Persistence

How it is measured

Persistence follows a cohort of entering students and reports what share are enrolled somewhere in higher education at the next observation point, usually the following fall, sometimes the following term. A student who starts at your institution, transfers, and enrolls elsewhere counts as persisting. The same student counts as lost in your retention rate.

The two figures therefore come from different places. Retention is reported institution-by-institution to the federal government through IPEDS. Persistence requires cross-institutional enrollment data, which in US practice means the National Student Clearinghouse, since no single institution can see where its departing students went.

Why an institution would prefer one over the other

Retention answers a question about the institution: did we keep them. Persistence answers a question about the student: did they keep going. Both are legitimate, and which one you lead with is a strategic choice that should be made deliberately rather than by whichever number is available.

Institutions with heavy transfer flows (community colleges, regional publics, and anywhere with articulation agreements doing their intended job) are penalised by retention for outcomes their own mission describes as success. A student who completes a year, transfers to a four-year partner, and graduates there is a failure in the retention column and a success in the persistence column. If your strategic plan celebrates transfer, your reporting should not quietly count it as attrition.

The reverse trap is real too. Persistence can mask a genuine institutional problem: a campus losing a quarter of its first-year class to a competitor 40 miles away has a healthy persistence rate and a serious retention problem.

Neither one measures progress

Both are enrollment measures. A student who re-enrolls having earned no credits counts as retained and as persisting. That is why credit accumulation belongs alongside either figure in any serious report: it is the cheapest available check on whether continued enrollment is actually continued progress.

Using it in your own reporting

Three habits prevent most of the confusion:

• Name the measure and the source every time. “Persistence (National Student Clearinghouse)” and “full-time retention (IPEDS)” are not interchangeable labels.
• Never compare across the two. A persistence figure will almost always exceed the same cohort’s retention figure. Presenting the two side by side as a trend is a reporting error, not a finding.
• Disaggregate before you present. Part-time, transfer-in, commuter, and first-generation students diverge sharply from the overall figure, and an aggregate carried by full-time residential students describes a subgroup rather than a class.

When someone quotes a rate at you, the useful first question is which of the two they mean. Often they do not know, and finding out changes the conversation.

See also student retention and our guide to student retention and persistence.