Hanging on to students - college student attrition rate after freshman year

American Demographics, Nov, 1997 by Matthew Cravatta

For many young adults, the freshman year of college is the Second Cutting that severs the cord connecting them to family, high-school friends, and hometown. For some, the break is less than complete.

Nearly one-third of college freshmen will not enroll for the following year of study, according to Postsecondary Education Opportunity. Persistence rates, also known as retention rates, for all college freshmen have been declining slightly since 1983, from 68 percent to a little less than 67 percent in 1997. About 70 percent of this decrease has occurred in the last five years. The decrease in retention means that about 21,000 college students who started their freshman year in 1996 are not back as sophomores this fall.

People don't go back to college for lots of reasons, including job opportunities, financial circumstances, and personal situations. At a macro-level, however, students' persistence appears to be at least somewhat related to their educational background and goals. College freshmen who were in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class have the highest persistence rate, 91 percent in 1997. In contrast, just 54 percent of those who started at a college with an "open door" policy of admissions went back the next year. Likewise, persistence rates are highest for Ph.D.-granting institutions and lowest for schools that grant associate degrees.

Persistence rates tend to be higher for private colleges than public ones. But the gap has closed a little in some instances. Bucking the trend, highly selective public universities increased their freshman-to-sophomore persistence rate by nearly 3 percent between 1991 and 1997. At the same time, private two- and four-year colleges suffered retention-rate declines of more than 3 percent.

For more information, or to receive a copy of Opportunity, contact the business office at (319) 351-4913; e-mail tmort@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu.