{"id":20154,"date":"2021-03-01T00:00:06","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T00:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tamus.edu\/data-science\/?p=20154"},"modified":"2025-10-06T20:13:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T20:13:50","slug":"persistence-and-retention-the-national-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tamus.edu\/data-science\/2021\/03\/01\/persistence-and-retention-the-national-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Persistence and Retention: The National Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Persistence and Retention: The National Perspective<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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While the past few blog posts have specifically addressed enrollment trends in Texas public universities, this blog post will begin a multi-part series of posts that will look at student outcomes data. We will begin by looking at the national trends associated with persistence and retention before moving to a Texas-centric view of those initial outcomes measures that most people associate with student success. Graduation outcomes will be the next topic that will be explored, which will be followed by post-graduation employment outcome data from the US Census Bureau.<\/p>\n

One of the challenges when reviewing national trends is that the data are often more than an academic year behind the current year of schooling. Therefore, the data we will be exploring are “current” as of either fall 2018 (National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)) or <\/span>fall 2019 (National Student Clearinghouse (NSC)). However, given that persistence and retention patterns are difficult to change in the short-term at a national scale, it is safe to postulate that the trends seen for the previous decade are likely to hold true through the fall 2020 semester, with the possible exception of COVID-19 specific effects.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before diving into the data, we must first establish our definition of terms. The following definitions will be utilized throughout our discussion, as stated in the NSC’s most recent Persistence and Retention<\/a> report:<\/p>\n