If there were but one factor I could review to determine the effectiveness of a college or university’s program it would certainly not be the US News and World Report Rankings, or the 25 and 75 percentile SAT scores of the incoming class, or even the number of Rhode scholars, or Fulbright scholars it has graduated over the last 10 years. Instead, I’d rather see the school’s retention rate: the number of freshmen students who return for their sophomore year at the same school. Experience tells us that freshman year in college is a massive adjustment. Those schools who can guide their students successfully through freshman year are gems, because a lot of students fail to successfully make the transition in college.
The national average retention rate for all two and four-year colleges is 66%: a third of the freshman class elects not to continue its studies, or transfers to another college. At the low end of freshman retention rate are public community colleges with 54%. At the high range are state and private universities with PhD programs, at 74% and 81%.
A good place to gain a sense of a college’s retention rate is at College Navigator, a site well worth frequenting, http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/. When you go to the site, type in the name of the college you want to review, say Grinnell College (in Iowa), and then click on ‘Retention and graduation rates.’ In this particular case, you’ll find that Grinnell retains 93% of its freshman. That’s considered a high retention rate, which isn’t much of a surprise, as Grinnell is a highly competitive college; it admits 34% of its applicants. Grinnell’s retention rate isn’t quite up to the Ivy levels where: Brown has 97%; Dartmouth 98%; Cornell 96%; Columbia 99%; Yale 99%; Harvard 97%, Princeton 98%; and University of Pennsylvania 98%. As an aside, when you look at these retention rates, it’s not surprising to realize that transferring in to any of them is almost impossible—few students depart prior to graduation, so there just aren’t many openings to fill.
Examining retention rates is important when evaluating a school that’s unfamiliar. One example that I recently came across was New College, a small, public honors university in Florida. The write up in the 2010 Fiske Guide to Colleges noted New College (NCF) was much smaller than that of a ‘typical liberal arts college,’ and rated it a ‘best buy.’ Additionally, the article noted that NCF has produced 25 Fulbright Scholars since 2001, with a rigorous academic curriculum, and with 90% of the classes composed of 25 or fewer students. It sounded absolutely tantalizing. Yet, when you pull up New College’s retention information you find, it’s 82%, not horrible, but not particularly good, especially for a school this size composed of highly skilled students; worse, however, you’ll also discover that the ‘transfer out rate’ is 33% of the class, and each class has, on average, only 170 students. For a school this small to lose almost 20% of its class after the first year is troubling. If one is considering attending, one would want to know what’s going on and why is this rate so high? Realize that the University of Florida, Gainesville, a university with almost 35,000 undergraduates, has a 95% retention rate, and only a 6% transfer out rate.
Are retention rates the Rosetta Stone in deciphering the successful schools from the average? Of course not, I duly acknowledge retention is but one statistic that indicates schools that take students to the next level. It’s not surprising that the most illustrious schools, the ones with the five-star reputations, have extremely high retention rates. Even if they were doing a mediocre job, the type of students they enlist would probably succeed just about anywhere. A lot has to do, not only with the quality of the institution, but with the quality of the student body it contains. I certainly, however, don’t discount successfully high retention rates; keeping 900 in a class of 1000 engaged and on track is a challenge.