QEP Topic

Albany Technical College’s QEP topic, “YO! Year One! Ready. Set. Succeed. First-Year Experience: Enhancing Student Success,” will provide a process for improving student success and retention. The initial vehicle for achieving the goals of the QEP will be the College Success course for beginning students.

Why You?

Research revealed that on average the college loses about 25% or more of the beginning student population each year. Also beginning students had a 64% pass rate and an overall GPA of 2.18, below that of returning students with a 73.7% pass rate and GPA of 2.89. Therefore, based on the data, new students seemed to be a particularly vulnerable population at the college and a possible focus group for improving student success and retention. To address this lower retention and under-performance of beginning students, the college will redesign its COLL 1020: College Success course for beginning students. Data revealed that beginning students had an average retention rate of 67% between the semesters of Fall 2017 through Fall 2019. In lieu of this information, the goal of “YO!” is to improve the student’s success rate and begin student retention rate by 7% by year five of the QEP.

QEP Goals

• Increase retention rate among beginning students
• Increase student success rate among beginning students