Campus Notes Ep4: Pacific's Path to 92% Retention
Alyssa, University of the Pacific, on the move-in-day shift and in-app gamification that lifted first-to-second-year retention into the 92% range.
At the University of the Pacific, Alyssa treats belonging as a process rather than a single event — one that typically plays out over a student's first six weeks.
The clearest sign it's taken hold, she says, is when students start calling Pacific 'home': leaving for the weekend and saying they're heading back home to campus, not their family's house, or getting genuinely excited to bring parents back for family weekend.
Watching for It, Measuring What They Can
Pacific's retention team tracks early warning signs directly — students with a C or lower in early-semester grades get proactive outreach.
But Alyssa is equally candid that a lot of it comes down to observation: watching how students interact with peers and noticing the difference between those who've settled in and those still struggling.
Redesigning Orientation Around Retention
Pacific's signature event, Week of Welcome, is structured differently from many peer institutions on purpose. Rather than running orientation in scattered sessions across the summer, all students return on move-in day and go straight into a two-day orientation, immediately followed by Week of Welcome.
That shift — made intentionally post-COVID, alongside summer send-off events in cities where students cluster, to stay engaged before they arrive — is a big part of why retention has improved:
- Previous years: mid-to-high 80s (85–89%)
- Past couple of years: ~92% first-to-second-year retention
- Stated goal: 98%
Trimming What Doesn't Need to Stay
Assessment data drives real changes year to year. Feedback that last year's three-day orientation felt too long led to a two-day model this year, with the freed-up time folded into a themed Week of Welcome:
- Tuesday — wellness day, built around a Take Care Fair and a trip to Target
- Wednesday — involvement day, centered on club fairs
Turning Orientation Into a Game
New this year: gamification through Guidebook.
- Students earn points for connecting with peers in-app and completing their profiles
- A leaderboard is read out at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with prize bags for the top three each meal
- 'Tiger's Pound the Mile' shuts down six blocks of downtown Stockton, where partner businesses offer student discounts and students upload a selfie at each stop to bank points toward an orientation scrapbook
The goal, in Alyssa's words, is shifting students from 'I have to go to orientation' to 'I get to go to orientation.'