UC San Diego

Historically, university leaders have met campus enrollment goals by focusing on recruiting prospective students. In the last few decades, however, as global competition for fewer students in a poor economy has forced them to spend more on recruitment and marketing, they have realized that retaining current students is actually a more cost-effective enrollment strategy than merely recruiting them. This realization has come about, in part, because for-profit companies in the service industry are finding it more profitable to concentrate on retaining customers' loyalties than expanding their customer bases. The business practice of developing long- term relationships with customers by meeting their expectations is known as relationship marketing. Although this is an established theory and practice in the business community, university administrators have yet to fully realize its potential as an enrollment management strategy. Considering that for a century, about half of university students have failed to graduate, enrollment managers should welcome a new approach that might remedy this long-standing retention issue. This study utilized relationship-marketing theory as a framework to understand the issue of university student retention. Relationship- marketing and enrollment management literature were reviewed to examine the relevance of customer service strategy to student retention efforts. The qualitative study used a multiple cross-sectional design to examine student loyalty at three points in time during the undergraduate student life cycle. Freshmen, seniors, and alumni from a public research university in California were interviewed about their expectations of university life, satisfaction with university experiences, and demonstrations of loyalty behavior. To supplement the interview data, blogs written by freshmen, seniors, and alumni attending eight campuses in the same university system were analyzed for evidence of satisfaction/ dissatisfaction with their experiences as well as evidence of loyalty behavior. The research findings provide insight into what factors affect undergraduate students' loyalties throughout the student life cycle. When it came to the university experience, these findings showed that students' loyalty behaviors was more strongly linked to the fulfillment of their expectations than to the achievement of their satisfaction. The findings also illuminate how university leaders can meet the expectations of students in order to retain them