UT’s poor graduation rate is one of the obstacles standing in the way of the university becoming a top-25 public school.
    
“If you look at other universities who are in that category, they graduate more students than we do,” UT Vice Provost Sally McMillan said. “So if we want to be more like the University of Virginia or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the things we have to do is graduate more students.”
    
At June’s UT Board of Trustees meeting, Chancellor Jimmy Cheek unveiled the top-25 goal, saying the university was looking at a “target group,” made up of the universities ranked Nos. 21-29, several spots above UT’s No. 52 ranking at that time of the 600 total public institutions in the country.
    
The data showed UT was on the level with those schools in ACT scores but not in freshmen retention rate or six-year graduation rate.
    
The university was at 83.8 percent freshmen retention rate, as opposed to the target group’s 90 percent.
    
The retention rate has grown from 83.8 percent to 86.2 percent for the class of 2009, according to preliminary data, McMillan said. The goal is reaching and going beyond the target group to more than 90 percent in 10 years.
    
With six-year graduation rate, UT was at 59.8 percent, compared to the target group’s 75 percent.
    
The preliminary number for the 2009 six-year graduation rate is 60.5 percent, up from 59.8, McMillan said. The goal is that target group’s 75 percent in 10 years.
    
“We would love to get there in 10 years,” she said. “But whether or not that’s realistic, it’s probably a bit of a stretch. It’s probably going to be about 15 years.”
    
McMillan attributes UT’s lagging behind Cheek’s targeted top-25 universities in graduation rates to a lack of focus on graduation rates until recently.
    
“If you look at those schools, they’ve had a more consistent focus on retention for a longer period of time than we have,” she said. “We just frankly haven’t been paying a lot of attention to it before 2002.”
    
Improving poor graduation rates at UT begins with looking at the freshmen, not the graduating seniors, McMillan said.
    
Without UT improving retention rates — the barometer for maintaining students from year to year — the freshmen will not be there the fourth year.
    
“Once you’ve lost part of the freshman class, you never get them back,” McMillan said.
    
This is why the university has introduced a slew of new programs geared toward freshmen this decade.
    
The university’s new focus settled on admissions in 2002. The result is a seemingly annual press release from the university about freshmen with new record ACT scores or GPAs.
    
“2002 was the year we really started to intentionally make a class instead of taking whoever came,” she said.
    
As a result, the percentage of first-time freshmen scoring below a 26 on the ACT has fallen from about 70 percent in 1997 to around 40 percent in 2008. But it’s not just about admitting more academically-gifted freshmen. The university has put a number of programs into place to retain those freshmen.
    
The Student Success Center and the Life of the Mind reading program both began in 2005. Also, in that year, UT made major revisions to its First-Year Studies offerings.
    
Supplemental instruction, group tutoring sessions with an academically gifted undergraduate leader, began in 2006 for challenging classes.
    
Additionally, the HOPE Scholarship brought financial aid to students beginning in 2004.
    
Incentivizing summer school is another avenue the university looks to explore, McMillan said, finding ways to better course offerings and provide student funding for classes not currently covered by the HOPE Scholarship.
    
As far as graduation rate is concerned, McMillan said it’s too early to gauge because of all these new programs. The latest data for six-year graduation rates is from 2009, but these students began in 2003. So they experienced none of the freshmen programs now implemented and did not start with the HOPE Scholarship.
    
There is still more that needs to be done, McMillan said. New programs like BANNER — the replacement for the online course registration site Circle Park Online — will provide UT administration with better student data.
    
A program called Platinum Analytics will go through student schedules and identify potential problem courses, she said.
    
Another program, UTrack, will use both of those systems, along with the graduation course-requirement system DARS, to use students’ declared majors to predict course demand.
    
In addition, UTracK, to launch fall 2012, will aid students who want to switch majors, letting them see how the classes they’ve taken fit in with different majors’ course requirements.
    
“You can sort of play around with it until you find a major that matches your skill set,” she said.
    
Ultimately, through talks with students, McMillan has decided that improving retention rate is about changing the environment at UT.
    
She said students used to fail out of UT when the university had lower standards of admission. Now, with the higher standards, some still don’t graduate because they “opt out” instead.
    
