About Keynote Speaker
For more than 20 years, Dr. Tinto has studied improving retention rates and how colleges can ensure that their students succeed.
His first book, Leaving College, is recognized as a major resource on student retention and is a benchmark by which work on these issues are judged. His second book Completing College, lays out in clear and compelling terms, the actions that colleges and universities can and must take to ensure that larger numbers of their students succeed. The improvement agenda must be about fixing institutions, not fixing students.
Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Tinto notes that colleges typically have organized retention initiatives around the margins of the institution, thus losing the potential that lies in the redesign of the students’ classroom experiences. Tinto offers evidence-based strategies that focus institutional and faculty energy where it matters most. For more information, please read Dr. Tinto’s full biography below.
Dr. Vincent Tinto's Biography
Dr. Vincent Tinto received his Ph.D. in education and sociology from The University of Chicago. He is currently Distinguished University Professor at Syracuse University and former chair of the higher education program. He has carried out research and has written extensively on higher education, particularly on student retention and the impact of learning communities on student growth and attainment.
Dr. Tinto has consulted widely with Federal and State agencies, with independent research firms, foundations, and with two and four-year institutions of higher education on a broad range of higher educational issues, not the least of which concern the retention and education of students in higher education. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals and with various organizations and professional associations concerned with higher education. He chaired the national panel responsible for awarding $5 million to establish the first national center for research on teaching and learning in higher education and served as Associate Director of the $6 million National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment funded by the U.S. Office of Education.
As a member of the Pathways to College Network Dr. Tinto is currently engaged in a national effort to increase access to college. He also works with the Council for Opportunity in Education, the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education, the European Access Network, and the Dutch government to develop programs to promote access to higher education for disadvantaged youth in Europe. His current research, funded by grants from the Lumina Foundation for Education and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation focuses on the impact of learning communities on the academic achievements of under-prepared college students in urban two and four-year colleges.