Dive Brief:
- Persistence rates among first-time students are the highest they have been in the past decade, according to a report released Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- Of first-year students who enrolled in fall 2022, 76.5% returned to college the following year, the clearinghouse said. That’s up from 75.7% among the previous year’s cohort and higher than pre-pandemic rates.
- The national retention rate also hit a decade high, rising to 68.2% among the fall 2022 cohort, up 1 percentage point from the year before. The persistence rate includes students who return to higher education after their first year, regardless of whether they stay at the same institution or transfer. Retention refers to those who continue at the same college.
Dive Insight:
Almost all sectors saw better year-over-year rates in both persistence and retention, with four-year for-profits seeing the biggest improvements.
In that group, about half of the fall 2022 cohort, 50.2%, persisted, up from 47.1% the previous year. Meanwhile, 44.4% remained at the same institution, increasing from 41.8% of the prior year’s cohort. But four-year for-profits still see the lowest persistence and retention rates among the institution types the clearinghouse tracks.
Four-year public institutions see the highest rates of persistence and retention, with 86.4% of their new students returning to higher ed for their second year and 78% electing to stay at the same college.
Private four-year nonprofits followed closely behind, with an 85.5% persistence rate and 76% retention rate. But they were also the only type of tracked institution to see declines, with their retention and persistence rates each falling 0.3 percentage points from the year before, the clearinghouse said.
“While there is still much room for further improvement, these findings are great news for students and institutions alike, and another sign that the struggles of students who enrolled during the pandemic are behind us,” Doug Shapiro, executive director of the research center, said in a statement Thursday.
The gap between the national persistence and retention rate has slowly narrowed over the years, though both dipped during the pandemic. The national retention rate rose from 64.8% among the cohort starting in fall 2014 to 66.9% for the fall 2018 cohort.
Persistence and retention rates reach highest levels in a decade
Year-over-year percentage change in enrollment by institution type
Thursday’s report also highlighted racial and ethnic gaps in retention.
For example, colleges retain multiracial, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Black and Native American students at lower rates than the national average for all students, the clearinghouse found.
Just over half of first-year Native American students, 52.8%, returned to the same college the following year, compared to 68.2% of overall first-year students. Multiracial students returned 66.8% of the time, followed by Hispanic students at 63.6%, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students at 57.7% and Black students at 56.6%.
In comparison, 80.1% of Asian first-year students elect to stay at their initial colleges, as do 71.5% of White students.
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