Why College Retention Fails (Part 3 of 3)

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Why College Retention Fails (Part 3 of 3)

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Intro

So far I’ve written about my issues with college outreach and college recruiting. However, none of these address the most common college quizbowl concern: membership attrition. Even when people do get into quizbowl, most of them don't end up sticking around. It's important to remember that quizbowl isn’t alone in this! All student clubs struggle to retain members after the excitement of the first few weeks, and you should expect people to drop as they try out all sorts of new things. But I suspect that attrition in quizbowl is especially pernicious.

My hypothesis is that quizbowl clubs have divergent objectives. Specifically, most quizbowl clubs have two goals which do not always go together: 1) becoming more competitive on the regional and/or national level and 2) growing the club by attracting and retaining more casual members. To be clear, these are not incompatible goals. But they definitely don't complement each other by default! Sometimes the things that help a club become more competitive are the very things that make it hard to retain casual members.

First, let's give credit where credit is due: quizbowl is mostly excellent at retaining its most committed members. I would even go so far as to say that the more committed someone is, the better quizbowl is at retaining them relative to other activities. People who fall for quizbowl fall for it hard. There are few activities with as much commitment from the average participant as college quizbowl. And there are few activities with the same variety of ways to engage. If you're a collegiate volleyball player, you're not going to have the same opportunities to help run the activity like you would have in quizbowl. This is partially a function of the community size, but it also follows from having an activity that requires a much more active community to survive. Even as a quizbowl alumnus, there are many ways to stay involved: writing, volunteering, and even more competition. There's a reason quizbowl has this gravity to it that makes it notoriously hard to leave.

But college quizbowl lacks this same vision for the casual player. There are certainly clubs that have come up with their own ideas, with varying degrees of success. But in general, college quizbowl struggles to answer the question "what should a casual member be trying to get out of college quizbowl?". Of course, their primary goal should be to have a good time. But in an activity that requires as much investment as quizbowl, it makes sense to expect there to be a clear path to follow. The fact that there isn't causes retention to suffer.

In the end, this is related to the dichotomy I outlined in Part 2: FBCs versus CBCs. To recap, FBCs (or Friend Group-based Clubs) are smaller entities centered around a tight-knit and very engaged group of friends, while CBCs (or Confederation-Based Clubs) are composed of more loosely connected clusters of people. In my last post, I outlined the social reasons why quizbowl FBCs are less attractive in college compared to high school. But in this post, I'd like to discuss why FBCs have unique retention challenges. Remember, almost all quizbowl clubs are FBCs. This fact really shapes the discourse: most discussion about retention never challenges the FBC premise directly, which leads to a lack of imagination of what a quizbowl club with great retention might look like (and consequently, a vision for the casual player!). This post will have three sections:
  1. In Defense of Low Retention: Why FBCs Can Still Be Successful
  2. The Case for CBCs: The Road to Nowhere
  3. Supporting Retention in CBCs: Creating Ways to Participate

In Defense of Low Retention: Why FBCs Can Still Be Successful

When I envision an FBC, I envision a club that is centered around regular tournament players. Other people may drift in and out, but practices are run by and for those people.

If you only prioritize regular tournament players, then you should expect high early attrition. Most people are not going to be in it for the long haul, and it's good to be able to see quickly who those people are so you can prioritize them. In many cases, it's not even obviously desirable for an FBC to expand. Some clubs get along fine with low retention and are probably better off as they are.

So my first big idea is this: high early attrition might not actually be a bad thing for a club. When the early wave of newcomers stops coming, is this really so bad? Sure, it might be demoralizing to see people decide that your club is not for them. But as long as your club manages to keep its core group happy, then it shouldn't matter what your attrition rate is, so long as there are enough people to keep things running from year to year.

Of course, that doesn't always happen: the big problem with FBCs is that they often struggle to maintain enough members to even be an FBC and start veering into "literally just one guy" territory. This is how clubs die: you have a really motivated FBC at the start, but there's no one to keep the lights on when those people graduate.

If you want to run a successful FBC, the first step is to acknowledge that you are an FBC and act accordingly. For example, if you are an FBC, don't spend as much time trying to recruit casual members! Focus on geeks, not MOPs! And don't spend so much time persuading less engaged members to stay in the club. If people are already unenthusiastic about the club at an early stage, they're probably not going to be a great fit. And if they are, convincing them through persuasion is less important than just running the club in a welcoming and representative way.

