More than one in five students who entered college in fall 2024 were no longer enrolled anywhere a year later. According to National Student Clearinghouse, 77% persisted into fall 2025, which remains virtually unchanged from the prior year. About 70% remained at the institution where they started.
Colleges have spent years building programs to improve these outcomes: advising, academic support, coaching, mental health services, engagement programs, and more. Yet students continue to leave.
Improving persistence requires more than adding another program or asking individual departments to work harder. It requires a connected institutional approach that brings these efforts together around the student experience.
Higher education needs a persistence transformation.
Why Students Leave Is Complicated
Retention varies considerably by sector. Among students who started college in fall 2023, about 70% returned to the same institution the following year. But consider the other side of those numbers: depending on the sector, 18% to 45% of students were not retained (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
While retention rates can tell us who stays, they do not tell us what contributed to a student's decision to leave.
Take Samantha. She's a first-generation student who commutes to a residential campus. She's Pell eligible, works 25 hours a week, studies biology with plans to become a nurse, and helps care for two younger siblings.
She's fictional, but her circumstances aren't unusual. A problem with her work schedule could affect class attendance. Trouble getting to campus could make it harder to meet with an advisor or participate in activities. Financial pressure could mean more hours at work. Any one of those things might be manageable. Several happening at once may not be.
From Samantha's perspective, it doesn't matter that financial aid, advising, academic support, and student affairs are separate operations. She just needs to know whether she can get what she needs to stay on track.
Samantha’s institution may already possess pieces of information needed to help her. A predictive model may identify academic or financial risk. A survey may reveal that she does not feel connected. Her participation data may show limited engagement. An instructor may notice declining attendance.
The problem isn’t always a lack of information or resources. The problem is that the information, people, and responses may never come together in a way that helps Samantha.
Note: Retention describes whether students return to the same institution. Persistence describes whether they continue their education, whether at the same institution or elsewhere. Student success encompasses the broader conditions and experiences that help students progress toward completion.
Who Owns Retention?
Student success involves nearly every part of an institution. Faculty, advising, financial aid, student affairs, academic support, and other offices all have a role to play. But who is responsible for making sure those efforts work together?
For many institutions, the answer still isn't clear. Research shows that only about two-thirds of institutions have a dedicated retention leader.
Figure 2.
That distinction especially matters when a student's challenges cross institutional boundaries. Think back to Samantha. Different parts of the institution may each understand one part of what she is experiencing, but no single office necessarily sees the whole picture.
Shared responsibility is important, but it isn't the same as coordination. Persistence transformation needs clear leadership, but it cannot belong exclusively to one office. Institutions need someone, or some clearly defined group, to connect what different parts of the campus know, establish priorities, and make sure someone acts when a student needs help.
Connecting the Pieces
Clear leadership is only part of the equation. Institutions often approach student success as a collection of separate programs: early alerts, surveys, engagement, advising, support, and analysis of student outcomes, all coming from separate departments. Each function can provide value on its own, but the greater opportunity comes from connecting them.
A persistence transformation brings six institutional capabilities together so that campuses can recognize student needs earlier, respond more effectively, and learn from the results. This approach is outlined in Figure 3.
Figure 3.
A persistence transformation environment consists of each of the following stages:
- Predict: Identify needs before they become crises. Use institutional data and leading indicators to recognize patterns associated with persistence. Prediction should help faculty and staff focus attention earlier, while students still have time and options.
- Listen: Understand the experience behind the data. Surveys, conversations, and other forms of student feedback reveal what institutional data alone cannot. Listening helps institutions understand students’ satisfaction, priorities, sense of belonging, confidence, and obstacles.
- Engage: Create meaningful connections. Participation matters when it helps students form relationships and see themselves as part of the institution. Engagement should extend across academic, social, and co-curricular experiences rather than remain the responsibility of a single division.
- Support: Connect students with timely help. Institutions need clear pathways for turning information into action. Support may include advising outreach, financial counseling, mental health resources, academic assistance, or help navigating routine institutional processes.
- Plan: Align people and resources around shared priorities. A written student success plan should establish goals, strategies, responsibilities, timelines, and measures of success. Planning moves retention from a broad aspiration to an institutional commitment.
- Analyze: Learn what works and improve the systems. Campuses must bring information from the other stages together to determine whether interventions reach the right students and improve their experiences and outcomes. Analysis supports continuous improvement and informs the next cycle of prediction and planning.
These six stages are not separate initiatives or a checklist that institutions complete once; they form a continuous cycle. “Predict” identifies potential needs. “Listen” adds context. “Engage” strengthens connections. “Support” helps students address barriers. “Plan” aligns institutional action, and “Analyze” shows what worked and informs the next rounds of decisions.
Most institutions already do some or all of this work. Persistence transformation occurs when the stages begin informing one another.
The Bottom Line: Where to Begin
Persistence transformation does not require an institution to rebuild every student success effort. It begins with understanding how well the six stages work together on your campus. Campus leaders can start by asking:
- Where are we strongest across Predict, Listen, Engage, Support, Plan and Analyze?
- Where does information about a student fail to lead to timely action?
- Who is responsible for connecting work across departments, and are they empowered to make strategic changes?
- What is one connection we could strengthen now to improve student experiences?
The goal is not simply to add another initiative. It is to connect the people, information, and resources that the institution already has around the students it serves.
