Persistence and Retention Rates Exceed Pre-Pandemic Levels

College students’ persistence and retention rates have climbed back to pre-pandemic levels—and then some. In fact, the rate of students who returned for their second year of college last year was the highest in a decade, according to new research by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Using data from students who entered college in fall 2022, the clearinghouse reported a persistence rate of 76.5 percent, up from 75.7 percent the previous year and 73.8 percent among those who began college in 2019—the cohort most impacted by the onset of COVID-19 in spring 2020. Persistence measures the share of students who stayed in college from freshman to sophomore year, while retention refers specifically to those who stayed at the same institution.

Doug Shapiro, the research center’s executive director, said that changes in persistence and retention rates are generally very slight, so an increase of about a percentage point each year is noteworthy.

“It’s good for institutions … Their overall enrollment rates should be more stable going forward,” he said.

This year’s increases were smaller among certain racial groups, with Hispanic students’ persistence rates (71.6 percent) hovering just below the pre-pandemic level of 71.8 percent for the cohort that began in 2018. The same holds true for Native American students (62.4 percent for the cohort that began in 2022 versus 63.3 versus for the 2018 cohort). On the other hand, the increase in the persistence rate of Black students is on par with the national data. Black students enrolled at public four-year institutions show one of the highest jumps in persistence rates, increasing more than three percentage points from 2021 to 2022.

“We don’t have a lot of insight and detail into what those differences might mean at this point,” Shapiro said, but he noted that it’s an encouraging trend.

But Alexandra Logue, a research professor at the City University of New York’s Center for Advanced Study in Education with a focus on student success, noted that Black students at public four-year institutions had one of the steepest drop-offs in persistence caused by the pandemic. The rate dropped from a high of 82 percent for the cohort beginning in 2018 to a low of 76.2 percent for those who began in 2021.

“They had more opportunity, perhaps, to increase because they went down more,” Logue said. ”It may be that we’re seeing natural recovery from that point, but they still are way lower than Asian and white students. But they have shown more of a recovery.”

A Leap in Online Persistence

Another group that saw an especially strong recovery is online learners, who are paired in the clearinghouse data with students who go to institutions that span multiple states. Persistence rates for that group began declining with the fall 2017 incoming class but recently underwent a sharp upswing, jumping from 42.6 percent in 2020 to 49.2 percent in 2022.

Shapiro speculated that this boost may have been caused by an increase in traditional-aged students, who generally have higher persistence rates than their older counterparts, enrolling in online education during the pandemic.

“Generally, we see older students online and at for-profit institutions, and that difference diminished a little bit during the pandemic,” he said. “That probably had something to do with the higher growth in persistence and retention” at online institutions.

Logue also noted that as universities across the country shifted to remote instruction during the pandemic, students became increasingly familiar with the format, perhaps making them more likely to transfer to an online-only institution. Research and training related to online learning may have also increased the quality of online instruction, resulting in fewer students stopping out, she added.

Choice of academic major also impacted retention and persistence, the data showed; while the top 10 majors all saw increases in both persistence and retention, some majors, including mathematics and statistics, experienced declines between 2021 and 2022.

It’s unclear why such differences might exist, Shapiro said, given that the state of the job market for computer science majors is similar to the market for those earning a major in math.

Logue said that many of the report’s key findings line up with the results of her own research into which CUNY students had been most likely to stop out during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two key demographics that were not outlined in the clearinghouse’s data—part-time students and food-insecure students—were among those least likely to re-enroll after fall 2020, she said. Meanwhile, a number of social factors seemed to increase the likelihood of students re-enrolling: those who said they felt like they belonged at their college, who participated in an extracurricular activity and who had a friend on campus were all more likely to return the next year.