I don't have nearly as many ideas for running FBCs, because 1) UW's quizbowl club is not an FBC and 2) I think existing FBCs already do an okay job of it. But here are a few things I would recommend to avoid getting into "literally just one guy" territory*:
  1. Get to know your new members and what they want. When you focus less on your outer members, the trade-off is that you get to focus more on your inner members. And you should absolutely be doing that. If you notice an engaged new member of the club, make sure to have a couple conversations with them! Figure out where they're at: what they like about the club, what they don't like, what they'd like to see in the future. And try to get to know them on a personal level as well! People like to feel seen and valued. Ultimately, when you run an FBC, members' individual wishes are way more important. Losing a member is a lot more of a blow when you have 4 members instead of 40. And people are a lot less likely to flake on a club if they feel valued. If you really value someone as a club member, you should be open to changing the club to satisfy their wishes. And while this should come naturally in an FBC, make sure to stay up-to-date with your veteran members as well! It's good for everyone to feel that their input has at least some amount of influence.
  2. Be transparent about both social stuff and club stuff. If your club is a friend group, you want to be open about what that friend group has to offer. Don't just disappear to some insular hangout spot after practice, especially at the beginning of the year. Make sure that new members know about at least some of your social gatherings, and make it clear that new members are welcome! People appreciate being invited to things. And that goes for club stuff as well! You want to make sure that they are somewhat aware of what club leadership does, as well as everything they are able to participate in. One of my biggest criticisms of my (FBC) high school club is that they never invited me to a tournament when I was a freshman, even when they were short a player! Of course they didn't know that I would have agreed, but it's not like they tried to get to know me either (until I was moved to Varsity by the coaches). Keep tabs on your young players— you never know when someone will be open to an opportunity! And be diligent about notifying them— one thing I've learned from sending teams to tournaments is that a lot of people just need a little push.
  3. Make an active effort to mentor young players. College quizbowl is super intimidating, and many players start out wanting to play quizbowl but quit because it is too hard. It should be easy for new members to get the support they need, and you should have at least one person make themselves available for people who want to improve. Consider hosting resources on a club website, or in a dedicated Discord channel. In general, you want to make the transition from high school to be as seamless as possible.
  4. Start transferring power to younger club members BEFORE they graduate. This is a big one. You should be thinking about who is going to take over the club well before the current leader graduates, ESPECIALLY if club operations are primarily run by one person. If possible, you should cede some power before the year is over to ease the transition. Get in the habit of delegating tasks to future club leaders while you're still there to help them. And have conversations about it! You don't want to be expecting someone to take over the club, only to realize at the end that they don't actually want to. There's a lot more room for error when you're not up against a deadline (and not handling graduation stuff at the same time!).
  5. Put together materials that can help future generations of the club figure stuff out. This is probably the least important of the five, but it really is nice when there are some reference materials to guide you, especially regarding school bureaucracy stuff like room reservation. This is especially important for clubs that die but may later come back to life. If you find yourself in "literally just one guy" territory, consider putting something together for the people that come after you. If nothing else, those resources could become useful for the broader community!
With the right attitude, FBCs can absolutely work in college quizbowl and in fact they already do. But it should come as no surprise that I prefer CBCs to FBCs. For one thing, I just like the idea of quizbowl being a more accessible place. It brings me joy to expose more people to quizbowl, and I believe that quizbowl can be enjoyed by pretty much everyone. But I'd like to make a more concrete argument for CBCs, and in particular I'd like to highlight strengths of high school FBCs that are difficult for college FBCs to replicate.


The Case for CBCs: The Road to Nowhere

In my last post, I discussed how college clubs generally trend towards CBCs for social reasons. But there's one other big idea that makes FBCs harder to run in college: achievement is often too difficult. I'd like to compare it to high school quizbowl, which (for the most part) has had stronger growth + retention than college while still using the FBC model. And because most promising FBC recruits are coming off of a successful stint in high school, it is useful to remember where they are coming from.

In this section, I’ll be talking about Illinois quizbowl, which is a great model for what high school quizbowl could be across the country. However, most of this is broadly applicable to any form of high school “circuit quizbowl” as well.

