College Retention
Working to improve postsecondary persistence and success
"...to know how to make their retention efforts more effective, institutions need information that is empirically grounded and contextually specified in benchmarks for comparisons across peer institutions."
–"How Colleges Organize Themselves to Increase Student Persistence: Four-Year Institutions"
Student persistence is a crucial issue for policymakers and institutional administrators striving to improve college graduation rates. Despite the recent attention given to success in college, we know very little about how institutions use campus resources, policies, and practices to increase student persistence. To address this information gap, the Study on Student Retention is developing benchmarks of the retention practices of groups of similar institutions.
The work of the Project on Academic Success with the College Board is the first large-scale effort to unpack the institutional role in student persistence and graduation. The results of this effort, reported in "How Colleges Organize Themselves to Increase Student Persistence: Four-Year Institutions," suggest that many institutions devote relatively meager amounts of institutional time and resources to improving student persistence. This report also describes the many campus policies and practices that institutions are using (or not using) in their efforts to decrease student withdrawal, providing a rich set of considerations and implications for campus policymakers.
Download the full report. (.pdf/1.7MB)