American higher education is suffering from a dropout pandemic. About 30% of freshmen at four-year colleges don't return for their sophomore year, according to a 2010 report by the American Institutes for Research. Such a high failure rate threatens to make a mockery of President Obama's goal for the US to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. The report, "Finishing the First Lap: The Cost of First-Year Student Attrition in America's Four-Year Colleges and Universities," estimates that, between 2003 and 2008, states and the federal government spent $9.1 billion in appropriations and grants on students who dropped out after freshman year. With stakes this high, colleges and universities are pushing to understand the dropout issue and find solutions to keep students in school. And just as there are myriad reasons why students drop out, institutions are discovering different ways to address the problem. This article takes a look at the efforts of three universities to keep at-risk freshmen in school. (Contains 6 online resources.)