Learn how to use the Postsecondary Data Partnership Retention/Persistence Term-to-Term dashboard to understand the fall-to-spring retention rates for first-time students.
Transcript
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to use the PDP Retention/Persistence Term-to-Term dashboard to understand the fall-to-spring retention rates for first-time students.
The Retention and Persistence Term-to-Term dashboard reports the retention and persistence rates for student cohorts after each term during their first two academic years for up to eight consecutive terms. This data may reveal stop-out behavior during a student’s first two academic years. Stop-out is when a student fails to enroll in one term but re-enrolls at a later term. At the institution level, stop-out behaviors result in enrollment declines for a term and increases in the following term.
What is the difference between retention and persistence?
Retention describes how many students are still enrolled at or have earned a credential from our institution per term. This is a measure of how well our institution retains students and highlights at what point students are dropping out or transferring.
Persistence describes how many students are still enrolled at or have completed a credential at another institution per term. This definition may differ from how your institution defines persistence. Check with your institution’s PDP administrator if you have questions about how your institution defines persistence.
Let’s use this dashboard to answer this research question: What is the difference in fall-to-spring retention rates for first-time, full-time students compared to first-time, part-time students?
Navigate to the Retention and Persistence Term-to-Term dashboard. To explore the retention rates of first-time students, we need to set two global filters.
To do that, click “Edit”, which brings up “Chart Settings”. From the “Enrollment Type” filter, select “First-Time”, and click “Apply Settings”.
Next, since we’re interested in fall-to-spring retention rates, let’s leave the Cohort Term in our dashboard specific filters set to “Fall” which is the default setting.
Before we explore the fall-to-spring retention rates, let’s focus our attention on the vertical stacked bar chart.
For the 2021-22 cohort year, 54% of first-time, full-time students retained, 18% transferred out and persisted at another institution, and 28% did not enroll for college for their second year. This retention rate is approximately 14 points lower than the prior three years.
Now, let’s examine the line chart that shows term-to-term retention and persistence rates. This chart has two unique filters.
The first filter allows you to select the cohort and it defaults to the most recent cohort. Let’s leave it set at 2021-22. The second filter allows you to toggle between retention, persistence, or retention and persistence. Let’s set it at retention.
In the line, Term 1 represents Fall 2021. While Term 3 represents Spring 2022.
Hovering over the Spring 2022 data point, we find that 90.2% of the student cohort who entered in the fall of 2021 retained at our institution in Spring 2022.
Now, let’s determine if students who attend college full-time are more, or less likely to retain, than students who attend college part-time. To find this answer, we need to apply a dimension.
To do that, click “Edit” which opens “Chart Settings”. Then, select “Attendance” from the dimension drop down and click “Apply Settings”.
Two things happened. First, in the line chart, we see three lines appear; one for full-time students, one for part-time students, and one for those whose attendance is unknown.
To make the charts easier to read, let’s filter out the Unknown attendance data.
To do that, click “Edit” which opens the “Chart Settings”. Then open the “Attendance” filter, and deselect “Unknown”, and click “Apply Settings”.
Now we’re ready to evaluate the data in the line chart.
Hovering over the data point for Term 3, or Spring 2022, for full-time students, we find their fall-to-spring retention rate is 90.8%.
And hovering over the spring 2022 data point for part-time students, we find their fall-to-spring retention rate is 42.1%.
This is a 49-percentage point gap in retention rates.
Let’s summarize what we learned from this exploration.
Overall, fall-to-fall retention rates have recently declined for our first-time, fall-entering students.
Fall-entering full-time, first-time students have a 91% fall-to-spring retention rate.
But the retention rate for our part-time, fall-entering, first-time students is only 42%.
Understanding which student populations have lower retention rates is critical to our efforts to improve retention and completion rates at our institution.
We encourage you to explore which students at your institution are experiencing higher, and lower, retention and persistence rates.
Thank you for joining us.