Brevard College is pleased to announce that it has been selected as one of eight founding cohort institutions for the John N. Gardner Institute Retention Performance Management (RPM) process.
The Gardner Institute’s RPM process helps institutions develop and successfully implement a plan to retain the students they admit – an outcome critical to fulfilling institutional mission.
The John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education is a national non-profit focused on helping higher education institutions improve student learning, persistence, and completion. Each institution will work collaboratively with the Gardner Institute for up to two years to analyze student data and subsequently create and implement a plan to improve retention. The colleges and universities will respectively focus on a specific cohort of students such as first year, sophomores or various subpopulations such as first-generation or low-income students.
“Our decade-and-a-half of experience as a non-profit focused on undergraduate excellence has firmly reinforced the lesson that taking substantive, evidence-based steps to improve retention can be a difficult process for any educational institution,” said Dr. Andrew Koch, the Gardner Institute’s Executive Vice President. “But doing so is absolutely necessary for the institutions as well as the students and communities they serve.”
Koch added that Brevard College was selected to participate in the inaugural RPM cohort due to the college’s strong commitment to student learning and success.
“We are honored to be part of the Retention Performance Management with the John N. Gardner Institute. The RPM will give us the platform to develop a program that will best meet the needs of our students,” D’Anna said.
“We look forward to working with Brevard College,” commented Dr. John Gardner, President of the Gardner Institute. “The lessons learned will shape both what Brevard College does for the success of students and also what the Gardner Institute does with future RPM cohorts.”
Brevard College is committed to an experiential liberal arts education that encourages personal growth and inspires artistic, intellectual, and social action.