By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Two minutes
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) brings us good news in the newest iteration of its Persistence and Retention report, which finds that second-year persistence increased for the Fall 2021 entering cohort of college students. The Fall 2021 cohort’s persistence rate increased 0.9 percentage points to 75.7%. Retention ticked up to 67.2%, which is also a 0.9 percentage
point increase.
These increases put both persistence and retention back in the range with the starting cohorts of 2016 through 2018. This is encouraging because both the Fall 2019 and Fall 2020 entering cohorts saw persistence and retention decreases because of the COVID-19
pandemic’s effects.
The NSCRC defines second-year persistence as returning to any postsecondary institution in the second year while retention finds students returning to the same postsecondary institution at which they started.
Interestingly, the report notes that “this latest persistence rate growth was driven by a higher share of students being retained at their starting institution into their second year (+0.9 percentage point in retention). This is a shift from last year’s
trend, where a higher share of students transferring out in their first year drove persistence rate increases.” In other words, students from the Fall 2021 entering cohort stayed put more often in their second year.
The newest report offers a longitudinal look at persistence and retention from the entering cohorts from Fall 2012 to Fall 2021. Beyond that, the data can be broken out by state, student demographics (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, age at entry), enrollment
intensity, and major field. Like most NSCRC reports in recent years, this one is presented in Tableau, which makes for easy analysis.
Considering these results by race and ethnicity, the report finds “persistence and retention rates increased for all major racial/ethnic groups, except for Asian student retention which was stable (-0.1 pp from last year)” and “Native American students
made notable gains after sharp decreases last year (+2.0 pp in persistence and +1.6 pp in retention over last year).” Unfortunately, not all the data by race and ethnicity are as encouraging: “Disparities by race and ethnicity remain large.”
The NSCRC remains a valuable source of data on students’ postsecondary outcomes nationwide. Beyond the Persistence and Retention report, National College Attainment Network (NCAN) members can make great use of the High School Benchmarks, Completing College, Yearly Success and Progress Rates,
and Some College, No Credential series, among others. The National Student Clearinghouse, which covers enrollments from upward of 97% of students nationally, is
the most comprehensive source of these data in the United States.
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