Victoria University in Melbourne is one of Australia’s newest, largest and most culturally diverse universities. Situated in a working class region, it is part of the international massification of Higher Education and seeks to meet the growing educational needs of an extremely diverse community.

In 2008, the Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development at Victoria University introduced a number of innovations designed to address the disproportionally high attrition levels across its undergraduate programs, and this paper explores and evaluates their introduction and their impact.

First year undergraduate students at Victoria University have a range of demographic and other characteristics which particularly predispose them for attrition, namely:

1. They are less ready to choose a university course on leaving school
2. They have a lower academic orientation
3. They have relatively high levels of dissatisfaction with course and unit choices, and with their teachers
4. They are given lower levels of help and advice from both family and friends and support staff
5. They have high levels of engagement in full time work
6. They have little or no financial support or savings (Krause, 2004)

Some of these factors are generated by demographic patterns which may well be impervious to intervention (1, 5 and 6 in particular) yet others were viewed as characteristics which could be disrupted (2, 3 and 4 in particular) in order that our students’ transition year made them less vulnerable to both dropping out and staying out.

Interestingly given the above, Victoria University students have exhibited a high level of ICT use. In Krause’s 2004 data, Victoria University students were shown to have a comparatively high level use of email, in particular, to contact staff (27% use it daily for this purpose compared to 19% at other universities) and friends on their course (31% of VU students as opposed to 22% nationally). The use of mobile phones is high amongst the VU student cohort – particularly for sending SMS messages. Their use of online discussion groups is almost identical (at 15%) to those at other universities (Krause, 2004). These usage rates will inevitably have grown over the last four years since this data was captured.

This was the context in which the faculty developed four retention initiatives designed to utilize our students’ comparative expertise in the use of communication technologies:

1. Through the use of an interactive multimedia event during orientation designed to facilitate students’ social networking and teamwork – both during the initial orientation period and afterwards online
2. The provision of a student toolbox embedded in free 1 gig USB stick which introduced them to the range of support services available
3. The development of a dedicated transition website by senior undergraduate multimedia students which was subsequently maintained and enhanced by one of our graduates.
4. The appointment of a transition and retention lecturer/ student advisor who used both ‘light touch’ and ‘intrusive’ contact strategies with vulnerable first years.

This paper will demonstrate and explore these retention strategies and evaluate their efficacy in terms of both attrition reduction and increases in student satisfaction.