Slippery Rock Retention Rate Stayin' Steady and Above the National Average

Over the course of the last ten years, retention rates around the country have been staying fairly steady. Now you may ask yourself, what exactly is retention rates and what do they mean for a university? Retention rates are fairly simple. What they are is just the college's ability to keep first-year students coming back for their second year of college. Being that colleges look at the more positive side of things, they like to not look at it from a drop out rate perspective, but more of how successful they are doing at getting students to come back to college.

Slippery Rock University has been doing fairly well these last ten years, staying roughly ten percent above the national average. At first, being a little confused on what retention rates are and what they mean for colleges, there needed to be some clarification on this. Michael May, who is the Director of First-Year Admissions at Slippery Rock University gives a little run down on what retention rates are and how Slippery Rock has been keeping their numbers steady and above the national average with this link.

The chart below is showing how Slippery Rock University has done with their retention rates since the year 2011 all the way up to 2020. The numbers are percentages of first-year students that return to their second year of college.

As anyone can see, the percentage of students coming back after their first full year of college at Slippery Rock University remains pretty steady. The lowest is was in these ten years that are shown is in 2017 when the retention rate was at 80.9%. The highest was in 2018 with a retention rate of 83.4%. However, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted students in the year of 2020, most likely with students taking a year off simply because of the online learning that students had to go through.

Like Michael May had said in his interview, Slippery Rock University usually hangs around ten percent higher than the national average each year. He believes it is because of the outstanding professors that are at Slippery Rock as well as the programs that are offered for first-year students such as FYRST Seminar and success coaches. In 2020, Slippery Rock was 7.9% higher than the national average and that can be seen in the bar graph below.

Since the percentage of students that come back to Slippery Rock University after their first year has remained really steady over the last ten years or so, it is safe to say that it will continue to be this way for years to come. SRU has done a phenomenal job at retaining students when comparing it to the national average and using those programs that Slippery Rock is continuing to provide will help it stay above the national average. Obviously, the retention rate won't be as high as universities such as Cornell University or Vanderbilt University, which sits at roughly 97%, but hopefully Slippery Rock University can continue to stay steady and maybe even rise slightly in a few years with more and more programs being offered at Slippery Rock.