First-Year Student Academic Probation

Transcript
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to use the PDP Enrollment dashboard to understand first-year student academic probation.​

As a quick reminder, the Enrollment dashboard reports the 12-month enrollment counts and key characteristics for first-time and transfer-in students enrolling in your institution by cohort year. You can use this dashboard to understand institutional context like student characteristics, level of academic preparation, and access.​

First-year students are students who enrolled in college for the first time and students who have recently transferred into your institution.​

Let’s use this dashboard to answer this research question: What proportion of our first-year students are on academic probation? And what are the characteristics of those students? ​

Before we continue, please remember that the results and trends shown in this tutorial can not be applied to your institution. This data is only for demonstration purposes. Please review your institution’s data before drawing conclusions.​

On the Home Page for the Postsecondary Data Partnership dashboards, clicking the Enrollment icon takes us to the dashboard.​

We’re interested in first-year students who are on academic probation. Most institutions define academic probation as earning a grade point average less than 2.0. Students who are in good academic standing have a GPA of 2.0 or higher.   ​

Let’s begin by applying the GPA Range filter. Click the GPA filter, deselect “All,” and click the ranges 0.0 to 0.5, 0.5 to 1.0, 1.0 to 1.5, and 1.5 to 2.0, then click “Apply”.​

We see that 4,610 out of our original 16,083 first-year student population is on academic probation, which represents 29% of our first-year students. ​

Now, let’s try and learn more about these students.​

First, let’s find out if they are more likely to be first-time or transfer-in students. To do that, let’s apply the Enrollment Type dimension. We find that nearly 80% are first-time students and 20% are transfer-in students.​

Now, let’s find the age breakdown of these students by applying the Age Group dimension.​

Here we find that 69% of our first-year students who are on academic probation are 20 years old or younger, 18.6% are between 20 and 24 years old, and 12.2% are older than 24 years.​

And, finally, let’s see if our first-year students on academic probation received Pell Grants. To find that out, select Pell Grant Recipient from the Dimension drop-down. Let’s remove the “Unknown” category by removing it from the Pell Grant Recipient filter.​

Here we find that 72.8% of our first-year students on academic probation received Pell Grants while 27.2% did not.​

So, among the 29% of our first-year students who are on academic probation, we know that most of those students are first-time students who enrolled in college shortly after completing high school and received Pell Grants.​

How could this information be helpful? You could share this data with financial aid, first-year experience, your tutoring center, and academic advising to start a conversation about ways we could better support this vulnerable population.​

We encourage you to take the time to explore your institution’s PDP dashboards to better understand your students. Thank you for joining us.​