tank.

It's a costly problem for colleges, too - one that many are trying to solve. The practice of "enrollment management" has grown with the understanding of schools that it is far cheaper to retain students than to go out and recruit new ones, Mr. Mortenson says.

To hang on to more students, the focus for a decade has been on creating "freshmen retention" programs. That has typically meant creating more small seminar-style freshman classes, freshman research programs, and special dorms that try to create a small-college feel on big university campuses.

The whole idea is to better connect students and faculty in a more personal classroom setting. Research shows that when students are academically settled and feel connected to faculty, it can lead to a higher percentage of freshmen returning for their sophomore year. It also can aid the greater goal of higher graduation rates, experts say.

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