St. Petersburg College

The result

St. Petersburg College started an NSLS chapter in August 2019 as a pilot on one of its ten campuses, Clearwater. It sent a limited number of invitations, to Black male students and to participants in its Take Stock in College program. Within one semester, the 24 Black members (most of them men) achieved a “37% increase over the college-wide retention rate,” according to the National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS) white paper on the pilot.

Read the figure for what it is. It describes 24 invited students on one campus over one semester, compared with the whole college, not a change in St. Petersburg College’s own retention rate. The white paper’s retention figure for those members includes students who graduated, and it does not say whether 37 percent is a relative difference or a gap in percentage points.

Sector context

St. Petersburg College sits between two sectors. It awards bachelor’s degrees, so IPEDS classifies it as a public four-year institution, but most of its programs are associate-level and it admits on an open-access basis (Carnegie: Mixed Baccalaureate/Associate’s). The median full-time retention rate is 63 percent at public two-year institutions and 75 percent at public four-year institutions (IPEDS, Fall 2023: the fall 2022 cohort returning in fall 2023). Retention is structurally harder at open-access institutions, and that gap reflects structure, not student ambition.

These IPEDS medians are federal data and serve as sector context rather than a benchmark for the pilot’s 37 percent.

How the program builds attachment

What a co-curricular program can change at a large, commuter-heavy, open-access college is attachment. Students who are academically capable, financially stretched, and socially unconnected can leave over small setbacks, because nothing is holding them. Involvement gives them a role, a small group that notices when they are absent, and a reason to be on campus beyond class.

The NSLS structure is built for a population that cannot commit to a multi-year extracurricular. The journey is five steps: orientation, a two-hour Leadership Training Day, three Speaker Broadcasts, three Success Networking Team meetings, and induction, which usually takes place in a ceremony. That is around ten hours in total, typically one semester. The Success Networking Teams are small peer groups that meet three times during the journey to set goals and hold each other accountable. Delivery runs in person, virtually, or fully asynchronously, which on a multi-site campus where most students work determines whether the program reaches students who were not already engaged.

Presenting the result on your campus

Students opt in, so any retention difference attributed to the program partly reflects who chooses to join. The strongest framing is reach: does the program connect students who would otherwise be unattached? That is measurable, and it is a design decision you control.

Planning for a similar campus

Use this result as evidence that an open-access institution ran the program and reported a positive retention result, then design your own measurement: define participation before the term begins, compare against a matched group rather than your institutional average, and report reach among previously unengaged students as a result in its own right.

For sector benchmarks and measurement methods, see our student retention pillar guide and the community college segment page.