According to a summer survey of students not coming back after freshman year, some said it was because UT was too large and impersonal. They decided to “opt out” and attend a smaller school instead.
    
“UT is large,” she said, “but it does not have to be impersonal.”

Sophomores struggle
    
The university also plans on asking undecided students to declare an “exploratory major,” she said. Right now undecided students all get lumped in together with the College of Arts and Sciences.
    
An exploratory major would serve essentially as a pre-major, gearing students toward taking classes they think they’ll need but aren’t sure yet.
    
“The longer they wait to make the decision, the more likely they’ll have some courses that don’t count toward their major,” she said.
    
This is the reason why some sophomore students are on the fast track not to graduate, UT Assistant Provost for Student Success Ruth Darling said.
    
Not enough sophomores have picked their major by the second year, which contributes to the university losing many students from the second to the third year. New campus seminars targeted specifically on what sophomores can do to move toward graduation, graduate school and getting a job in the future could help sophomores focus.
    
But Darling said many sophomores have difficulties outside the classroom. Sophomore year is the year many students move into apartments off campus and take on responsibilities like paying rent for the first time, she said.
    
Seminars now focus on what sophomores can do to transition from just UT students to Knoxville community citizens.

Undergrads supplement instruction
    
With the university losing state and federal support and relying more and more on private donations and rapidly expiring stimulus money, the university has been forced to create, in some cases, larger classes to maintain course offerings.
    
But for a student struggling in a larger class — especially one of the historically challenging, introductory courses like engineering fundamentals — finding needed help can prove difficult.
    
Enter supplemental instruction. Tiffany Hedges, assistant director of supplemental instruction, assures students it’s not just a euphemism for tutoring.
    
Supplemental instruction consists of out-of-class study sessions, led by an undergraduate instructor who has already taken the class and is now taking it again to instruct it.
    
“They sit in the class every day it meets,” Hedges said. “They rehear the lecture, and during the evening sessions, they could really relate the material talked about in the section.”
    
Supplemental instructors get trained before they teach. Program leaders oversee how supplemental instructors perform to make sure they are adhering to the goals of the program, as well.
    
“What we really want to do is get students working together to master the course material,” Hedges said. “… Not just talking about course material but how to study, how to read how to talk about the material they’re learning in class.”
    
Student instructors are required to have taken the class and gotten a B+ or better in it, as well as having recommendations from faculty members in the course’s discipline, she said.
    
Supplemental instruction is not like one-on-one tutoring, but is it the same as if a course has a discussion section with a teaching assistant? Hedges says that’s not supplemental instruction. She says the TA essentially parrots the professor, emphasizing what the professor thinks is most important and rehashing course information.
    
“The SI leader certainly has an idea, a concept provided to them by the instructor based on the lecture, but the SI leader’s main goal is to help students use that material,” Hedges said.
    
Often supplemental instructors begin as sophomores or juniors and stay on until graduation. It’s a paid, hourly position, and the Student Success Center hires new instructors each term, she said.
    
“We will have some students who are maybe pre-med and are getting ready to take the MCAT or other sorts of exams,” she said. “… They say that because they were a chemistry SI leader, they were really able to think through that material again.”
    
The supplemental instruction program started in 2006 in algebra and has grown every year since. It now also includes precalculus, Chemistry 120, Chemistry 130, engineering fundamentals and Biology 130.
    
The program usually sees roughly half of the students enrolled in a course attending.
    
“(It’s a) useful way of relating material and discussing it in a way that is meaningful for students,” she said. “… (It’s) an easy way for us to really relate that pairing of the lecture and what's going on in the textbook.”

UT’s future
    
Programs like BANNER and UTracK, as well as the hiring of more professional advisers, could help put an end to stories of students’ confusion on the requirements of graduating. It could also move UT closer to fulfilling its state mission.
    
Improving graduation rates is important, McMillan said, because of UT’s status as a public university.
    
“People of the state of Tennessee expect us to be preparing young people to be productive citizens of society, so actually having them complete their college degree is an important part of that process,” she said.
    
And students need to finish their programs in order to move on to careers or graduate school.
    
“Starting a degree is great,” she said, “but finishing a degree is really what is required in today’s world to be successful.”