ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that decades of research on student retention have identified a number of proven or promising institutional strategies to promote student success. Good intentions on the part of institutional actors and policymakers do not always lead to good implementation of strategies to improve student outcomes including persistence. The chapter highlights a number of factors that can interfere with institutional efforts to improve student outcomes such as student persistence. It discusses examples of initiatives that are tested, scaled, and diffused to identify facilitators of and obstacles to adoption. The chapter offers strategies for engaging organizational change to promote student persistence. Higher education scholars have employed the theories, without fully considering the ways that the models themselves may pattern and constrain thinking about what it is about higher education organizations that perpetuates unacceptably inequitable student outcomes.
