Retention rates for the first three years of a linked-courses learning community

While enrollments in computing degrees and courses have grown rapidly in the past decade, both female and minority male students remain underrepresented in computing programs. This makes recruitment and retention of these populations a continuing concern. To attempt to address the issue at our institution, we created a linked-courses learning community targeting females and minority males enrolled in several computing majors. Here we present retention rates for the first three years of the linked-courses learning community. The results show that the learning community appeared to make a difference for some cohorts, improving their retention rate and academic performance over comparable institutional populations. Unfortunately, the more challenges a cohort faced in terms of factors that contribute to a difficult transition to college, the less the learning community was able to overcome these challenges. There were also other differences between the cohorts, as seen in attitudes measured by pre- and post-quarter surveys, that complicate generalizations about the impact of the learning community.