When I played quizbowl in high school, there were so many ways to achieve. The first level of achievement was making the quizbowl team. This might seem trivial to experienced players, but for the bigger high schools in my area, getting to play on the top team was a big deal! Many players spent a large chunk of their quizbowl careers aspiring to that goal. But the prize on most players’ minds was the conference title: the culmination of a local league that met regularly throughout the year. Unless you were in one of the overpowered conferences in the northern suburbs, this was a pretty attainable goal for motivated players. But things didn’t end there! We also had the IHSA State Series and the Masonic State Series, a series of end-of-season small tournaments that joined up into bigger ones. These tiers of achievement allowed many players of all different skill levels to experience a sense of achievement. Even if you weren’t a state powerhouse, you could aspire to capture a Regionals title that year, or at least beat your rival in conference play. And then there were a variety of awards for individual achievement: from the IHSSBCA All-Sectional Team to the NAQT High School Player of the Week.

Heck, even if you didn’t make the team, you could still achieve as part of the JV circuit. We had a JV team that traveled alongside the Varsity team and played against the same schools. For me, this was the single most motivating aspect of high school quizbowl as a young player. I couldn’t hope to compete with Varsity players, but JV provided a challenging yet “winnable” goal. JV was a nice on-ramp to the world of Varsity quizbowl, and it let us develop in our own little ecosystem without having to get crushed in overmatched competition. In addition to that, it made us feel like we were a part of something. We got to improve alongside local rivals and continue to encounter them along our journey to success.

All of this gave players instant feedback: a sense that they were accomplishing something. This gave people a reason to return every week, and it gave them something to aspire to. Most importantly, it gave them a direction. There was a general sense of how the team was doing, even among the MOPs of the club. All of this allowed people to feel more “in tune” with the team.

College quizbowl has nothing even close to this. Local competition is few and far between, and we don’t have the same kinds of tiered structures that drive engagement in high school. It's not obvious what you should be working towards, and if you're not on a top team, it's not clear that any competitive goals are attainable at all. And this brings me to my central concept: the Road to Nowhere.

Here’s a simple question: if you were a less involved member of your own quizbowl club, what would you get out of coming back to practice week after week? Perhaps you have a good answer to this, and if you do, that’s great! But I’d imagine that a lot of clubs don’t! Most competitive quizbowl practice environments I’ve been in (including my own) involve reading a packet and then chilling for a bit, over and over. This is totally fine for elite players; getting a chance to play packets against other skilled players is why they come every week. But it can start to feel aimless for everyone else. Even if they have a separate room to play packets, there’s no clear path of progression. There’s no “Road to Somewhere”, if you will.

We all understand the importance of giving novices a place to excel when it comes to player development. There’s been more efforts in recent years to give novice players more space, and this has been a positive change. But player development is just as much about making new players feel recognized, and we don’t spend enough time talking about that. I’d like to shout out my teammates Isaac Olson, Ben Shi, and Felicia Tsai. Despite never playing quizbowl in high school, these players have grown into some of the best world literature, world history, and physics players that I’ve ever played against. It’s been exciting to watch them surpass me (yes!) in these categories over the past couple of years. But there’s no mechanism in college quizbowl to recognize them for their achievement. And that’s really a shame. If these standout players can’t get recognized, what hope is there for anyone else (who isn't super plugged into the national scene)?

When it comes to individual recognition, there isn’t a single regular award for individual college quizbowl achievement. All we’ve got are scoring awards at nationals and informal player polls. Both of these things will only ever be awarded to the best of the best, a level that more casual players in college will likely never reach. And no shade to the people who run + vote in player polls, but I doubt players in our little circuit are ever considered. By their very nature, informal player polls will always be dominated by the more insular parts of the community. This is exacerbated by the fact that the polls are often topped by grad students who have been playing quizbowl for decades.

In conclusion, a competitive college calendar is generally not enough to build a sense of purpose for all but the most dedicated members. And honestly, it’s often not enough for the most dedicated members either! Just look at the most recent sites of ACF Regionals: pretty much all of them have had eight teams or less. Not only is the competition smaller, but there is generally low parity across sites. You pretty much don’t have a chance of winning any non-novice tournament unless you’re one of those schools who win every game. In the end, it doesn’t feel great to be rewarded for your hours of hard work by losing to the same teams, just by a slightly worse margin that usual.

