Retention and persistence to graduation have been concerns for colleges and universities across the country. Research has pointed to sociodemographic and economic factors that affect persistence. Our analyses isolate the relationship between advising appointments and the likelihood of persistence controlling for the possibility of an endogenous relationship and while controlling for sociodemographic and academic performance covariates. Using data from one college in a large, public university, we found that students enrolled in Spring 2018 who met with an advisor one or more times in January through August 2018 were 9% more likely to persist and enroll in Fall 2018 than otherwise similar students who did not visit an advisor at all during that period.

Texting has been identified as a tool that has the potential to enhance informational exchanges between academic advisors and students. We use focus group and survey data from a recent texting intervention to assess student and advisor receptivity to texting as a new mode of communication. The data reveal that most students immediately saw the benefits of this new tool. In contrast, advisors initially were very skeptical of its value. They raised concerns about having a voice in the content of the messages and the time commitment that would be needed to respond to students’ texts. Over time, this feedback led to modifications in the texting protocol and, in turn, advisors came to view texting as an important mechanism for improving communication with students. Our study ends with a discussion of texting best practices within the context of academic advising.

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As colleges and universities strive to increase persistence and aid students in reaching graduation, they are utilizing alternative communication strategies like text messaging. Behavioral economics researchers suggest personalized, regular nudges can help college students make decisions that positively impact their college career and keep them on track for graduation. The current study presents the results of a randomized field experiment where a text messaging program was implemented in a large college at a public university. The intervention utilized a mixture of automated and personalized text messages from academic advisors and allowed for two-way communication between individual students and their major advisor. Mulitvariate analyses revealed the intervention had no impact on university persistence, but it did increase the odds of persisting in the college to the end of the semester, moving the average, overall college persistence rate from 93 to 95%. Effects were concentrated on underclass students, whose persistence rate moved from 87 to 93% at the college level. Underclass students also showed statistically significant university persistence effects, moving from 90 to 95%. Students who received texts but never engaged with the texting program were significantly less likely to request an advising appointment or to apply to be a student ambassador than were students in the control group. More research is needed to understand what motivates a student to engage with the texting software and to identify what the longer-term consequences of using text messaging to communicate with students might be.