Education Commons^™

Addressing First-Year Retention Through Servant Leadership Guided Change At An Eastern Canadian University, David Decker

The Dissertation in Practice at Western University

Higher education institutions have long sought to understand and address the attrition of first-year students. This organizational improvement plan (OIP) addresses the high attrition rates for first-year students at a small university campus located in Eastern Canada. Situated within a multicampus university and in a part of the country experiencing declines in university-aged demographics, the campus faces challenges in both student recruitment and retention. The focus of this paper is on improving retention. This OIP begins by unpacking the political, economic, social, technological, and environmental factors that influence the campus as a way forward in analyzing the poor retention rates …