Now, I concede that a lack of teams is the main problem here. Chris Chiego rightly pointed out in the last post that all of this could be addressed by recruiting more teams, which is a task best facilitated by institutions. This is completely true, and I would agree that institution-building is a good long-term goal. However, I wonder if we’re even at that stage yet. First of all, why would new teams join college quizbowl if there’s nothing there for them in the competitive circuit? Sure, we have novice tournaments. But they don’t really lead to anything. There’s no clear stepping stone from playing local novice tournaments to competing with the best of the best unless you go to one of the top quizbowl schools. Plus, even the most underdeveloped high school circuits have a handful of opponents to play against. But if UW were to get, say, Seattle U to start a team, their only local opponent would be us! (I realize that some regions of the country have more teams, but most regions of the country are closer to ours.) It's not clear what the value proposition of forming a competitive team would be. Before you can reap the full benefits of a quizbowl institution, you need to have a few self-sustaining quizbowl ecosystems for it to work with.


Supporting Retention in CBCs: Creating Ways to Participate

In the end, I reject the idea that we should address the Road to Nowhere by prioritizing outreach and institution-building. Rather, we need to think about what roads are possible to create with the resources that we have. Sure, in the long run, you want to see a thriving novice circuit and high team parity. But that's a long way away! You need your club to be fun for the people in it now. When I was captain of my high school club, I failed to realize this. I thought so much about the ways that the club could be fun if we went to more tournaments that I failed to address the more important question of how the club could be made fun otherwise.

And the way you do that is by creating more ways to participate. Obviously, packet reading is integral to the quizbowl experience. But there are so many other ways you can engage with quizbowl besides just reading packets in preparation for formal quizbowl tournaments. You can organize quizbowl writing workshops. You can give quizbowl presentations. You can host quirky intra-club competitions. Most of these things are only possible when you have a large number of people in your club. But this is exactly what I'm advocating for: CBCs that are large enough to command their own self-sustaining scene. In a CBC, it should be possible to have a fulfilling quizbowl experience within the confines of your club.

Anyway, all this is to say that quizbowl clubs in sparse areas need to create their own meaning: their own "Roads to Somewhere". Start filling your team's calendar with quizbowl things that are not tournaments! Remember, people come to quizbowl because they chose it over every possible thing they could have otherwise been doing at the time. Respect their time by giving them a reason to keep coming back! Stagnation is the enemy of retention. If you feel like practice is getting monotonous, it probably is. In a CBC, there's a lot more of a need to keep things interesting! I'd like to think that UW has done a pretty good job of that. One time, we hosted a tournament in which duos of people got paired up randomly every round and played an old set against each other in weird Frankenstein teams. (We even edited in some housewritten questions to add some extra spiciness.) Another time, we hosted a "Telestrations Writing Workshop", in which people would work on collaborative tossups for a set amount of time before passing it to the next person, and then we got together and critiqued them as a group afterwards. And of course, we hosted quarterly readings of tossups on celebrities people in the club found attractive (uh, make sure to be respectful if you do this). It was events like these that got people excited about staying, not the promise of a four-team tournament in the spring. I'd be excited to see more discussion about novel ways to engage with quizbowl during practice, especially ones that are less player-focused.

But above all else, you want to give people space to get to know each other. Quizbowl spaces often focus too much on getting through the packet, and they end up not giving the room space to breathe. But this "breathing room" is exactly where the magic happens: it's where people can strike up an unexpected conversation, or make a surprising friendship. The biggest predictor of whether someone stuck around in the club was whether they had good friends coming to the club as well. So especially in those beginning weeks, do your best to facilitate human connection. This goes for both FBCs and CBCs. If people don't feel like they can connect with their fellow club members, then they probably won't come back, no matter how much they like quizbowl.

I realize that this section is a bit light on how to actually create a healthy CBC, and that's mostly because it can't be forced. I included thoughts about how to recruit the necessary number of members in my earlier posts, but what to do specifically for retention depends a lot on what your club members say, and that's going to be specific to your club. And community-building like that takes time. Almost two years passed before I felt that quizbowl at UW was built to last. Any CBC is going to be a collaborative effort between club leaders and club regulars, and I don't want to prescribe a specific course of action just because it worked for us. But my core ideas are all here: if you pursue the recruitment methods from the earlier posts, if you create enough interesting "Roads to Somewhere", and if you make new members feel welcomed and valued, I believe that your efforts will be rewarded by a healthy CBC. (And that goes for FBCs as well.) Thanks for reading!


