By any measure—whether it's persistence from year one to year two, time to graduation, or the percentage of students who complete their degrees—many higher education institutions are falling short. Leaders at these institutions realize that they urgently need to improve outcomes. But progress has been slow, at least in part because leaders of these institutions believe that improving retention and graduation rates is a slow and expensive undertaking.

While it is true that institutions cannot transform student outcomes overnight, a number of high-impact, low-cost practices have been shown to get results. In this article, we identify five promising practices that colleges and universities can implement quickly without a significant investment.

Some of these promising strategies include:

• Open a campus dialogue on student success
• Create a shared narrative and/or common scorecard to track progress
• Look for ways to demonstrate a student-centric culture