Retention Management and Advising Services (RMAS) represents one of three major areas within the Division of Student Success and Enrollment Management at Kentucky State University. The departments that comprise Retention Management and Advising Services are: Academic Center for Excellence (ACE), Center for Academic Persistence and Success (CAPS), Placement, Testing, Career Preparation, and Student Support Services (SSS). The goal of this comprehensive area is to increase student retention rates and persistence to graduation with a focus on academic success and achievement through intrusive, early intervention, academic support programming, and systematic tracking of students from matriculation to graduation. Several programmatic strategies have been instituted both by the area and individual departments in support of the institutional goals of improving student persistence, retention rates, graduation rates, and academic success.

As outlined in the Division's strategic plan, the 2013/14 annual programmatic priorities for area of Retention Management and Advising Services includes the following:

To increase student retention, progression and timely degree completion

To decrease the number of students with academic action

Working collaboratively with the Office of Institutional Research, a Graduation Initiative has begun for students identified as a member of the fall 2009 cohort. This initiative focuses on students who have at least 60 hours completed, to ensure their ability to graduate within the required timeframe to impact graduation rates. Degree audits are being performed on those individuals and individualized success plans will be developed and continually monitored to ensure students remain on track to completion.

The University has begun use of Course Signals early intervention software effective this semester. Implementation of Degree Works, a degree audit software, begins this semester.

- ACE has experienced a very busy Fall 2013 semester with the TutorTrac system logging 542 individual students. The classification of those students is as follows: Freshmen 49%, Sophomores 22%, Juniors 13%, Seniors 15%, and Graduate students 1%. In addition to strong participation by first-year students, Fall 2013 data indicated an 8% increase in overall participation, a 29% increase in the number of tutoring sessions, and a 58% increase in the logged student hours in ACE compared to fall 2012.