Key Takeaways
  • Sometimes the things that help a club become more competitive are the very things that make it hard to retain casual members.
  • High early attrition is not always a bad thing; it just depends on your goals.
  • Get to know your new members and what they want.
  • Start transferring power to younger club members BEFORE they graduate.
  • Player development is just as much about making new players feel recognized. Give a shoutout to your most-improved players!
  • A competitive college calendar is generally not enough to carry a sense of purpose for all but the most dedicated members.
  • In a CBC, it should be possible to have a fulfilling quizbowl experience within the confines of your club.
  • Stagnation is the enemy of retention. Do your best to mix things up and keep practice exciting!
  • Give people space to get to know each other.
This post contains some messy thoughts, mostly because I didn't want it hanging over my head any longer (it's been half a year). It contains a lot of conclusions that I've come to over the course of the past eight years, and many of them are imperfectly conveyed. But I'm of course happy to discuss any criticism and/or other feedback here or on Discord! I sincerely hope that you found some part of this series useful. I have lots of emotions around leaving quizbowl (my last practice was yesterday), but overall I love my club and I'm glad that I was able to be a part of it.

* = Pretty much all of these points can be effective for CBC retention as well. Also, I'm using "guy" in the gender neutral sense.
Kevin Kodama
University of Washington '23
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Re: Why College Retention Fails (Part 3 of 3)

Post by cchiego »

This has been an interesting series to read and, while I disagree with the recommendation of this post to focus less on inter-club institution-building, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the post in examining intra-club dynamics and especially the idea of avoiding a "Road to Nowhere" situation for most prospective team members. There are also lots of really great specific suggestions for ideas that clubs could implement to try to make regular practice enjoyable for all, which is a very important consideration for retention.

There are two main issues though with focusing primarily on intra-club dynamics rather than larger regional/national circuits.

First, it's not always going to be possible to have a strong club experience of the ideal type described above. Developing a social scene that works for your club and getting members onboard with it is tough and there's no one recipe to success, as Kevin's post notes. It's also very easy for a leadership change/graduation of a large cohort to completely wreck a college club, even if the previous leaders do everything possible to make it work. This instability, despite the best-laid plans of previous officers and players, seems to be a hallmark especially of more isolated clubs and those primarily composed of undergrads (i.e. there aren't long-term grad students serving as buffers).

Second, many of the same social benefits that this post outlines can be accomplished by just going to a bunch of trivia nights and having fun "practices" playing trivia questions rather than jumping through the hoops of getting a quizbowl team started and competing at quizbowl events. This has, not surprisingly, led to a decent number of programs over the years getting either "trash-captured" or simply becoming trivia night clubs. While this can be fine in its own right, it's not very conducive to a successful quizbowl club.

This is where having an outside quizbowl community and ideally a regional circuit with some level of institutionalization can be useful. Having outside sources of advice, encouragement, and motivation can help some of the more-dedicated potential members be encouraged to invest their time into quizbowl in the first place and reduce the costs of setting up a team on one's own. In cases of major turnover, circuits can share information and provide other roles for individuals to stay part of the community outside their own team (quizbowl pretty much everywhere needs experienced readers, for instance, as well as those interested in promoting quizbowl, coaching local teams, etc.). Even if a club goes inactive or becomes less active, having other nearby events and clubs can help lead to a revival more easily than just doing it on one's own. Plus, having quizbowl events provides a focal point for club activity. While the focus can be more on enjoying the roadtrip and having a good time on the trip, it helps to have a destination of, say, ACF Fall or NAQT SCT to aim for and keep the team on track (it helps if there's a healthy local circuit too to provide a variety of competitive matches).

I still think it would be really helpful to have some kind of conference or symposium with collegiate club leaders past and present, especially those from clubs that have succeeded despite challenges (distance from other teams, lack of a local HS circuit, financial challenges, etc.). These posts have been very useful in outlining the UW approach and it's great that that has worked well at UW, but I do think that there's much to be learned from sharing different approaches and perhaps even adopting a bit more rigor in testing different strategies.
Chris C.
Past: UGA/UCSD/Penn
Present: Solano County, CA
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