I just met with Terry Smith, executive vice president and dean for academic affairs at Columbia College (Missouri). He liked my ideas on how to boost retention and encouraged me to share them with you on this blog.

So, here’s the smorgasbord I presented to him. Perhaps you might find one or two items worth tasting:

Attract the sorts of students likely to persist at your college. And here, I’m going beyond high school GPA and SAT:

Step 1. Identify a pool of your college’s seniors who are happy at your institution. One low-cost way to recruit them is to use the cap-and-gown order form. Simply attach a request for volunteers to be interviewed.

Step 2. Hire an excellent interviewer. Rather than a retention consultant, use an ethnographic researcher or journalist to interview each of those students to answer this question: What made Columbia College such a good fit for you and a good college, in general.

Step 3: Revise your prospective-student marketing efforts in light of the interview data.

At non-elite colleges, especially privates, many students drop out because of cost. And a major factor in cost is time to degree, which increases significantly when a student changes majors. To increase the chances that a student will wisely choose a major the first time, post, on your Web site, a tool to help prospective and newly admitted students match their predispositions and predilections with majors.

For example, more than 100 colleges and high schools link their Web site to www.mymajors.com. It has face validity, but predictive validity data is not reported.

An alternative might be for an institution to ensure that each academic major’s Web site offers helpful guidance to prospective majors: what the courses are like (video clips?); the skills, abilities, and preferences that tend to lead to success in this major; the distribution of what the institution’s graduates in that major are doing careerwise, five years after graduation.

Have a perhaps-required class offered at orientation or in the first semester called, “Secrets to Making the Most of Columbia College … and to Graduating in Four Years.”

Significant, ongoing one-on-one relationships are key both to a good education and to retaining students. So consider building the following into your undergraduate program: — Ensure that training of professional and peer advisers and residence-hall assistants includes guidance on how to be a fine mentor. — At orientation, assign every freshman to a peer mentor who is a successful junior, so the freshman has a mentor for at least the first two years. — Ensure that good tutoring is available and its use encouraged.

Ensure that your institution offers high-quality career guidance, and offer or even require a course at orientation or in the first semester on choosing a career.

While many academics wish that college students would forgo a preoccupation with career in favor of learning for learning’s sake, the reality is that, especially outside of the elite colleges, career is many students’ primary motivator for attending college. By helping them — by the end of the first semester — to have a tentative career goal they’re excited about, they are more likely to continue with and work hard at their college education.

Make completion of each year a milestone with rewards. First-year students at the U.S. military academies (e.g., West Point) have few privileges and are dubbed with the diminutive term “plebes.” Each year, they get more privileges and status. That, I believe, contributes to retention. Other institutions might want to try something similar. For example, at the end of the freshman year, there could be a ceremony for all completers, and returning sophomores could receive privileges not available to freshmen — perhaps priority parking, registration, dining-hall privileges, etc.

Allow sophomores and beyond to become student members of the alumni association to build bonds with the institution.