Student Retention Programs for Community Colleges

Creative Ideas for Community Colleges Looking to Retain Students
Current Student Retention Rates

“The overall persistence rate of 75.0 percent represents a one-year gain of 1.1 percentage points (pp), more than the historical average, but the persistence rate is still below the pre-pandemic level (75.9%).” - National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Fall 2022 Research Study

The pandemic impacted higher education enrollment, persistence rates and retention rates. Bouncing back to pre-pandemic levels is going to require creative thinking from higher education institutions.

For community colleges and other 2-year institutions, this creativity could take the shape of a Bandwango passport.

About Student Retention Passports

Bandwango’s platform can enable a campus to organize student activities, deals and discounts and locations around campus into a single passport that is delivered to the student’s phone via text and e-mail.

This passport allows students to check-in at locations on or near campus, redeem discounts included in the pass and let the campus know they are participating in a student activity.

Students who check-in on the passport can accumulate points, which unlock prizes. These prizes could be campus water bottles, t-shirts or other swag. Bandwango can help the campus ship that swag, or it can be picked up directly at an on-campus location.

Our passports are mobile web applications, which means there’s no app to download!

Why Student Retention Passports Work

Bandwango’s passports are tokenized, so we know exactly which student downloaded the passport and how much they’ve used it. We also have the ability to message those students via text, e-mail and in-feed messages.

Our real-time reporting dashboard would enable campus staff to pull up passport results and user information at any time to see how the pass is performing.

Students with low passport engagement could be flagged as a retention risk and be sent different messages through the Bandwango system. For instance, those students who have checked in or redeemed zero offers through the pass could receive a survey via e-mail that asks how they’re feeling about their coursework, and whether they need additional support.

Similarly, those highly engaged passport users could receive text messages to remind them of upcoming re-enrollment dates.

If you’re interested in launching a student retention passport, reach out to schedule a demo of our platform and talk to a sales representative today!