Stephanie Hamway went from F's to A's | Photograph by Yvonne Berg

At the end of her first year at Carleton University, Stephanie Hamway was struggling with poor grades and a program she didn’t like. “I rushed into university before I fully realized what I wanted to do,” she says. But after spring finals, she got an email from the school’s Student Academic Success Centre, offering to help her create a plan to fix it. Today, in her third year, she has an A average.

Identifying at-risk students and getting them the help they need to stay on track is an obstacle all universities encounter, though some more than others. Retention rates, measured as the number of students who go on from first year to second year, range from a low of 70.3 per cent at Brandon University to a high of 95 per cent at Queen’s University.

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