Multicultural Dorm Project Rewarded For Retention Results: Five years ago, when Purdue University’s administrators sat down to brainstorm ways to improve diversity and retain students, they came up a solution they never thought would become an award-winning retention program.
In their program, “Multicultural Learning Communities,” a diverse selection of students studying the same discipline live in the same dorm as well as take the same classes. MCL project enforce the importance of living and learning from a multiple perspectives by requiring students in the courses to live and learn together.
Purdue, the University of Central Michigan and West Virginia UniversityOrlando. received the Lee Noel and Randi Levitz Retention Excellence Award earlier this month at the higher education consulting firm’s 2007 National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing and Retention, in
“The winning programs…went above and beyond in terms of generating identifiable and measurable institutional outcomes, demonstrating originality in program development and using resources in a creative manner,” said Tim Culver, vice president of the firm.
