Scaling Up: Shrinking the DFW Rate

The University Innovation Alliance (UIA) last year committed $3.5 million over two-and-a-half years to scaling a promising academic-credit–recovery model across 10 additional campuses.

Now data from the first round of that effort, from last summer and fall, shows that 77 percent of students who previously received grades of D or F or who withdrew from a course succeeded in their efforts to retake that course. Prior to the intervention, course retake rates were at 55 percent, amounting to an increase of 22 percentage points in course retake success.

Retention was also high, at 85 percent for students retained in the fall after completing their summer accelerator course.

To Bridget Burns, founding CEO of UIA, the results are highly promising—and high-stakes—in that they point to a scalable solution to education’s unproductive student-credit problem.

“If we don’t move forward to try and figure this out from a national kind of laboratory framework, the default setting for our sector is, ‘We just hope it gets better,’” she says. “And hope is an ineffective strategy when we’re talking about persistent DFW rates that have really accelerated, especially on the heels of COVID.”

UIA is a national coalition of public research universities committed to increasing the number and diversity of college graduates. The DFW project represents its first major foray into classroom-based student success strategies, with previous work focusing on areas including advising and financial aid.

Burns adds, “It’s clearly something that is not about one faculty member or one discipline or one institution. This is a national problem that is worth all of our thinking, and we needed to create an environment in which we’re going to move forward together.”

What’s the need: According to one pre-pandemic analysis by EAB, institutional unproductive credit rates typically range from 15 percent to 30 percent, meaning, on average, that up to three in 10 students enrolled in any given course won’t get credit for it. Dropping out of or failing a course is also linked to a larger set of negative student outcomes, such as reduced retention or losing financial aid. Unproductive credit rates tend to be especially high in key gateway courses such as introductory English and calculus: EAB has found that over a third of unproductive credits occur in just 1 percent of all courses, many of them gateway.

EAB has recommended four strategies for shrinking the DFW rate:

• Know the problem by studying course completion and failure rates, and share this data across campus to promote discussions about solutions.
• Identify root causes, which can include instructor variation across course sections, lack of academic preparation and student struggles outside the classroom.
• Focus available resources on courses that will have the broadest impact on student success and where pedagogical innovation is supported.
• Build faculty buy-in via a coordinated effort to provide actionable data, internal and external benchmarks, resources, support, time and incentives.

The inspiration: While individual institutions have had success pursuing the above strategies, the pandemic only highlighted—and worsened—the DFW problem across higher ed as a whole. At Georgia State University, in particular, the DFW rate in some critical first-year courses jumped 20 percentage points in the 2020–21 academic year. Concerned, the university—which is home to the National Institute for Student Success—launched a program to get an initial 600 students who’d failed to earn credit for a class back on track.

Dubbed the Accelerator Academy, the summer 2021 pilot allowed students to retake a course at no cost to them on an accelerated timeline with supplemental instruction, near-peer mentoring and proactive advising. Courses targeted from this treatment spanned departments but were all judged to be important to student progression and saw increases in DFW rates that year. In addition to being able to try the course again at no cost to them, participating students received a $500 educational grant, paid from federal pandemic funds.

Ultimately, more than 400 students in the pilot accelerator program earned grades of C or better, with 98 earning As. Success rates in the program, which continues, now approach 80 percent.

Tim Renick, founding executive director of the National Institute for Student Success, told the alliance late last year that Georgia State’s success notwithstanding, “this problem’s not going away. Our students have not recovered [from the pandemic]. There’s significant learning loss, and significant mental health challenges and stresses on the students. And, nationally, the DFW rates continue to be much higher than they were.”

Additionally Renick said, there’s a “bifurcation of impacts based upon socioeconomics. DFW rates have not gone up across the board. If you are a well-resourced high-school student who comes from an academically rigorous school with high graduation rates, you probably weathered the pandemic pretty well. We know some high schools in the Atlanta area, during the pandemic when they were entirely online, were shooting for attendance of 50 percent on any given day. Half the students weren’t there to learn.”

Higher DFW rates for historically marginalized groups predate the pandemic, with Every Learner Everywhere, among other groups, long having positioned this as a critical equity issue.

Scaling success: Georgia State’s success obviously captured the attention of UIA, of which it is a member. Guided by Renick, Burns and others, 10 additional member institutions are now working to adopt the Accelerator Academy model on their campuses. Courses selected for accelerator treatment vary from place to place, but all are gateway and have relatively high DFW rates. These have included general chemistry, introductory biology, college algebra, calculus I, trigonometry, math for liberal arts, introductory computer science, macroeconomics, English composition and psychology.

The program involves inviting currently enrolled students and, in some cases, students who have dropped out, to retake courses at a subsidized cost and with a small incentive grant. All those involved get supplemental instruction, group tutoring and academic coaching. As with other major alliance initiatives, the project will be translated into free “playbook” for other institutions to use.

Burns reiterates that the alliance’s mission is help institutions share, further develop and scale solutions for student success that can work in any setting. “We’re always trying to ask the question, ‘How do you adapt it? How do you evolve it where it is? What’s the best way to do this given that we have, in this case, 10 campuses with different governance structures, different ecosystems, leadership styles—all that kind of stuff?”

At least 1,000 students will participate in the alliance’s initial pilot, but the program ultimately stands to benefit many more students at alliance member institutions, 170,000 of whom are students of color and 130,000 from low-income backgrounds. The project is funded by Ascendium and the Frederick A. DeLuca Foundation.

Burns says that one of the many things that she’s learned leading the alliance thus far is that “one of the most significant barriers to innovation is the story that campuses tell themselves about what’s possible and what’s not.”

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