Improving Retention Through A Sense of Belonging: The EPIC Program

By Mike Watters, Professor of Biology

Student retention is important to any university, especially keeping commuter students who are traditionally less anchored in campus life. Even more at risk, given the leaky STEM pipeline, are STEM commuter students. To address this issue, a group of Valpo faculty and staff proposed a National Science Foundation grant. The grant was awarded and thus began the EPIC scholarship program (Enhancing Practices Integrating Commuters), launched in 2016.  

Although focused on commuter students, the program also included resident students. In addition to awarding scholarships, EPIC included multiple programmatic enhancements such as early research opportunities, faculty mentoring, monthly meals and activities, field trips, and a fall retreat.  

Many of these additional activities were quite informal and often inexpensive.  Faculty mentors would regularly check-in with students. This might mean having a chat about how they are doing, offering suggestions, or even just talking informally about personal things. For the monthly get-together, EPIC faculty and students would eat together at Founders and shoot the breeze. Or we might make Christmas ornaments or decorate pumpkins together. For the fall retreat, we took them on an overnight trip where we introduced the program to freshmen and had the upperclassmen talk with them.  The retreat included a mix of formal and informal time together.

 All of these program enhancements are different forms of cohort building as well as ways to break down the barriers between faculty and students. What that really means, of course, is that we built a sense of belonging, a sense of acceptance, a sense that they are part of the group. Note that, except for the early research opportunity, none of these enhancements are STEM-specific and could be applied by any unit on campus. 

So, how did it go?  The results of the first EPIC grant program have been published  (Capaldi et al. 2022 in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, Vol 6 pp 14-22).

The most notable change we observed was an improvement in retention.  EPIC students retained (to graduation) at a rate of 82%. This can be compared to STEM majors (44%), STEM commuters (36%) and the overall student population (70%).  This occurred despite the fact that all of the EPIC students were in multiple high-risk groups for retention. Moreover, in surveys and focus groups, EPIC students discussed their strong sense of belonging, related to the enhancements provided by the program.

We have always known that students pick a university like Valpo because they want a more personal experience. I think we also know that faculty who choose to make their careers here do so for the same reason. So what we observed is that by boosting that focus on personal experience, we see a significant improvement in the student experience. They are happier, they feel more like they belong, and they are more likely to be retained until graduation.

Buoyed by these results, the Biology department has decided to incorporate aspects of the EPIC program into our general program for the majors.  This is envisioned as a four-year (one credit per year) program with each year focused on a different subject, but keeping the students together in their cohorts. The first year, responsible for most of the heavy-lifting in terms of building a sense of belonging, began just this last fall. 

The EPIC program is currently overseen by Michael Watters, Kristi Bugajski, Teresa Bals-Elsholz, Nick Rosasco, and Bonnie Dalhke-Goebbert.