Early warning systems for more effective student counselling in higher education: Evidence from a Dutch field experiment

Abstract

One way to reduce dropout is to improve the effectiveness of student counseling, since, for instance, proactive individual student coaching was found to improve student retention and graduation rates (Bettinger & Baker, 2014). However, student counselors often have caseloads that can span many hundreds of students (Hughes & Scott-Clayton, 2011), making individualized student counseling difficult, if not impossible.